Romans 6:16-23
Holy Slavery

Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey--whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.

I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

New International Version

The Bible frequently describes the human condition as that of a servant, or more accurately, a slave. That is an unusual and abhorrent concept in our modern civilization! We have fought to eliminate slavery in our nations, and we actively oppose slavery wherever it exists in the world. We consider the freedom of individuals to be a sacred right, granted to every individual by God, so that every individual might have the opportunity to choose to follow God.

But our concept of slavery, as worthy and important as it is, has serious limitations.

We get a glimpse of how naive we are about slavery when we talk to people combating addictions. They tell us that their bodies are slaves to chemical stimulants, and they speak of the enormous will-power and support needed to overcome their physical dependence on nicotine, alcohol, or narcotics. We know the reality of how a mind can become slave to bad habits when we try to work with a habitual liar, or when we try to have a serious relationship with a flirtatious partner, or when we try to get along with someone that has a "hair trigger" temper. It sometimes seems that no promises are strong enough to keep these individuals from reverting to old habits, and we often find individuals with a long history of damaged relationships because they found it more convenient or more alluring to behave in their familiar ways.

The slavery of persons can be fought with justifiable and honorable force. The slavery of bodies and of minds cannot be defeated with legislation and police forces, and it will not succumb with consistency to the persuasive urging of friends and loved ones. It takes an inner change to break free of that slavery.

I have been a slave to sin, and so have you. We each have our weaknesses, and we are all still fighting to keep those old sins from again exercising control over us. But we have exchanged our slavery to sin to become a slave to God, for that is our only way to break the power sin has over us. We must give ourselves again every day to the service of our Lord, so that we would become more and more the holy creatures God designed us to be.

Part of our service to God is to rescue those still enslaved to the addictions and attractions of this world. We must reach out with compassion to those who bodies betray them, to those whose habits make them unlovable, and to those whose confidence in their own goodness convinces them that we are misguided and hypocritical. We might try to persuade, we might argue, we might caution, we might even denounce the evil of their ways--but the only sure way we have of leading them out of slavery is to love them, just as Jesus loves us, so that God can guide them Home.