Slaves

Greetings All,

Well I finished The Great Divorce yesterday amidst my Bowling Green travels and started a new book this morning by Michael Card called A Better Freedom: Finding Life as Slaves of Christ.  Michael is a song-writer and scholar.  Perhaps you know the song made popular by Amy Grant El Shaddai, that is one he wrote.  This book is rooted in his scholarly side and comes out of his experience with the African-American church, to be clear Michael is Caucasian.  In his worship he was continually drawn to their practice of calling Jesus master as it was something he had not seen or heard in Caucasian church.  What he discovered as he inquired was that it was a practice rooted in the times of slavery as the slaves made a point to call Jesus Master so they could be clear that their human master wasn't actually their master.  Michael's goal with the book is for us as Christians to begin to rethink our relationship with Jesus as one of slave to master and to embrace the new kind of freedom that can be found in such a relationship.

The thing that struck me in my reading this morning comes from an early chapter where he is telling the story of one of the earliest martyrs of Christianity, Ignatius.  He is also one of the earliest writers after those that penned the New Testament, so we have some of his letters to his churches.  He addresses them as "fellow slaves."  The reality of that statement is that many of them were actual socio-economic slaves, but all of them were slaves to Christ.  Michael made the observation that Ignatius recognized that the choice we face with Christianity is not between slavery to Christ and freedom; rather it is simply a matter of choosing who or what we are going to be enslaved by.

What a powerful realization!  We are all slaves.  Some of us to our jobs.  Some to our families.  Some to our past mistakes.  Some to our circumstances or addictions or our perceived realities.  Many of us are slaves to the acquisition of stuff.  All of those can be brutal task masters with whom we find no freedom, even though we thought we were choosing freedom by serving those.  The truth remains that the only real freedom we can ever have is when we embrace Jesus as Master and become slaves to Him.  In Him we are free to simply be, to receive His love, forgiveness and will for our lives.  In Him we do not have to be driven to acquire stuff, or titles, or status because in Him our status is all the same, children of God, beloved, forgiven and free.

So today we are faced with a choice.  As we realize that we are all slaves, who will we call master?

Your fellow slave to The Master,
Faron