Out of Slavery // Onwards and Upwards, Part 4

You know, over this Christmas-New Year period, I’ve been praying for you and everybody else who listens to this program – that the coming year will be a year where you’re set free from the things that have enslaved you, because freedom, as it turns out, is just about the biggest gift that God can give us.

This is just such a wonderful time of the year. The sense of a new start, a new beginning and yet, as we’ve been reflecting this week on “A Different Perspective”, it’s so easy for the hurts and regrets of the past to haunt us, to hold us back in the New Year.

And we can literally be enslaved by behaviours, habits and things that we think and do but if we truly thought about it, we’d admit to ourselves, “Well, they’re wrong.” But somehow they can hold us captive and rob us of a life worth living.

I wonder if I asked you to look at your life, what are those things? What are the chains that hold you back? What are the things that enslave you?

Slavery, being enslaved is not something we think much about these days. I mean really, isn’t it a thing of the past? Sure Negro’s were taken to the United States and to the United Kingdom and that’s all over and done with. That’s the past. We don’t have slavery anymore.

Well, actually that’s not true. The estimates are … there are about 27 million people living in slavery in the world today – 27 million people. That’s more than at any other time in history. Add to those official slaves, if I can call them that, people living and working in the export processing zones of Indonesia, of Malaysia, right across South East Asia. Millions of people being paid a few cents an hour in almost slave like conditions to make the clothes and the runners and the shoes and the toys that we in the West take for granted.

And what about the people that are enslaved by poverty? The number is probably in the hundreds of millions. When you look at it like that it’s a startling, painful, horrible reality.

Slavery is flourishing if I can put it in those terms but I would like to suggest to you that it’s much, much bigger than even that.

Over this last week on “A Different Perspective”, we’ve been talking about the things that hold us back – the regrets, the thoughts, the behaviours, the habits, the negative things, the things that if we were really honest with ourselves we’d say, “I know they’re wrong.” Those things bear bad fruit in our lives and you know something? They’re just like the chains that the Negro’s had around their ankles when they were being shipped from Africa to America.

Jesus made that point. He talked about it in terms of sin. I’ll talk about what sin means in a minute but listen to what He said for a bit. He wants us to have an abundant life and He said, “Look, if you are involved in sin it’s like you’re a slave to sin,” and He said, “I’ve come to give you an abundant, rich and full life.”

He never denied that we’d have tough times but the whole subject of sin was something He talked a lot about. And the word sin means something very specific. We load it with a whole bunch of cultural and theological baggage I think sometimes. But the word “sin” means literally “to miss the point”, to miss the point of life, to miss out on the share of what’s on offer.

When you look at it in that sense you think, “Well, it does make sense, I know that when I get angry with people, I’m ruining my life and I’m ruining theirs. I know when I talk behind people’s backs, I know when I stab them in the back when they’re not there, I know that’s not good. I might want to do it, I’ve been used to doing it but I know that actually what it does is that it robs me of a life worth living.”

Jesus said this:

I tell you the truth, anyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family but a son or a daughter belongs to it forever. (John 8:34-35)

I have met people who live in the biggest houses in the most affluent suburbs and have the flashiest cars sitting in their driveway. And those people are no less slaves than someone who is living in chains. They’re slaves to bad behaviour. They’re slaves to their consumerism. They’re slaves to building a bigger house and spending more money and trying to get their hits that way. They’re slaves to power, slaves to money, slaves to position, slaves to status in society.

And our behaviour ends up causing hurt and pain and suffering to us and to other people. We end up missing the point of life. We end up missing out on what really is on offer from God. That’s why it’s called sin.

But here’s the crazy thing for me, each one of those 27 million official slaves and the hundreds and millions like them right around the world, there’s one thing that they want more than anything else in life – they want freedom.

I was reading the autobiography of a man called Josiah Henson recently. Josiah Henson lived in the late 1700’s, early 1800’s and he was the man about whom that great book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written. He was a real life slave in the southern states of America. And he wrote this, he said:

From my earliest recollection freedom had been the object of all my ambition, a constant motive, exertion and ever-present stimulus to gain and to save.

He wanted nothing more than to be set free. It’s actually a wonderful book and a wonderful story.

And you know those old Negro spirituals, remember Swing Low Sweet Chariot? Swing low was a code word amongst the slaves for ‘come down south’. The sweet chariot was the underground railroad, the network of illicit safe houses where slaves were smuggled from one house to the next, further north and further north until they went over the border. And it says, “Coming for to carry me home”, that meant “get me to freedom in Canada”.

And the next verse says, “I look over the Jordan and what did I see?” The Jordan was a code word for the Ohio, the Niagara and the Detroit rivers. They were the lines. Once the slaves crossed those lines they were free. These slaves wrote songs about freedom, they sang about freedom so beautifully and so wonderfully because in their hearts they wanted to be free.

Yet, there are so many wealthy slaves content to rot in their slavery to sin. No less destructive, no less something that robs them of the freedom and the lives God gave them to live. Content to miss the whole point of life. Content to miss out on their share of the abundance and the grace and the love and the joy and the freedom and the peace that Jesus came to give us. It’s crazy, don’t you think?

Our Sweet Chariot is Jesus, our underground railroad from slavery to freedom is Jesus. God became man, a lowly carpenter who trod the dusty roads, who healed, who loved, who gave. Jesus Himself said, “God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, to the slaves, to let the oppressed go free”.

We have a choice, we can keep living out a cycle of failed New Year’s resolutions – I’m going to change, I’m going to change, I’m going to change. You know something? We never will on our own. Or we can say, “Hang on a minute, there is a point to life and the whole point of life is to enjoy the richness of what’s on offer through a relationship with Jesus”.

And we, like Josiah Henson, can decide to have an abiding, desperate hunger for freedom, as real as any slave and invite Jesus into that space and see what happens.

Sin, it’s a word with a lot of cultural baggage. But when we say, “Hang on, sin is missing the whole point of life. Sin is missing out of the blessings on offer from God,” it takes on a whole new meaning.

If we have a behaviour that revolves around sin, we’re no more and no less a slave. The choice is ours really.