We travelled to the Lake District today for a short break, but typically, the rain has been coming down in torrents! Still, it's good to be sitting in God's presence, waiting for Him to speak. I'm thinking again about freedom and I'm also thinking about slavery.
In the story Jesus told about the son who took all his inheritance money early and spent it on wild living, when the lad came to his senses and returned home, he offered himself to his father as a servant, because he felt so ashamed of himself. But the father in the story refused to accept him on those terms and treated him as a most beloved son. This is how our father God sees each one of us. We are His children, not His slaves.
And yet.....so many times in the New Testament the apostles introduce themselves as 'bondservants', or slaves, of Jesus Christ. As it is so clear that Jesus wants us all to have total freedom, why would they do that? I said yesterday that serving self is no life of freedom, so how could serving Jesus be different? The difference is in the choice: we choose to serve. Just as Jesus, at any moment, could have walked away from going to the cross, but chose to do His Father's will, so we choose to do God's will. Instead of bringing rules and laws into our lives, we suddenly become freer than we've ever been, because the power of the Holy Spirit working within us makes it all so easy. It's like driving a car with power steering after years of struggling without it.
But this is not always our experience. The giant of 'selfish desire' rears up in us and we obey its demands, sometimes steamrolling our way over other people as we go. Learning to 'walk in the spirit', as the Bible calls it, (Gal 5:16) takes time and patience. God's got oodles of it.......patience, I mean! So let's not be hard on ourselves. We're getting there!
No comments:
Post a Comment