Pastor’s Corner: Slaves by Choice”
I Corinthians 6:19 – Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?
The apostle Paul often referred to himself as a bondservant (slave) or a doulos—a voluntary servant. Doulos is a Greek word often used in the New Testament for a slave or servant. It describes a unique class of servant, someone who was not made that way by by force. A doulos was someone who had been freed, but chose to serve his or her master out of love. Therefore, this servant would be called a doulos—a bond-servant, a servant by choice.
As Christians, that is what we are. Christ has paid an incredible debt for us. He has pardoned us. He has forgiven us. And now we are compelled to become His voluntary servants, serving Him not because we have to but because we want to. We serve Him because we love Him. We recognize that He has instilled certain gifts, certain talents, and certain resources in our lives that we are to use for His glory. The Bible says: “Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).
Galatians 2:20 (NIV) – 20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. These words mean the breaking of our independence by own own hands, and the surrendering of our lives to the authority of the Lord Jesus. No one can do this for us. We must do it ourselves. God may bring us to this point three hundred and sixty-five times a year, but He cannot push us through it. It means breaking the hard outer layer of our individual independence from God. We no longer follow our own ideas, but choose absolute loyalty to Jesus.
Has that breaking of my independence come? Everything else is a religious fraud done in our own power and will without Christ which has no value in the Kingdom of God. The main thing to decide is— will I give up? Will I surrender to Jesus Christ, placing no conditions as to how the brokenness will come? The passion and joy of Christianity comes from deliberately signing away our own rights and becoming a bond-servant of Jesus Christ. Until we do this, we will not really be free. To the world, this sounds like a contradiction: “to be free, I must be a slave?” Yet, until our eyes are open to the reality that our independence (wanting to be our own god) is a delusion of sin, it will never make sense. In actuality our independence is a miserable bondage that leads to death and separation from the one who made us, truly know us and loves us. True freedom comes through serving the one who died for us. Jesus said, “So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:33). The words forsake all mean surrender your claim to and say goodbye to. This doesn’t mean taking a vow of poverty; it simply means recognizing that it all belongs to God. Our lives belong to God. Everything is the Lord’s.
To choose to live as a bond-servant of Christ seems radical today. But only to those who’ve never deeply considered the immeasurable price of their faith and its infinite, eternal worth. All of the great works we can accomplish in this life mean nothing in comparison to the closeness to our beloved Savior. How else can we respond?
In His Grace,
Pastor Hamilton