Paradoxy - To be truly free, we must become slaves of Jesus.

Peter getting two speeding camera tickets from the same camera within space of 15 minutes. We hate rules and laws!

Jesus – He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners (Luke 4:18)

Yet Paul – calls himself a slave of Jesus, and even a prisoner of Jesus (Ephesians 3:1)

Bible seems to be teaching a paradox – to be truly free, we must become slaves.

• How does this work?
• How does becoming a slave of Jesus make people truly free?

1. Life is found within limits

Truth – the best possible life only comes when we limit our freedom.

Sports training

Marriage

Friends

Example from the Bible:

“If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything.  3 If he comes alone, he is to go free alone; but if he has a wife when he comes, she is to go with him.  4 If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free. 5 “But if the servant declares, ‘I love my master and my wife and children and do not want to go free,’  6 then his master must take him before the judges. He shall take him to the door or the doorpost and pierce his ear with an awl. Then he will be his servant for life. (Exodus 21:2-7)

• Freedom is not the highest value in life. Love is. To gain love, you must limit your freedom.
• His love made him want to serve.

Same with our slavery to Jesus.

• the best possible life only comes when we limit our freedom
• For someone who can say: “I love Jesus so much that I will limit my freedom and stick with him”
• Serve because we want to.

Illustration?

2. Liberty is found within law

Truth 2 – The law of Jesus gives life.

Doesn’t being a slave of Christ mean having to do what he says?

• Following his rules?
• Surely that limits joy and freedom in life?

Certainly true of many people who were alive at the time of Jesus:

Rules of the Pharisees. - In addition to the Ten Commandments, for the Law to be fully obeyed, people had to keep an additional 613 requirements – 248 positive ones (i.e., you must’s) and 365 negative ones (i.e., you must not’s).

There were 39 things that should not be done on the Sabbath  to avoid breaking law.

You know what Jesus said when confronted with this huge list of rules? “You people have complicated the Law of God.”

‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  38 This is the first and greatest commandment.  39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40)

What is he saying? All the Law of God given to Moses etc. can be boiled down to one word – Love.

• Love God
• Love others.

James describes this law of Jesus as the ‘law that gives freedom’ (James 2:8, 12)

How can following  a law give freedom?

It has to do with the nature of love.

• Love is other-focused
• Sin is self-focused.

Love causes a person to expand and grow. Being loving inspires us to build relationships, reach out to others, invest in more and more lives. Share resources. Multiply blessings. Love expands our horizons and we grow as people.

Anti-love … or sin … is always ‘me-focused’. It is selfishness and pride and jealousy and greed and fear. All our attention is focused inward. We become obsessed with me. We become little people. We get trapped in the prison of our own little lives, and we shrink and shrink and shrivel inside.

I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber, one has some day to cry aloud from the house-top. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace.  Oscar Wilde

Jesus tasted this temptation. In the Garden of Gethsemane, on the night before he was to be crucified, he took his three closest friends and said to them.

…“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” he said to them. “Stay here and keep watch.” 35 Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him.  36 “Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” (Mark 14:32-36)

Here we see Jesus, the willing servant of his Father, choosing to live his life for the benefit of others instead of himself – that’s the law of love.

We are to be slaves of love, obeying the law of love, and as we do … our lives are not restricted. We taste true freedom.

3. Growth

How does becoming a slave of Christ Jesus bring true freedom?

Control freak?

16 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?  …  20 When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness.  21 What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death!  22 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