In Christ No Slave nor Free
Isaiah 61 The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn,
3 and provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness
instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
instead of a spirit of despair.
2 Corinthians 8 v 8 I am not commanding you, but I want to test the sincerity of your love by comparing it with the earnestness of others. 9 For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.
10 And here is my advice about what is best for you in this matter: Last year you were the first not only to give but also to have the desire to do so. 11 Now finish the work, so that your eager willingness to do it may be matched by your completion of it, according to your means. 12 For if the willingness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has, not according to what he does not have.
13 Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. 14 At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. Then there will be equality, 15 as it is written: “He who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little.”
Read Matthew 6 as a prayer
“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10 your kingdom come,
your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us today our daily bread.
12 Forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.’
Jesus taught His disciples to pray that God’s Kingdom would come to earth as it is in heaven. In Matthew’s version, the arrival of the Kingdom of heaven is linked to people having enough daily bread and that debts are removed and forgiven.
Maybe “Lead us not into temptation” means “Lord let us not be tempted again to pick up our credit cards and buy what we don’t need.”
Lord, let Your kingdom come and Your will be done on earth exactly as it happens in heaven.
Can you fathom that? We ask that life on earth will be just like heaven.
Funny how some people go out of their way to create hell on earth for others, for their families, for their neighbors for their employees or their bosses.
In Israel they spoke of the Shalom of God. It means more than peace, it means absolute wellbeing, satisfaction, contentment, wholeness.
Imagine if God truly reigned over South Africa today, what would that look like?
Can you imagine if God reigned over PE?
What if the Reign of God came into your home, if Jesus was truly the head of your home?
For so many of us heaven would simply mean we have enough every month to live, that we can be debt free.
So many South Africans want to live somewhere else because we desperately want a different way of life.
We want to live in a place where we don’t have to fear death every day; we want to live in a place where we don’t have to worry that tomorrow our money will be worth nothing, or that our houses will be taken away.
So many of my friends are immigrating, and I can understand why. There are days when we listen to the news and Australia or New Zealand or Canada looks like heaven.
But I would rather see a different kind of immigration.
I long to see Christians who move their citizenship from being totally invested in life on earth, and who transfer their lives to living as citizens of heaven.
I long to see people who genuinely move their hearts and their wealth from here to there.
When we do that, death has no sting and our treasure is stored where Mbeki and Mugabe cannot destroy.
I long to see Christians who are a living witness in the way they live, that they are children of the creator of heaven and earth.
I long to see Christians who take the Lord’s Prayer seriously, and devote their lives to bringing heaven, the reign of God, to earth.
For Jesus, for Paul, for first century Christians, for modern Christians like Mother Theresa or Hudson Taylor, this is not pie in the sky, this is reality.
Last week as we looked at Scripture, I made the statement that “Being a Christian supersedes every culture”.
Following on from that, this morning I need to say that “Being a Christian Supersedes every Social and Economic Class.”
When Paul says, “There is neither slave nor free”, we need to understand that in Paul’s time there wasn’t a working class and middle class and upper class. There was one simple economic distinction, “slave or free”
People who couldn’t pay their debt were taken captive by their creditors and forced to work off their debt as slaves. In Matthew 18 we read a parable of a man who owed an absolute fortune who was taken along with his wife and children to be sold as slaves to recover some of the debt.
Sometimes people who were in dire straits would stand in the market place and put a board around their necks saying “For Sale”. People would buy them and they would send the money home to family and go off as slaves.
Paul wants to avoid this situation of Christians drowning financially.
Thando
On Tuesday I sat with a young man who told me that from his salary every week he pays a little something to his grandmother, and then he helps to pay for his two sisters schooling and sometimes to buy them clothes. Sometimes if his mother is short of money he assists her too.
Listening to him, I couldn’t help but think this man knows more about being a Christian than I can dream of. He understands what it means to be a part of a family, a community, who sacrifice so that while no one becomes rich, at the same time no-one starves. His sacrifices keep his family from the slavery of debt.
This is the New Testament vision of how Christians should care for each other. To the Corinthians Paul says “13 Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality.
Paul says to the Galatian Christians, “When you are clothed in Christ there is neither slave nor free”.
When it comes to quality of life and freedom from financial slavery, if we take Scripture seriously, then in Christ we are to look for ways to achieve this equality.
As Paul would become a Greek to be able to share the Gospel with Greeks, so he would become poor, a servant, to share the Gospel with the poor.
Paul wasn’t so foolish that he thought when people became Christians they would just be set free from slavery, or that the rich would suddenly let all their slaves free.
In fact Paul says to slaves, “If you were a slave when you became a Christian, don’t run away, but if you can be freed, do so.”
As Christians we have to fulfil our obligations.
Becoming a Christian does not mean that the bank is going to phone you tomorrow and say, “By the way, we have written off your debt” or that we should fail to make our payments.
But it means that when we are in Christ, we are no longer defined by how rich we are or how poor we are. We are defined by the fact that we are heirs of God.
But on the other side, to Philemon, a Christian owner of a slave called Onesimus, Paul pleads, “Please receive him back not as a slave, but as a brother.”
Paul understood that in heaven one day there would no longer be the social chasm between slaves and free, that in heaven all people would be equal.
In heaven one day people will stand and worship Jesus together as absolute equals without the divide of rich and poor, and so for Paul the mission of the Church is to make heaven the reality here on earth.
At the very least, within the church there should be no distinction between rich and poor. That is the very least.
Have you ever noticed how society treats rich and poor people differently?
Scientific studies have shown that when the driver of a nice car indicates, the other cars gladly open a space and welcome them in. But when a rust bucket asks for a space, they usually have to wait longer.
A friend of mine is a chartered accountant who popped in to the bank one day wearing jeans and a golf shirt. He was pushed from one person to another until he left totally fed up. The next day he returned in a smart double breasted suit and was shown to the manager’s office immediately.
Paul says that when we become Christians, when we become citizens of heaven here on earth, the distinctions between rich and poor, slave and free, lose their divisive power. Every person should be treated the same.
But the ideal is that in fact we work hard to remove the inequality between rich and poor, the rich give of their riches in order that the poor can be less poor.
In Luke 4, quoting from Isaiah 61, Jesus said,
“18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
The rich aren’t without problems, there problems are just different.
A friend of mine is on the governing body of a very wealthy private school. Many of the children receive up to R2000 a month in pocket money. The problem is they almost never see their parents. The result is that a huge number of these children drop out of school because they have cocaine or heroine habits that leave them unable to function.
PAUSE
Possibly read Phil 2
In that beautiful song in Philippians 2, it says that Jesus who is in very nature God, made Himself nothing and took on the very nature of a servant.
Being God has to be the ultimate in wealth, and yet Jesus gave that all up and became a servant of humanity.
IN the line before the song starts, Paul says, “Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.
5 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus”
In 2 Corinthians 8 Paul is writing about a collection for the financially poor in Jerusalem. And here is his argument in a nutshell, “Jesus gave up all His wealth so that you could be made rich, and so it is not too much to ask that as Christians we follow the example of Jesus and share our wealth so that others may be equal to us.
Paul’s dream is that there will be equality amongst Christians, not just a theoretical equality, but a true equality. That Christians would experience the freedom from slavery that Jesus bought on the cross, and that Christians would truly be the one community on earth which experiences common unity.
Paul’s formula is that we give according to our means, and we receive according to our needs.
Paul says when we are clothed with Christ, there will be neither slave nor free. The two extremes are removed. The slave becomes less of a slave, and the free person gives up some of their freedom.
We may be tempted to think all this talk about sharing our wealth is just superfluous speech. But the early Christians never thought so. We read in Acts 2 that the Jerusalem church took what they had and shared it amongst themselves, and the result was that unbelievers looked on in amazement and said, “See how they love each other”.
We read that the churches of Asia who were wealthier took up collection and stored up money to send to the poor in Jerusalem.
In 1 Corinthians 9 Paul says that he has every right as a minister of the word to have his physical needs met by those he serves. HE had every right to have the money.
But he goes on to say that he did not use this right, instead he ministered amongst the Corinthians at no charge so that the gospel would not be hindered. Instead he worked making tents to support himself.
Friends, the New Testament is deadly serious when it says that the world will know we are Christians by our love.
So what will it take?
Will it mean converting to Communism or Socialism?
No
It means that the way we see the world will change. We will shift our focus from the individual person and focus on the community.
But it is more than that. It means that we draw the border of those we care for around all humanity, those who Christ died for.
This is how serious God is about this.
God, owner of ever planet, every star, every galaxy, chose to leave all His wealth, He chose to strip Himself of all His Godly attributes and became a man.
Jesus came to earth and became poor in every sense of the word to set us free from every bondage.
Jesus died to end slavery, how will we respond?