The Sacraments
Sermon
In a number of Paul’s letters he uses the phrase, “Slave to Sin”.
Most of my life I thought people chose to sin, and so it made perfect sense for ministers to say, “Stop sinning”.
But slaves don’t choose to be slaves. Slaves were often captured and kidnapped, sometimes alone but often as entire families or villages.
Slaves have no choice. I remember seeing a movie with slaves in the hold of a ship, shackled to one another so they couldn’t move. Or slaves working on a farm, they had no choices but to do what their master commanded.
The thing with slavery is that eventually it became a mindset. People became slaves in the way they thought.
When a slave fell pregnant and had a child, her child was born a slave to her master.
Paul says we were slaves to sin.
300 years later St Augustine coined the term, “Original Sin”.
To explain this slavery to sin this morning I want to tell a little parable. None of the characters are real life people, but the truth is this story plays itself out every day.
Last week we spoke about how the Holy Spirit opens eyes and ears that we can hear what God has to say.
My prayer this morning is that God would open our eyes and ears that we would hear His voice.
STORY
Once upon a time there was a young man named Bob who had been married 3 years when he and his wife had their first child. As he watched his daughter he wanted to give her more than his job could afford. They stayed in a very small town house, shared a car and he worked as a traffic officer.
He wanted her to grow up in a nice suburb, with nice middle class friends, and a nice school. He wanted her to be able to play tennis in her own backyard and learn ballet.
So the next week he started a second job tiling bathrooms to make extra cash. Things went well and soon he was making extra money.
Then a rush job came up which had to be finished in a hurry. There was no way he could do the job and go to work, but he really wanted the money. So he popped down to his doctor and with very little convincing the doctor gave him a sick note for 3 days. With his sick note in hand, he quickly started tiling and had the job done in time.
A month or two later, now that he had some spare capital, he decided to start a small spaza shop from his garage. It started with bread and eggs and the occasional chocolate. Soon he had a range of cigarettes displayed on his shelves. A few local teenagers came for bread and milk, and tried to buy cigarettes, but he turned them away. Soon he noticed that the teenagers never came to his shop any more, they walked past to the shop on the corner. He really did need their money and they were buying cigarettes anyway, so he decided he would sell cigarettes to teenagers too.
Then people started asking for alcohol so he kept a few beers in the fridge in the back.
Who would of thought you could make so much extra cash in such an ordinary suburb.
When his tax return was due he couldn’t bring himself to telling the tax man about his extra income, so thinking no-one would ever know, he only declared his traffic officer’s salary.
This went on from year to year and his daughter grew up and became a teenager. Occasionally she would ask if they could move to a nicer suburb, but her dad said they needed to stay here because of his business.
When she started high school his daughter started working in the shop too. She sold bread and eggs, and cigarettes and beers to her friends.
One day an older boy came in and asked if she sold dagga as well as beers. When she said “NO” he asked if she didn’t want to sell for him.
So she started her own little business.
In time the daughter took over the shop and moved to a shopping centre and got married and had two children. Just like her dad, she ran two sets of books.
When her older son was 11 she saw a beautiful house in the suburbs, the kind her dad had always talked about but never actually bought. The problem was that she didn’t have enough money for the deposit.
Then it was like God sent her a gift. In the middle of the night some thugs broke into her store and stole a television and some tinned food.
She called the police and told them that the burglars had got away with televisions and computers and cash from the safe.
When she claimed from her insurance she was able to raise the R180 000 she needed for her new house.
When her son left school his mom forced him to study to be an accountant so he would learn to beat the system, to make money and hide the profits.
AT first he protested, but how could he afford to study without his mother’s money? Just like previous generations, he was enslaved to his family’s way of doing things and he couldn’t escape.
DO you remember the Apostle Paul saying, “The things I want to do I don’t do and the things I don’t want to do I end up doing”?
The way this family did things had started innocently with a father wanting more for his daughter, but to have just a little more he sold his birthright of freedom.
It was like they became slaves to their wrong ways, and every generation taught the next generation.
Maybe this is what St Augustine had called original sin. Eventually they didn’t choose it; it was just the way things were done. Or maybe like Paul said, they were slaves to sin and couldn’t get out of slavery on their own.
By his second year this son had made friends in the computer department who could access exam papers before they were printed, and he set up a network of students who sold these papers.
Imagine God stepped into this young man’s life. What would that look like?
How many of us thought of some rich guy sending the young man money?
We want God’s salvation, but we don’t want to lose control of our lives.
what this young man needs is not more money, what he needs is a new heart. In the words of Romans 6, he needs to die to his old way of life which has been passed down from generation to generation.
He needs to be transplanted from the kingdom of darkness and born from above into a Kingdom of light.
He needs to be uprooted from a family of thieves and be born again into the family of God.
The grandson in the parable may ask, “What do I need to do to have this life?”
In earthly terms we’d say, “You need to get a new life”.
Salvation by God is the opportunity to start over, to have a new life.
There are two parts to understanding this new life.
The first is that we need be born into this new life,
and we need to be sustained throughout our new life.
Entrance
To enter into the new life we need to die to the old one.
Paul says when we are baptised we die to who we used to be and we receive a new life. We enter the water who we were but we come out clothed with Jesus.
When we are baptised we are baptised in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In baptism it is Jesus who baptises us, and the Father breathes the Holy Spirit into us. Like the breath that entered Adam in creation, the Holy Spirit comes into us in baptism to recreate us.
That’s the nice side of baptism.
Have you ever thought about the gravity of Baptism?
It struck me again this week of the symbolism of Baptism, that we publicly go through the ceremony of baptism to publicly show that I have died with Christ and am raised a new person. Baptism is our public funeral service for the old person.
In baptism we DIE!
Some years ago Sam read a book called, “I dared to call Him Father” by a Muslim woman who converted to Christianity. Like so many Muslims in the same position she agonised about going public with her faith in Jesus, because it meant her family would disown her. If I remember correctly, they had a ceremony where they declared her to be dead.
Can you imagine the anguish of that?
The truth is that they are absolutely right, because the person who comes to Jesus has died in terms of who they used to be, and are now a brand new person.
The irony is that the Muslim ceremony is an exit ceremony which says, “You have died and are no longer one of us”. But the Christian ceremony of baptism says, “Because you have died, you are now one of us”.
Jesus said unless we lose our lives we will never save them.
God sustains us by Communion. Imagine Bread and Wine is God’s favourite meal, and he says, “Whenever you eat this bread and drink this wine remember me, invite me over.”
At every Communion God renews us, washes our sins away again, and draws us close to Him.
Paul says, “Just as we were slaves to sin, we become slaves to God”. Slavery to God is true freedom. St Augustine said, “My heart is in turmoil until it finds it’s rest in God”.
When our children are born, born to Christian parents, they are born free to God.
Sam and I were chatting last night about this, and just saying how incredibly grateful we are to God for choosing our parents and grandparents. We are the result of generations who have been chosen by God, who have struggled with sin but have been livers of the new life in Christ.
Just as sin becomes the operating system from generation to generation, when we come to Christ, His grace and His love become the operating system from generation to generation for those who love God.