New Theses, New Reformation

Thesis 49- We must remember that we have been bought with a price, that we are not our own.

There has been a great deal of talk lately about freedoms won and freedoms lost. On the one hand we have people marching in the street, demanding this and demanding that. On the other we have people cowering in their homes, because they were told to do so. Freedom, it seems, isn’t what it used to be. Various governments, for various reasons chip away at our liberties. Our forefathers must be spinning in their graves.

We live in a world where roughly half of our income is taken by sundry governments. I must ask the state permission to build a shed in my back yard. I must, at the moment, if I wish to host an event at my home for over 25 people, get permission from the state. I must, if I want to keep a higher percentage of my income, tell the government what I spent my income on. But I am a free man. I am free, ironically enough, precisely because I know that I am a slave.

My master, however, isn’t the state. My master is the state’s master. The very freedom Jesus came to gave us is built upon the truth that He is the one who bought us. His blood has paid for me, body and soul, and so I am not my own. Those of us who can remember our conversion typically remember when we remembered this truth. When we were first confronted with our sin, when we first embraced God’s grace, we cried out words to this effect, “O Lord, I will go where you send me. I will do what you tell me. Here I am. I am yours.” But then most of us forget.

We move through our lives believing our Master owes us, that indeed He works for us. We look upon hardship as a mysterious, unfair intrusion as we are seeking to go about our business. But we are to be about our Master’s business, which is, in His grace, His glory and our good. Hardship is our business, for we are not greater than our Master.

A wise man once sang that we will all have to serve somebody. A wiser Man still told us that no man can serve two masters. I am free not because I am my own, but because I am His. I cannot be enslaved by the state, even if it has me in chains, because I already belong to Him. I cannot be enslaved by my desires, because He desires to purify me. I cannot be enslaved by the culture, because He has made me not just a citizen of that city whose builder and maker is God, but has made me there a king with Him. I am free precisely because I belong to Jesus. His burden is easy. His yoke is light. As I remember my enslavement to Him, I enter more fully into my liberty. I become more and more each day a free man.

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