On Slavery

My lovely Princess S married her Prince J a few months back, so now they both look out for me :) J sent me a few words of encouragement recently in response to a post I'd written about giving up as a Christian a while back; particularly, my following sentence:

"No matter how much I mess up, it's not up to me to call the shots - the only one who can ever tell me to quit is God. And He never will."

Who wouldda thought the words of encouragement would be on SLAVERY? This is what J had to say:

Last week I had the pleasure of listening to some sermons as I drove around Jo'burg. In one of the messages Tim Keller spent a decent chunk of time defining slavery. Our modern understanding of slavery is largely "race-based African/Indian slavery" which was essentially kidnapping, oppression and abuse (all of which God is clearly against). As we read scripture though, slavery is not always/not necessarily cast in a bad light, because the slavery of the day was very different from now. A slave was not necessarily poor - in fact a person could sell themselves into slavery to better their economic standing! Many slaves owned slaves. Slaves were not distinguishable by their clothing or by markings or by race or any such thing. They could own things, and were essentially managers and stewards of other people's assets, to increase these. They could therefore also manage their own things profitably and sometimes even then buy themselves out of slavery. So, at this point in the sermon, I thought: "What's the difference between a servant and a slave? They sound exactly the same... " In good preaching planning, the next sentence brought up this question and Keller proceeded to address it.

Scripture distinguishes between slaves and servants. Throughout the New Testament, we are described as slaves of [God, Christ, the gospel, each other]. Most English translations soften the word "doulos" to "servant", but that's wrong because it means "slave", and "servant" has its own word. (I'll say "apparently", because I've no knowledge of Greek.)

The difference (The Conclusion I hope will be nutritious) is that a slave can not quit.

At any time, a servant may hand in his resignation and leave on equal terms. But a slave can not quit.

So, you are correct in saying it is not up to you. For us, who have been bought out of slavery to sin (we could not quit that), we are now slaves of Christ. We are to serve (and we are free to serve) Him, and people, according to His command of love. We are not allowed to quit, and we find that this is a great safety and encouragement when we belong to the wisest, most loving and sovereign Master.

I've never been grateful before for being called a slave!