Day 2641 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.


John 8:34 NIV

It's amazing what happens when you make reading the Bible a daily priority. As you read it again and again you start noticing more and more as you go deeper into God's word and start to actually consume the messages and stories and wisdom found in those pages. You start to realize just how timeless and personal it all is. It isn't just some book written by some random people a long time ago. It's something that has a personal connection to everyone, and as you allow yourself to be changed by it, then you'll see just how incredible Scripture really is.

I've been reading through the beginning of Exodus for a few nights now, and this time through the whole story of the Israelites in Egypt has just really hit home. Sounds weird right? I'm not from Israel. I'm not living in Egypt. I'm not a slave of some Pharaoh. None of us are. But just because none of us are any of those things, that doesn't mean that the story doesn't have a personal connection to each of us. When you look beyond the names and specifics and the historical time frame, you can actually find a whole lot of things that each of us have personally experienced in our own lives in this century.

One of the most profound similarities is that each of us have in fact been slaves. Now I know that's one of those highly controversial words in our modern world. But this is about more than the historical American context. This slavery that I'm talking about is our enslavement to sin. Being controlled by an outside force that is beyond our control. Being owned by something that can dictate our thoughts, our actions, our lives. Sin has been that controlling force in the life of every human being who has ever walked this earth.

You and I have in fact been slaves! We've lived lives according to the wicked wants of our sinful hearts. We've been told what to do and how to think and how to construct these lives around what we desire according to the appeal and allure of sin. Each of us have sinned and fallen short of the expectations of our Holy Father. And each time we've fallen into sin, we've accepted this fact that those chains still hold us in place and prevent us from the freedom that we'd prefer. But we've been beaten down and broken by sin to the point that we eventually just accept it and stop fighting back.

Sin makes us think that we can't live without it. It convinces us that we need that pleasure and that satisfaction and the fleeting enjoyment to bring us happiness. And so we keep going back. We keep living in sin because we're blindly owned by its evil lies. We settle for lives of enslavement because it's all we've ever known and we're afraid to fight back because we've also been convinced that we can't break free. We think that we can't change or do something different. So yet another link gets added and another day is lost to the wants and wishes of our sinful nature.

Our world and our society has chosen to make believe that sin is just some made up rules that a weird group of people believe in. And in doing so, they've made sin seem harmless, innocent, and unthreatening. In many ways, as we've discussed many times, this place even makes sin seem enjoyable, exciting, and even necessary in some ways. The world doesn't choose to see the chains. They ignore the weight of responsibility and guilt and shame and those pesky consciences. People don't want to think about what they're doing or who they're becoming, or what's owning them.

Friends, the fact is that slavery is very real and it's more common than any of us have ever realized. As Jesus Himself tells us in this verse in John, each of us are slaves to sin. Each of us are lost. Each of us are broken. Each of us have been controlled by evil and deceit and wickedness. But as much as sin has controlled our lives and dictated our actions, just as the story of the Exodus shows us, there is hope for freedom. There is a God above who is fighting for our freedom. There is hope in the blood of Christ that can set us free, shatter those chains, and lead us to a better land, a better life, a better eternity.

But friends, in order to find freedom we have to realize that we need freedom. We have to understand that we're not free whenever sin is allowed to remain in our lives. We have to believe that there is a fix to the problems that we've been corrupted and controlled by in our lives. It's only when we can see the chains in our lives that we can find the courage to start fighting back and working toward the freedom that we've been offered in Christ.

Sin will gladly keep owning us. It will happily keep leading us by our noses and our desires to all the selfish glory and satisfaction that our hearts can crave. It will lure us all the way to hell if that's what we allow to happen. But friends, it doesn't have to be that way. We don't have to continue living as slaves to sin. There is freedom, but only when we ask Christ into our hearts and fight every single day to choose Him, pursue Him, and serve Him rather than the filth that sin has given us to keep us in its grip.

So who is your Pharaoh? Who or what is keeping you enslaved? What is in your life that is keeping you in chains, bound and broken far from the freedom that you really want? We each have enemies in our lives that are controlling our thoughts and actions. We have sinful desires that are controlling us, that are owning us. And as long as we choose to ignore that, those sinful desires will continue their reign in our hearts and prevent us from finding the freedom that we’ve been handed in Christ.

We don’t have to settle for anything in life. God sent Christ to show that He loves us far too much to let anything keep us separated from Him. But we have to be the ones to recognize our enslavement so that we can understand the gravity of the gift of salvation and in turn change our lives and fight back against those evil lies that want nothing more than to keep us from seeing what God has done for us. There is freedom, but it’s only found when we admit that we need it. And we can only admit that we need that freedom when we acknowledge the fact that we’ve not been free from sin.

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