John 8:34 “Jesus responded, ‘Truly I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.’”

This word was in response to their claim, “We have never been enslaved to anyone.” And there is a reason this slavery can be hard to detect.

So long as a slave and his master agree, they get along more like friends and partners. I don’t mean to imply that I am somehow a slave to my wife, but we have a kind of running joke, or at least I do, when she asks me to do something. “Would you like to take out the garbage?” she will say. And I reply, “I was just thinking, I would really like to take some garbage out.” I know, it’s sort of a bad dad joke. And in spite of the sarcasm, I really am willing to do what she asks. My point is, as long as we are in agreement and our wills are aligned, it doesn’t feel like someone is making you do something.

That’s how it works so often with sin. As long as you are in agreement and your wills are aligned, it doesn’t feel like someone (or something) is making you do something. You know how this goes. For the man who likes to indulge his lust and ogle the pretty girls, it is no burden to take a second look, or to find a web page that allows him to entertain his fantasies. For the woman desperate to build up her sense of self-worth, gossip may be something she embraces as a pastime, not a conversation she struggles to avoid. People intent on getting plastered at the party don’t feel like all those drinks are being forced on them. They are ordering more themselves.

Sometimes this slavery hides under the disguise of godly zeal. Take Westboro Baptist Church for example. They try to confront sin by being mean to people. They have staged loud protests outside the funerals of fallen soldiers, not because they know of any particular sins the soldier committed, but because he died supporting a government that allows abortion and various sexual sins. One former member admitted she didn’t feel guilt or regret when she used to mock and dismiss the grief of these families and insult the mourners. It made her feel proud and righteous. She was unaware of the sinful slavery behind her actions.

Jesus sets us free from this slavery first by exposing it. Once we see the sins and try to resist, the slavery becomes more evident. The sinful nature in me is like a psychotic ex- boyfriend or girlfriend. It isn’t going to accept that we are breaking up. It has a psychopathic attachment to my soul, an unwholesome need to control my life. It won’t let go. It knows every button to push, every manipulative trick to play on my mind. Sometimes it forces itself into my behavior with an act of pure power.

It’s the same with the sinful nature. When we were getting along and thinking the same way, it looked more like my friend and less like my master. It was hiding the fact that I was not free. Now I understand just how unhealthy this relationship really is, and how truly it applies also to me.

Jesus helps us further in setting us free by exposing the consequences of this slavery. “A slave does not remain in the household forever…” Jesus is no longer looking at the way the slave is controlled. Now he is looking at a slave’s status. Slaves don’t belong to the family as full-time members. In Jewish society, slaves were supposed to be set free every seven years. After that, the family had no more obligation to feed, clothe, or house them. In Greek and Roman society slaves could be bought and sold like property. The Greeks in particular looked down on slaves as inferior people and slavery as beneath the dignity of the Greek citizen. They kept slaves, but they loathed the status for themselves above all else.

We can say that the whole world and those who live in it are part of God’s household. But not everyone is a free member of the family. For now, even the slaves enjoy some blessings of being in the household. Jesus described God’s goodness to all this way in the Sermon on the Mount: “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” They may not all live day to day with the peace of forgiveness or an awareness of God’s love. But their basic needs are met.

The day will come when this will end for those who remain slaves to sin. Their time in God’s household will end. It is a subtle way in which Jesus is warning us that hell, eternal banishment from God, is the consequence of sin. It’s all the more reason we need Jesus to set us free from our slavery to it.

Romans 8:35-37 “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble, or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”

Sometimes God’s love feels a little theological, a little theoretical, like a set of abstract principles in mathematics. It works on paper, but is it real? Oh yes it is! Look at how God’s love intersects with our lives.

In order to open our eyes and help us see God’s love more clearly, Paul gives us a list we might call “Love’s skeptics” or “Love’s deniers.” So often experience seems to contradict the idea that God loves us. Ancient life was not so different than our own. Behind words like “trouble” and “hardship” in Paul’s Greek are experiences we know all too well. “Trouble” literally has the sense of “pressure.” We feel the “squeeze.” We feel pressure to compromise our morals or our integrity from the people we work for, or from our peers at school. “Hardship” puts us in narrow place, a tight spot. The walls are closing in. The options are running out. Finally, we are cornered and trapped.

Why, if he loves us, does God let us be persecuted? How come I can’t just fit in and be accepted? Why should they others make jokes behind my back when I try to live my faith? Why should my job, my reputation, my safety be threatened because of what I believe?

If I am God’s child and he loves me, then why should I suffer famine or nakedness? Or to put it in more 21^st Century American terms, why should I be living on the edge of poverty? Why should I be struggling to make ends meet? Doesn’t God promise our daily bread? What gives?

What about danger or sword? My house has to be a little fortress–dead bolts and alarms and tornado shelters–to keep me safe. And even these offer no real guarantees. Has God stopped loving us?

“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” In support, Paul brings a second list. Here are the leading candidates for getting between us and God’s love for us. Every one of them is destined to fail.

“I am convinced that neither death nor life…” Death can’t do it. Although death was at one time the penalty for sin that cut us off from God, now it is the gateway to life. It is our last step on the way home. It brings us into the direct presence of God and his love. It never moves us farther away.

Life can’t do it, either. More than death, people fear the things life throws at us. We don’t want to suffer. But the worst that life has to offer is just temporary, and God promises to love us through it all.

“Neither angels nor demons…” Spiritual powers, whether good or evil, cannot do it. We should respect them because their powers greatly exceed our own. But they are no match for God and his love. Even if the good angels were to turn against us (which they would never do) God’s love remains the same. It always protects us. It always says to them, “You may go this far and no farther.” These most powerful spiritual beings (other than God himself) cannot separate us from his love.

“Neither the present nor the future nor any powers…” Nothing in time can do it. We may not like the times we live in now. They feel like evil times. Christianity and Christians seem to be in retreat. We may fear the future with all its unknowns even more. But present or future, from now until the day Jesus returns, we will be the objects of God’s love, every minute, every moment, until the clock ticks its final second and time is over.

“Neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Build a space probe and travel to the farthest edges of the universe. Dig a hole and keep digging until you come out in China. God’s love for you is bigger and more powerful than anything else that exists. You will never find anything anywhere that can separate us from God’s love.

How do we know? In his Son, on a cross, and at an empty tomb God has loved us and loves us still.

Deuteronomy 10:14-15 “The heavens, indeed the highest heavens, belong to the Lord your God, as does the earth and everything in it. Yet the Lord had his heart set on your fathers and loved them. He chose their descendants after them–he chose you out of all the peoples, as it is today.”

We are easily impressed by people who have a lot. I once watched a documentary about people who owned extraordinary houseboats. Most of them had more square footage than my own house. A two thousand square foot boat (most of them were more like barges) is an interesting thing, interesting enough that someone made a show about them. But in the end, it’s just people living on a big boat. You can find similar shows about extravagant houses, impressive car collections, and other luxuries beyond the reach of ordinary people.

People who can afford such things have choices the rest of us don’t. They don’t have to settle for “just-barely-good-enough-to-get-by.” For some, almost nothing is beyond their reach. The food they eat, the clothes they wear, the cars they drive are all of the highest quality. Such people don’t hang around with just anyone. The friends they make, even the people they marry, come from an elite class of people who don’t associate with the rest of us.

The Lord God makes all these celebrities and rich folk look like beggars. Moses mentions God’s ownership of the entire universe in which we live, not to make him interesting to us, nor to suggest that he is aloof and distant and unapproachable to little people like you or me. He does it to magnify God’s grace, his undeserved love, in choosing us to be his people. “Yet the Lord had his heart set on your fathers and loved them. He chose their descendants after them–he chose you out of all the peoples, as it is today.”

The Lord could have chosen any people he wanted. Israel had nothing to make them especially attractive to the Lord. From the time of their father Abraham they were nomadic shepherds, not great rulers and conquerors. The families from which they had come had been quite dysfunctional. Many times the family history read like a soap opera: adultery, playing favorites, pathological lying, unhealthy rivalries, domestic violence. As they grew into a nation, they proved to be stubborn, whiny, and ungrateful.

Still, the Lord set his heart on them and loved them. He didn’t overlook their shortcomings. He was well aware of them all. But he forgave them nonetheless. His standard for choosing them, for having them wasn’t based on their gifts, accomplishments, or goodness. It was all based on his grace. He is a seeking God who does not claim the best. He rescues the worst. He turns sinners into sons and daughters, the people he has made his very own.

Today, we are that people. In his first letter Peter writes to New Testament Christians, “You are a chosen people.” “Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (2:9,10). There’s that standard again: mercy, grace. We have not impressed God with our credentials. We have been saved by the life and death of Jesus Christ, cleansed by his blood, and gathered by faith as the people who are his very own.            

That’s impressive.

Deuteronomy 10:12-13 “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you except to fear the Lord your God by walking in all his ways, to love him, and to worship the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul? Keep the Lord’s commands and statutes I am giving you today, for your own good.”

Alongside fear, proper respect and awe for God, Moses reminds us “to love him and to worship him with all your heart and all your soul.” In talking about Christian love, biblical love, we often say that is more than a warm feeling. It doesn’t seek for itself but it gives, and gives unconditionally. Moses words reflect this, too, when he says we are to worship the Lord, which in the Hebrew is more generally to serve him, with all our heart and soul.

So love is more than warm feelings, sentimental gush. It goes to work. It acts to serve God or help others. But it isn’t less than a genuine, heartfelt affection, either. We can’t claim to love God if don’t really care about him. Would that work in my marriage? If I was faithful to my wedding vows; if I did my share of the work at home or even more; if I always deferred to my wife and we did the things that she wants to do, but I didn’t really have any feelings or care about her, would she be pleased? Would you? Should that kind of relationship make God happy with us? “They are behaving themselves but couldn’t care less whether I were alive or dead. Oh, goody!”

We know how we love our friends, our spouses, our children, our parents. We have experienced the emotional component and how it affects the way we treat them. Does any of that carry over to the way we relate to our God?

This is a problem that runs in two directions. I once sat in the home of a man who professed his great love for God while he defended his decision to defy God’s will for his marriage. What kind of love is that? “I love you, but your will for my life means nothing to me.” Well then, thanks for caring.

I have also known the cheerless, joyless, bitter Christians who slave away at living right as though they were whipped to it. At times, I have been both these kinds of people myself. “Love the Lord your God” is easy enough to understand as a standard for serving him. In practice we struggle.

Nor can we complain that the Lord’s standards somehow work to his advantage and against our own. “Keep the Lord’s commands and statutes I am giving you today, for your own good.” For your own good. When our parents made rules for us, they were simply looking out for us. Eat your vegetables. Be in bed by eight or nine. Don’t play in the street. Don’t talk to strangers. Life works better this way. We are healthier, stronger, and we don’t get hurt.

We don’t have time to cover the entirety of God’s law now, but it works the same away. In many ways, it is the operating manual for the world he created. Live out the implications of fearing and loving the Lord your God, and life works better. His standard for serving him is for our own good.            

Is that hard to believe? Doesn’t his grace convince us it must be so? We know better than the people of Moses’ day the sacrifice our Lord was willing to make to save us. He submitted himself to torture and death to save us from sin and death. That was all “for our own good.” We can trust that his commands are for our good just the same.

Deuteronomy 10:12 “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you except to fear the Lord your God by walking in all his ways, to love him, and to worship the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul?”

Have you ever seen someone with special skills make something hard look easy? A friend of mine let me try his trumpet once. He could make it sing. I blew into it and no sound came out at all. My dad had a knack for carpentry. He cut out pieces of wood, and they just seemed to fit together. I tried it and the lines were not straight and the angles were not square. There is more to this than meets the eye.

Moses makes God’s standards of behavior sound kind of easy at first. “This isn’t rocket science,” he seems to say. It boils down to something quite simple. Knowing what God wants isn’t that hard to understand.

Knowing it and doing it are two different things, though. There is more to this than meets the eye. “Fearing the Lord your God” isn’t primarily a matter of being afraid of him. It is about acknowledgment. It is about recognizing God as God. He, and no one or nothing else, stands above us with power over every feature of our existence. He blesses or withholds blessing. He makes things work out for good or harm. Our survival, our livelihood, depend on him–not on our environment, not on our government, not on our employment, not on our investments, not on our friendships, not on our families, not on our own cleverness and ingenuity.

There are many things that compete to be the “big thing” running our lives. In this sense we may “fear” people, possessions, relationships. We stand in awe of them as though they have god-like power over us. We compromise our morals and principles to keep them happy and keep us safe. We lie for the boss to protect our jobs and stay on his good side. We bite our tongue around family members to keep the peace even though the situation is crying for someone who has the guts to call someone out for his nonsense.

If there were an x-ray that let us peer into our souls, they would look like one of those homes on Hoarders, cluttered and choked with things we can’t let go of because we are terrified we can’t survive without them. As these things grow in importance and influence on our hearts, God himself shrinks in our view. He seems more and more irrelevant. We imagine he doesn’t make that much difference.            

That is a spiritually fatal mistake. The Lord is the “big thing” running our lives, whether we acknowledge this or not. Any attempt to replace him or ignore him will end in us beating our heads against the wall. “Fear the Lord your God, by walking in all his ways,” Moses commands. It’s not hard to understand why he deserves such a place of respect in our hearts and minds. Look at how great and powerful he is. Look at how gracious he has been, forgiving our sins and redeeming our souls. But this standard for serving him is hard to put into practice, which is why Moses has to repeat it here.

1 John 5:14-15 “This is the confidence we have before him: If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears whatever we ask, we know that we have what we have asked of him.”

“This is the confidence we have before him,” John says. And this is not just any kind of confidence. Some confidence is little more than swagger, a self-confidence that doesn’t bother to take into account whom you are dealing with.

Our confidence before God to ask him things does not grow out of disrespect for who he is. We are fully aware of his awesome power and holiness. But we still come to him and speak with a kind of freedom. We pour our hearts out to him with sort of reckless abandon, because in Jesus we know just how much he loves us.

One of the reasons Jesus taught us to call on God as our Father is because he wanted such parental love to influence our prayers. Or, as Martin Luther said it, “With these words God tenderly invites us to believe that he is our true Father, and we are his true children, so that we may pray to him as boldly and confidently as dear children ask their dear fathers.”

That makes us certain that when we ask, God hears us. Even more, John says, “If we know that he hears whatever we ask, we know that we have what have asked of him.” Could that be true? Is that possible? Can we be certain not only that God is listening to our prayers, but that we actually have the things we are asking for? Aren’t we venturing into TV preacher, prosperity gospel, wild-unsubstantiated-promise territory here?

The key to understanding this promise is in the qualifier, “If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” “Oh,” we might think, “that sort of spoils the excitement. We have to ask in line with God’s will.” But not so fast. Isn’t that how Christians want all their prayers to be, or at least they should?

Several years ago a book on prayer was published titled On Giving Advice to God. It intends to be a remedy for the kind of prayer life that seems intent on telling God how he should run our world, as though he wasn’t doing a very good job already and needed us to help him figure things out. If our prayers seem to start with the assumption that so far the Lord has it wrong, those aren’t very useful, or even sensible, prayers. God forbid that we should get anything that goes against his will. That can’t end well. We should even try to avoid asking for such things.

But if we are asking according to his will, how can we fail to get it? He’s God, and he loves us! Sometimes we may not know whether something is his will, so we acknowledge this in our prayers. We qualify our request: “If it is your will…”, at least in our hearts if not in the words we say.

But there are many things he has promised to do for us. Let’s pray about those things more! The whole Lord’s Prayer is an example. Let’s pray it with sincerity and full attention. James says, “Pray for wisdom,” and God will give it. Jesus teaches us to pray for more workers in God’s harvest, to ask for the Holy Spirit, to ask for protection from the devil and temptation.

Let’s search the Scriptures to know God’s will better, and then be certain, by faith, that we have what we pray for.

1 John 5:13 “I have written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.”

John isn’t writing these words to some special class of Super Christians. This is true for the simple, ordinary Christians “who believe in the name of the Son of God.” We don’t have to blow ourselves up in an attack on the enemies of our faith to have such certainty, like the followers of Radical Islam. We don’t have to wander through endless repeating lifetimes pursuing perfect behavior, each time in a new body, like so many of the Eastern religions. We don’t have to do anything at all. Jesus has completed the whole project, satisfied every requirement for us. We turn to him. That is what it means to “believe in the name of the Son of God.” Let me explain.

“The name of the Son of God” is not merely one of the ways we address him, whether Jesus, the name his parents gave him; or “Son of Man,” a title he often used to refer to himself; or “Immanuel,” a kind of nickname from the prophet Isaiah and picked up by Matthew the gospel writer; or “Christ” which is less of a “name” as we think of it, and more of a job title, like “doctor,” or “general,” or “officer.”

Like your own “good name,” his name encompasses his whole life’s work and the reputation that has achieved. By believing in his name our faith embraces Jesus perfect obedience to the Ten Commandments, his unmatched love and compassion for everyone he met, the death he died to satisfy the whole sentence God passed on our sins, his resurrection to life promising new life to all who believe in him. This is our way through the door from death to eternal life. This is our access to life on the other side.

It works a little like this. In my previous congregation we had a member who played in back up bands for a number of entertainers. When singer Frankie Valli came to Dallas, he hired him to play for his show. This member of our church got us tickets to the show and invited us backstage afterwards. It was his name, his work, and his connections that got us through the backstage door after the concert. I couldn’t play one of the instruments in the band to save my life. I had no personal connections to Mr. Valli. My way through the door to meet the band and Mr. Valli was all my friend. His name got us in.

Our way through death’s door to meet God face to face and live eternally with him is all Jesus, “the name of the Son of God.” If it depended in some way on our own reputation, our own achievements, our own moral record, we would have every reason to doubt our access. We would be met at the door with, “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

When we begin to question our salvation, inevitably this is the problem. We are thinking about our own qualifications, or lack thereof. That is looking in the wrong place. John says, “I have written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God…” That faith is looking in the right place. If Jesus is God’s Son, how can he fail to get us through the door? Faith in Jesus makes us certain, certain that we have eternal life.

Psalm 67:6-7 “Then the land will yield its harvest, and God our God will bless us. God will bless us, and all the ends of the earth will fear him.”

It’s the harvest time of year. Pumpkins and squash have appeared in the grocery stores. Apples and pears come from this year’s crop. Cotton fields are white and corn is coming in.

The harvest, the reason we go through all the work of planting and tilling, is the one part of the process we don’t directly control. We can choose good seed. We can plant at the proper time. We can water and weed and fertilize. But after that we wait. Like Jesus said in the parable, “A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain–first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”

Of course, Jesus wasn’t interested in farming so much, and neither is this psalm. Our harvest is a harvest of souls. We can plant the message of God’s grace in people’s minds and hearts. We can pray for God’s grace to give them faith. After that it is up to God to give the harvest.

But just because we don’t control the harvest doesn’t mean that we don’t expect one. Notice how this part of the prayer reads: “Then the land will yield its harvest.” More souls saved, a bigger family of faith, more and more children of the heavenly Father is God’s will for our mission work, not just ours. When the Lord himself teaches us to pray for something, we expect him to give us what we ask.

Those souls, those family members in faith, are the reward for our mission work. This is the content of the promise that “God, our God, will bless us.” My sins were forgiven, and heaven became my own, over a half a century ago when God claimed me as a child by faith through baptism. That was a settled issue long before I ever thought to tell anyone else about the Jesus who has done so much for me.

Since that time, through the preaching of God’s grace, the Lord has given a harvest. He has grown the family of faith around me. I am pretty sure that my house doesn’t love me, especially the way it treats me. In the twelve years I have lived there, the garage door has fallen apart, the toilets have leaked, the dishwasher stopped working, door knobs and hinges have broken, I replaced the roof twice. The demand for maintenance is constant. Something always needs to be repaired.

When I get old, and weak, and move into a nursing home, I don’t think that my cars will care enough to call me and see how I am doing. They will just sit in the driveway and ignore me, or worse yet, abandon me to drive someone else around town.

But the people, the people who have become my brothers and sisters by faith, show their love for me every day by supporting my ministry. They work alongside me in God’s mission. They are my friends in the ups and downs of everyday life.

Someday they, and other members of the family I have never met, may care enough about me to come and see me when I am sick, or old and weak. And all of us are going to share an eternal home with Jesus where we will love each other perfectly without end. We are God’s harvest. We are God’s blessing to each other. Pray that he will increase this harvest.