John 8:35-36 “A slave does not remain in the household forever, but a son does remain forever. So if the Son sets you free, you really will be free.”

I have three sons, and when I use the word, I’m generally not trying to communicate anything more than the fact that my wife and I have three male children. We produced these three people, and they are boys. We made a girl, too, for a total of four children.

The Bible uses the word this way, too. In the Christmas story, Mary “gave birth to her firstborn, a son.” She had a baby boy, a new member of the family. Not much more is meant in that case.

But many times, God uses the word “son” to emphasize a certain relationship with him. It is more than being a biological member of the family. Even slave parents can give birth to a male child. But to be a son in God’s family is a privileged position with special rights. Sons are heirs. The family’s property, the family’s business, the family’s interests belong to them as well.

In God’s family, Jesus is the natural son, the one and only, the only-begotten. All the power and privileges that belonged to the Father belonged to him. From all eternity he has been God’s Son, a member of the divine family, and he will continue to be for all eternity to come. “A son does remain forever.”

But neither Jesus nor the Father were content to be a family with a single Son. Since the fall into sin, their only choice has been to populate the family by taking slaves to sin like us and setting them free. “So if the Son sets you free, you really will be free.”

The Son sets you free. That starts with sin’s consequences, the fate of being slaves. We aren’t going to end up in the Universe’s incinerator, just so much garbage for God to get rid of in the end. By his death on the cross and resurrection from the dead Jesus has severed our responsibility for all that work we produce as sin’s slaves. We don’t have to answer for it anymore. Sometimes if I am home for lunch at noon, I will watch the news, and many of the commercials during the middle of the day are for lawyers. A number of them offer help getting out of your tax debt. One of them even offers to pay off the remaining debt themselves if they can get your bill reduced to a certain point.

I don’t know what tricks the lawyers might use to convince the court to forgive taxes owed. I do know that Jesus paid off our entire debt of sin from the beginning. In this way the Son has set us free and made us sons and daughters in his family. The Son has set us free, and we are really free.

But his freedom goes farther even than this. Do you know the hymn Rock of Ages? In the closing lines of the first stanza we pray, “Be of sin the double cure: Cleanse me from its guilt and pow’r.” In setting us free from our slavery to sin, Jesus not only frees us from guilt and all we needed to pay for it. He frees us from sin’s power over our lives as well. Maybe that seems a little hard to believe. Does this agree with our experience?

If you are like me, you may still find it easy to slip into sins you don’t want to do anymore. They didn’t completely lose their appeal when you became a Christian. They still tempt. They still promise good times or good feelings. The taste for them has not left you.

In some cases, the Lord may remove the taste for a certain sin in response to faith and prayer. But here is the thing he always does: he gives us the power to fight back. Once we were like a small oppressed people ruled by neighbors with a superior army. Now we have been armed. Our weapons are superior to the enemy’s.

And God himself has joined us in the fight. Tempting or not, sin no longer holds total control. We can resist. “Sin shall not be your master, for you are not under law but under grace”, Paul once wrote (Romans 6:14). The Son has set us free, and we are really free.