You gotta serve somebody

Choices are all around us. In today's culture, ads are continually bombarding us, vying for our time and money.  Freedom is the air we breathe in America.  We pride ourselves on being open-minded, letting people choose what's best for them, not forcing a decision on anyone.

Young people who go off to college are entranced, even intoxicated, by the sudden freedom of being away from their parents.  They think that they are now free to make their own choices, to "be an adult."  And so, they do the things that they've longed to do all their life, without fear of reprimand from their parents.  They stay up late, party, keep a messy room, and generally pretend to be adults while still looking like children to the ones who can tell the difference.

Even adults, though, oftentimes think that they are free, when really they are not.  In the biblical view, no one is free.  You're a slave to sin--money, power, fame, flesh, or you're a slave to God--obeying His will for your life.  The college student who decides to give in to her boyfriend because she feels in love and thinks that it's right for her is not really making a choice, but is simply obeying the flesh. If you're being robbed at gunpoint, and the robber says: "Your money or your life," and you choose to give him your money, it's not of your own free will, you'd never have given him your money if you hadn't been forced.  Life is the same way.  In the words of the Bob Dylan song, "You gotta serve somebody.  It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody."

(I know that song only because I watched The Ultimate Gift, a very good movie, by the way.)

The only real choice we have is whom we will serve.  "Therefore, choose this day whom you will serve."  You can serve the Devil, and have handcuffs on you that keep you in a prison of passion that leads only to destruction.  Or, you can, as my pastor put it, serve Jesus, who came in the flesh, put the handcuffs on himself, let himself be led to the cross, and then, as his arms were spread out and nailed to the cross, he broke the handcuffs of the flesh, and offered us the choice of being his slaves, so that we can live lives of overwhelming satisfaction and freedom, looking forward to eternal life with Him. The choice is an either/or but not both.

"Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? ... For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.  For when you were slaves of sin, you free in regard to righteousness.  But, what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed?" (Or at least you should be ashamed of them.) "For the end of those things is death.  But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.  For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." ~Romans 6:16, 19-23