Break free

October 6, 2006

By Bob Caldwell

My great-great-grandfather was a Tennessee colonel in the mid-19th century who owned a tobacco processing plant. Like all businesses in the South, the manual labor was done by slaves. The work was surely better than that out in the tobacco fields, but the workers were still slaves.

The colonel used to brag to anyone who would listen that he was a somewhat enlightened man. Sure, he had slaves, but he was a benevolent owner who treated them well.

At some point near the end of the Civil War, the time came to free the slaves. They burned down the plant on their way out.

The family history does not say if Colonel Caldwell was perplexed by this turn of events or if perhaps the reality sunk in that, no matter how well you treat slaves, they are still slaves.

By burning the factory, those former slaves destroyed both the symbol and the means of their enslavement. In their small world, that factory was slavery itself. It was one thing to be told that you are now free, but destroying the oppressor might ensure that you would not be enslaved again.

I think there is a point here for Christians. Consider what we were: seemingly unimportant slaves to sin with no hope of ever changing our condition. But the wonderful day came when Jesus freed us — freed us from Satan and sin which held us captive. No longer did we have to live in the house of slavery and do the bidding of an evil owner.

Surely we have all experienced the frustration of being drawn back into behavior we thought we had left behind. We were freed in theory, but we seem to have been pulled back into the factory to serve the evil master.

Perhaps we need to burn the place down. I am not speaking in a literal, physical sense, but metaphorically. If your sin problem is alcohol, you can’t destroy all the liquor in the world. The problem is not the existence of alcohol, but the desire for it in your heart.

Jesus said, “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell” (Matthew 5:29,30, NIV).

We rightly understand this as hyperbole, but the point of the exaggeration is how seriously we need to eliminate our opportunities to sin.

With a little less drama, Paul said, “But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts” (Romans 13:14, NKJV). The point, however, is the same. We need to not just walk away from the slavery house of sin, but need to do whatever is necessary to destroy it in out lives.

To be forgiven from sin yet remain enslaved to it is not part of Jesus’ plan for our lives. We can be freed if we are willing to take drastic action to tear down the house of slavery.

Bob Caldwell is a Ph.D. student at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Mo.