"slavery To Sin"

“Sold as Slaves to Sin”

John 1:29

It doesn’t seem like we hear people talk much about sin anymore.

I know it can be a downer of a subject, and we don’t want to over-dwell on it, but we certainly don’t want to pretend it doesn’t exist.

I know it exists in my heart, in my life.

I know I have many things I need to work out, need to deal with, something that I still need to give to God, or things I have given over to God many times, but I keep taking back.

How about you?

Can you relate?

The past few years have been incredibly unsettling for most of us.

The pandemic has changed a lot of things and many of our habits.

Suddenly people are not going into offices but working from home with a computer and a phone.

I remember thinking we were becoming increasingly “cut off” from one another before the pandemic.

The pandemic sped this up and made us drift apart even more.

Fewer and fewer people are coming to church; not only that, many of the folks coming are coming less often.

I ask people why they haven’t been around, and the story is often the same: “I got out of the habit.”

And I hear that.

It is an easy thing to do.

But just because many of us have gotten out of the habit of coming together to worship God doesn’t mean we have lost the need to do so.

It’s sort of like, just because so many of us don’t talk about sin anymore doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, doesn’t mean it doesn’t sap the joy from our lives, steal our peace and blur our relationship with God and one another.

Sin can be so deceptive that we can be unaware that we are caught in its death grip.

I remember coming to faith and speaking to someone saying, “I had no idea how unhappy I was. I thought I was happy before, but I wasn’t.”

Sin steals our joy.

It steals our humanity.

It can control us if we allow it.

I was having a conversation with another Christian a few years ago, a younger guy, so I’ll give him that.

But he said, “If it weren’t for my fear of going to hell I wouldn’t be a Christian because sin is fun.”

I was like, sin is not fun.

It may disguise itself as fun, but it brings nothing but misery, hurt, broken lives, chaos and I could go on and on and on and name the reason for just about every horrible situation in our world—sin is the reason for it.

That’s not fun!

But it is deceptive and it is part of our nature.

It’s something we must conquer but can’t conquer on our own.

The Apostle Paul expressed this when he wrote in Romans Chapter 7: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate, I do…”

I was speaking with someone not too long ago…

…someone who had lost his wife, children, and so much more to an addiction that he spends just about all his time doing.

He told me, “Sometimes I think to myself, ‘What am I doing?’

I so want to stop, but I can’t.”

And no, we can’t.

We are, indeed, as Paul puts it, “sold as slaves to sin.”

It’s like we don’t feel that we have a choice in what we do.

We can’t help ourselves.

But there is a way out.

Someone has come to help us, to provide us a way out.

And John the Baptist announces His presence in our Gospel Lesson for this morning.

When he sees Jesus coming his way, he says something profound: “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”

What in the world does he mean by that?

Why does John call Jesus the Lamb of God, and what does that have to do with taking away sin?

For those familiar with the Exodus story, the phrase “Lamb of God” would bring to mind the Passover lamb, whose blood saved the Israelites from death and paved the way for their deliverance from slavery in Egypt.

We can read about it in Exodus Chapter 12.

God instructed each Israelite family to take a lamb, without defect, slaughter it, and then put its blood on the threshold of their homes, slathering it on all the sides of the door to their houses.

And then they were invited to make haste out of that door, out of their slavery in Egypt, and into a newfound freedom where they were on their way to the promised land.

And in doing this, they were born again.