You Gotta Serve Somebody

Introduction:

A. I always liked the Far Side cartoons, and so I begin with this cartoon because of the irony of it.

1. Here’s a man who is a slave on a Viking ship, and he thinks the slave driver will care that he is getting a blister. He was in for a rude awakening!

2. Slavery is an ugly subject no matter where or when that slavery took place.

3. Tragically, the history of human kind includes a history of people enslaving other people.

4. I wish we could say that we as humans have evolved to the place where there is no longer any slavery of any kind taking place on earth, but the hard cold truth is that some people continue to be enslaved by others.

B. Not to speak for all of us here today, but I venture to say that all of us find it deplorable to think that some of our nation’s forefathers actually held other human beings in slavery, and that in some cases, they beat their slaves (fellow human beings), starved them, chained them, cursed them, ripped them away from their families, refused them medical attention, and subjected them to the foulest conditions imaginable.

1. That’s the ugly truth about slavery in America, and slavery elsewhere.

2. But on New Year's Day, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued what we know as the Emancipation Proclamation.

3. Newspapers in both the North and South virtually screamed the headlines: SLAVERY ABOLISHED!

4. Former slaves were now free to leave the plantations and make their own way in life.

5. The legal power which slaveowners once had to control the lives of other people was decisively broken.

6. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued about halfway through the Civil War, and it would be two more years before the Civil War ended.

C. But a strange thing happened: Many of that first generation of freed slaves never left the plantations.

1. Right up until the day they died they continued serving their old masters, as cruel and brutal as they may have been.

2. One Alabama slave, when asked what he thought about the President and his Emancipation Proclamation, replied, “I don’t know nothing ‘bout Abraham Lincoln, ‘cept they say he set us free. And I don’t know nothing ‘bout that neither.” (Shelby Foote, The Civil War, cited by Charles Swindoll, The Grace Awakening, p.104).

3. As you can imagine, the plantation owners were happy to keep it that way.

4. If they could keep them in ignorance, they could keep them working in the fields.

D. There is a powerful parallel between that fact of history and the spiritual truth which the Apostle Paul revealed in Romans 6.

1. Do you remember what we looked at last week in Romans 6:6-7: For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be rendered powerless so that we may no longer be enslaved to sin, since a person who has died is freed from sin.

3. That’s the good news of the Gospel: WE’RE FREE!

4. But the sad reality is that many of us, Christians don’t know it, and we’re still living in slavery to our old master: sin.

5. That ruthless old slave-master named Satan is happy to keep it that way.

6. If he can keep us ignorant, he can keep us defeated, discouraged and doing his bidding.

7. That may be where some of us are today - defeated, discouraged, and doing what Satan wants us to do.

8. We’re still down on the plantation of sin, still in bondage to our sin, and miserable as a result.

9. But the Apostle Paul wants us to know that we’ve been emancipated, and that we can enjoy freedom from the bondage of sin in daily living.

E. Before we proceed with the second half of chapter 6, let’s be reminded of how the second half of chapter six is related to the first half.

1. Romans chapter 6 has 23 verses and divides easily into two sections.

2. Paul made it easy to see the two parts by basically having two questions and two answers.

3. Verse 1 begins with a question and then Paul gives the answer through verse 14.

4. Then verse 15 begins with a question and then Paul gives the answer through verse 23.

F. Paul carries forth the theme of verses 1-14 in this next section, verses 15-23.

1. Paul continues to proclaim that believers are set free from sin, but the emphasis shifts slightly.

2. The primary focus of verses 1-14 is freedom, but the primary focus of verses 15-23 is slavery.

3. Being set free from our slavery to sin, doesn’t mean that we are totally and absolutely free.