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Lord, this is our desire. To be made Yours, to be made whole by

You, to be set free by You, and to be used by You. We pray that

You would use this time and Your word to teach us how more and

more that might become the case for us.

We pray in Jesus’ name.

Amen.

 

 

For the past several weeks, we’ve been exploring why the Christian church claims that Jesus’ death on the cross is more important than any other event in all of his life and ministry.

 

And last week we came across I Corinthians Chapter 7 verses 22 and 23 and the intriguing paradox that that passage contains. This is what it says:

 

For he who was a slave when he was called by the Lord is the Lord’s freedman; similarly, he who was a free man when he was called is Christ’s slave. You were bought at a price….

 

Jesus’ death on the cross brought about a seeming contradiction and both of these groups—those who once were slaves and now have been made free and those who once were free and now are being made slaves—those both describe all of us who become his followers. Last Sunday we looked at one side of that paradox: that through Jesus’ death, those who were free—who had the freedom to do whatever it is that they wanted—have been purchased as his slaves, to live their lives under his mastery. This morning we’ll be exploring the other side of this paradox: the idea that through this same death, we who once were slaves—slaves to our sin—have been set free from our slavery.

 

Gerald May begins his landmark book, Addiction and Grace, with these words:

 

“All human beings have an inborn desire for God. Whether we are consciously religious or not, this desire is our deepest longing and our most precious treasure. It gives us meaning.

 

“But something gets in the way. The longing at the center of our hearts repeatedly disappears from our awareness, and its energy is usurped….

 

“Our desires are captured, and we give ourselves over to things that, in our deepest honesty, we really do not want.

 

“[We attach our] desire—[we] bond and enslave the energy of our desire—to certain behaviors, things, or people. These objects of attachment then come to rule our lives. Attachment has long been used to describe this process. It comes from the Old French attaché meaning ‘nailed to.’ Attachment nails our desires to specific objects and creates addiction, a situation in which we are no longer free.

 

“Addiction displaces and supplants God’s love as the source and the object of our deepest true desire.

 

“Addiction…makes idolaters of us all, because it forces us to worship these objects of attachment, thereby preventing us from truly, freely loving God.

 

“Addiction exists wherever we are internally compelled to give ourselves to that which is not our true desire. Attachment, then, is the process that enslaves desire.

 

“It is the absolute enemy of human freedom.”

 

This isn’t a new idea. May writes as a follower of Christ and he reflects what he has encountered in a number of different places in the Scriptures such as in II Peter Chapter 2:19 where Peter says, “A man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.”

 

The human experience is such a contradictory one. Here we are in the land of the free, and we feel like we are anything but. Do you ever feel that you are bound in some part of your life, that you are in captivity, that there are places in your life where you just don’t experience freedom at all? Where are you least in control of your life? What is the thing that most has mastery over you?

 

Human beings are driven by a small handful of basic bedrock needs. And while there are many needs that shape us, these are the ones that, I believe, really define us:

 

The need to belong, to be safe and loved and accepted.

 

The need for a sense of our worth and value as a person, that who we are matters.

 

And a need to live a life of meaning and significance, to feel as though what we do matters.

 

Every human being has two places where he can take those most basic needs:

 

Either to God, who created us for Himself, and in whom those needs are fully and perfectly met and in that is freedom,

 

or elsewhere: to someone or to some thing short of God, something or someone that’s only partially and only temporarily able to meet those needs and that’s bondage.

 

I can take my need to be loved and accepted to God, and I find that need met in His perfect and unconditional love for me and I am free.

 

Or I can take it to others, and I find myself bound by pressure to be what others want me to be, or bound to make myself loveable, or bound to please and to perform, or bound to resort to manipulation or control, or bound to using the people around me instead of loving them when I find myself unloved or unaccepted, or bound to anger and unforgiveness when I’m rejected.

 

I can take my need to be esteemed and valued to God and find that need met in God’s having masterfully and lovingly created me for Himself and in that way I am free.

 

Or I can take that need to the world around me and find myself bound to the world’s fickle opinion of the value of my life and its recognition of my worth, or bound to a sense of pressure to do the things that others expect of me and be bound by pressure to get it right, to do it right, or bound to work or pornography or alcohol or drugs to medicate myself when I see in the world’s face its disappointment with me or when I feel that disappointment with myself.

 

I can take my need for a life of meaning and significance to God whose call upon my life and whose ceaseless love for me gives me value beyond expressing and in that way is freedom.

 

Or I can carry that need into my work or my parenting or my relationships and find myself bound by workaholism or pride that I derive in the way that I parent, or bound to using other people to accomplish my own ends and to give significance to my life, or bound to compete with rather than to love those that God has placed around me, or bound by envy and greed of the people around me, or bound by the endless pursuit of some experience that will give me a sense—if just for a moment—that life is still worth living in the face of its boredom or in the face of its brevity or in the face of the sense that we have just a few days here and then we’re gone.

 

The way of freedom stands before us. God beckons us towards it, but inevitably as human beings we choose the way of captivity. When Leon Morris writes, “Mankind has a fiendish ingenuity in discovering ways to bring itself into bondage,” he is reflecting what Paul says in Titus Chapter 3 verse 3: that this is our natural state as human beings, to be captive to our freedom, “slaves [as Paul says] to our desires and our pleasure.”

 

That’s why it’s so significant that Jesus inaugurated his ministry with these familiar words from Isaiah Chapter 61 which he quotes in Luke Chapter 4:

 

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He sent me to proclaim freedom to the prisoners.”

 

And at the close of his ministry, in the event that we celebrate today, Palm Sunday, Jesus rode into the city of Jerusalem to set the captives free by laying down his life on the cross for them.

 

That act of self-sacrifice stands at the center of the passage that we’re going to be focusing on this morning, a wonderful section from Paul’s letter to Titus.

 

Titus was a protégé of Paul, a young pastor whom Paul has just appointed to give leadership to a fledgling church on the island of Crete. And in the section of the letter that we’ll be looking at, Chapter 2 verses 11 to 14 which you’ll find on page 1895 in your pew Bible, Paul is telling Titus what he should be teaching the people in his church about the sort of life that they are called to live.

 

The question that Paul wants Titus and his people to wrestle with is this: What difference should it make in a person’s life that he or she is a follower of Christ? What sort of lives should we be living in these in-between days, these days between Jesus first having come and his return?

 

Paul has just written in Titus Chapter 2 verse 10 that the followers of Christ in his flock should live, he says, “So that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive.” Don’t you love that? I came across those words this week and I typed them out and printed ‘em off and cut them out and put them above my computer desk. That’s the sort of life that I want to live, a life that makes attractive the teaching about God our Savior.

 

And then in Titus Chapter 2 verses 11 to 14 Paul explains why the witness of a beautiful life is so important:

 

For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say “no” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope—the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.

 

In that last verse, in verse 14, Paul says, “Jesus Christ…gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness.”

 

When Paul says that Jesus ”redeemed” us, he is drawing the attention of his readers to a practice in Greco-Roman culture that would have been familiar to every single one of them.

 

During the two hundred years or so that led up to the time of Jesus’ ministry and the establishment of the church and Paul’s ministry and continuing still at that same time that this letter would have been written and that it would have been read, there was a practice in Greece of setting slaves free that was called sacral manumission of slaves.

 

Here’s how it worked. If a slave wanted to become free, he would scrape and save until he found enough money to be able to purchase his own freedom. But then he would take that money to the priest of one of the many temples of the many gods in his city.

 

And then that priest would take that amount of money which now belonged to the god that he served—that amount of money was called a ransom—and he would go to the present owner of the slave and with it he would redeem the slave. He would purchase with that ransom the slave’s freedom.

 

When he did this, he would always stipulate that he was buying the slave “for freedom.” That was the phrase that was used again and again: buying the slave “for freedom.” Technically the slave now belonged to the god for whom he was a priest, but as far as men were concerned, the slave was free.

 

And to prove that this was the case, after the redemption was completed, the record of the manumission, which means “releasing from the hand,” was chiseled on the wall of the temple. That way, if someone ever questioned whether or not the slave was really free, he could bring that person to the temple and show him that permanent record.

 

There are hundreds of examples of this found in the archeological ruins of the city of Delphi. Here is one example:

 

Apollo bought from Sosibius of Amphissa, for freedom, a female slave, whose name is Nicaea, by race a Roman, with a price of three and a half minae of silver. Committed unto Apollo for freedom.

 

When he wrote Titus 2:14, Paul had other words that were available to him if he wanted simply to say that Jesus set us free. But he chose to use the word that refers specifically to this idea of releasing someone from slavery through payment of a ransom by which that person is redeemed.

 

Now think about the implications of what Paul is teaching when he writes this—the implications for each of us.

 

First, that we are trapped in slavery to sin.

 

As Leon Morris says in his book, The Atonement, “Evil is part of our nature. Our sin arises out of who we are. And being what we are, we can never break free.”

The human predicament of natural alienation from God means that we all are slaves to sin. A man is a slave to whatever has mastered him, and we have all been mastered by our sin. We are all under the tyrannical mastery of our desires and longings apart from God.

 

Secondly, to free us from our slavery to sin, a redemption is necessary; a ransom price must be paid. We cannot rescue ourselves. No matter how hard we would work to scrap together the payment price for our own freedom—to purchase our own freedom, we can never do that on our own. We cannot rescue ourselves. Trying harder to be good doesn’t work. So, if God wants us to be free, a price must be paid.

 

That leads us to the third profound implication of this passage—that Jesus did just that: that Jesus laid down his life as a ransom to purchase our freedom. You may hear Mark Chapter 10:45 in a different way in this context. “Jesus came. The Son of Man came,” Jesus says, “not to be served, but to serve and to offer his life as a ransom for many.”

In Hebrews Chapter 9 verse 15: Christ as died as a ransom to set them free from the sins they committed.

 

Fourth. The price has been paid, and if we put our faith and trust in Christ—if we put our confidence in who he is and what he did—then our freedom has been secured and a record of our redemption has been chiseled here in the pages of Scripture:

 

Galatians Chapter 5 verses 1 and 2: It is for freedom [Do you hear that?] it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

 

Finally, and this is the other side of this paradox that we’ve been talking about this week and last week: when Jesus redeemed us, his claim on our lives was not like the empty claim of Apollo, which was really just a pretext to buy a slave out from under his owner, but is in fact a genuine claim on our lives. He purchased our lives with his own to lay claim to our lives so that he might have mastery over our lives. Now we belong to him. We are his—wholly and completely under his mastery. And at the very same time Jesus really did purchase our lives with his own for freedom. Under his mastery, we are free: more free than we could ever be apart from his rule over his lives.

 

As Jesus says in John Chapter 8:

 

“Everyone who sins is a slave to sin. But if the Son sets you free, you are free indeed.”

 

And this is exactly what Paul is getting at in Romans Chapter 6 when he writes about the before and after for those who’ve put their confidence, put their trust, in Christ:

 

Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey, whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. You have been set free from sin, and you have become slaves to God.

 

“Committed to Christ for freedom.” Those are the words that are chiseled over our lives. We have put our trust in him.

 

Now I want to draw your attention back to the Titus passage.

 

There’s something else that I want you to notice here. This is a passage that says that grace is not just for salvation. Grace—that free gift from God—is not just something that brings us into relationship with God and secures our forgiveness, but that grace is also a part of the process of sanctification which is the fancy theological term for being made holy. That also is a work of God’s grace.

 

Let me develop this for you just a little bit.

 

Listen again to the contrast that Paul sets up between the life of the slave and the life of the free person in this passage. When we put our trust in Christ, the unveiling of grace does not result only in forgiveness for our sin—which we’ll be talking about Thursday and Friday of this week—it also is intended to result in freedom from the grip and control of sin. Paul says:

 

For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say “no” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope—the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.

 

Now in this passage Paul very intentionally uses three sets of lexical opposites: word pairs that are opposite. And he answers three questions in this passage.

 

First, where will you direct your worship? Every one of us was created to be a worshipping being. The question is what will we worship? Will we worship God or something other than God? Paul talks about ungodliness which means worshipping something other than God and being godly which is our worship rightly directed. Either you will engage in misdirected worship worshipping whatever you are inclined to, whatever you may desire, whatever you happen to attach your heart to, whatever happens to be before you which is the way of bondage, or your life will be an expression of reverence and devotion that is rightly directed to God who alone is worthy of our worship which is the way of freedom.

 

The second question he asks is, “What will you do with all those desires that are stirring around on the inside of you?” Will you give in to them or will you rein them in? He uses another set of opposites here when he talks about wickedness in verse 14 and about being upright in verse 12. Wickedness literally means lawlessness and upright means law-abiding or law-fulfilling. So, what will you do with your desires? Will you give in to them? Will you follow their every impulse? Will you chase after the fulfillment of every passionate desire that you feel? Or will you be self-controlled submitting your feelings to the mastery of your will and having a rein on your passion? That’s actually the second set of words that I intended to speak about is worldly passions and then self control.

 

Then finally he asks the question, “So, what will you do with the prompting of your conscience?” Will you ignore it, or will you live by it? Lawlessness, anomie, is indifference to the moral code and the moral boundaries that God has planted in our hearts that find expression in the promptings of our conscience. Will you live in violation of those promptings, or will you be law-abiding, will you be lawful, will you seek to conform your life to that moral code that God has put in you and to live within the moral boundaries that God has placed around us?

 

According to Paul, grace does not merely wipe the slate clean. Grace is intended to transform us, to empower us, to compel us to renounce the one, the way of bondage, and to embrace the other, the way of freedom, in order that we might live in such a way as to be eager to do what is good and pleasing to God so that we will make the teaching of God Our Savior attractive.

 

Now, it is so important here that, I think, we understand how this process of our becoming holy is to take place. We don’t just go from wrong worship to right worship, from giving in to our longings and desires to saying no to them, from breaking the law of our conscience to keeping it through our own effort.

 

That’s the Pharisaical model: that somehow I can muster up righteousness through my own exertion and that’s going to work for about fourteen minutes! And then we’ll be right back to where we started or worse.

 

Wrong! Paul doesn’t say, “Try hard to be a good person.” He says that Jesus is the one who sets us free from lawlessness. He is the one who purifies us or cleanses us. Who is the one doing the action in this passage? Jesus is the one doing the acting. We are the ones being acted upon.

 

The word purify in verse 14 is the same word that would have been used of wheat after the chaff had been allowed to blow away, or of an army that has been rid of its weak and wounded and ineffective soldiers. That is the work that Jesus is doing in us: not leaving the wheat and the chaff alongside and pronouncing forgiveness over it, but being about the work of separating out that which is pleasing to God from that which isn’t.

 

And this fits with lots of other passages that put in front of us the same sort of a radical promise about the transformative work that God can do in our lives. We’re not stuck in our sin:

 

Colossians 1:22: He will present you holy in his sight.

I John 1:9: He will cleanse you from all unrighteousness.

Hebrews 9:15: He cleanses our consciences from acts that lead to death.

Romans 6:8: He sets us free from sin.

Galatians 5:24: He puts to death in us the sinful nature.

 

Jesus doesn’t merely forgive our sin. He works in our hearts to set us free from that desire to give in to sin and its bondage, and to replace that desire with a new desire: a desire to please and to honor God, a desire zealously to seek that which is good.

 

Paul calls us not to the Pharisaical model, but to the Philippian model:

 

Remember Philippians Chapter 2 verse13: God is at work in you to will and to do according to His good pleasure.

 

God is stirring in you to make you want to do what pleases Him and then He is giving you the ability actually to do that.

 

Practically speaking, let me describe for you what that means for those who are followers of Christ: not I try to please God and be good through my own efforts, but rather

 

God convicts me of sin.

God brings my sin into the light and exposes its false allure.

God moves me to godly sorrow.

God gives me a desire to turn from what I’ve done.

God forgives my moral and spiritual failure.

God removes my guilt and my shame.

God awakens in me a desire to change.

God gives me a picture of a different way that life could be.

God moves me to look to Him and to trust Him for change in my life.

And God empowers me to be different from the inside out by His Spirit.

 

My greatest work is simply to remain open and to cooperate with what God is doing on the inside of me. My greatest work is simply to say yes to the new life that God desires to grow out of my slavery.

 

This is a picture that Michele Rainford took at the Coliseum in Rome. It captures the stone walls that would have imprisoned those held captive in the Coliseum. And their life was one that was only two things: captivity and then death. But if you look closely above the corner of the door frame, you’ll see yellow flowers that are growing out of the concrete, out of the crack, and that expression of new life and new freedom in the midst of this prison and place of death and bondage.

 

What does our experiencing this kind of freedom from sin really mean? It doesn’t mean that we become perfect right now. We can still choose to sin. We often do, and we all still will. We will still have a bent, an old habit, a propensity to fall towards sin—to indulging those desires and promptings that are not of God. But we are no longer under its control, under its mastery, under its bondage. God helping us, we are now able to choose obedience in any given situation as we voluntarily place ourselves under God’s control and seek His power to do so.

 

Self control, it turns out, actually means God control.

 

Jesus Christ gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness, to purify for himself a people that are his very own eager to do what is good.

 

You remember that earlier in the sermon I asked you where you most experience or are most feeling a sense that something has mastery over you in a way that it shouldn’t: where you’re most feeling bound by your sin.

 

I’m going to share with you now the true story of a woman named Mary Phillips and as I do that, the place where she especially felt bound and in captivity was in dealing with a drug addiction. But I’d like you to hear the story through the lens of that thing which is the greatest struggle for freedom that you experience in your own life right now.

 

Mary had a profoundly painful upbringing. She became rebellious as a teenager. By the time she was seventeen, she had been kicked out of several schools and found herself in the Maryland State Reformatory. When she was released, she moved to San Francisco and almost immediately became addicted to speed.

 

She said that, “Her whole life began to revolve around her use of speed.” At times she would stay awake for days at a time while her three-year-old daughter fended for herself as best she could.

 

Eventually, with good reason, she lost her daughter to child protective services and foster care.

 

After that, in despair, she gave herself over to drugs completely. At one point she stayed in a closet for months taking drugs constantly.

 

Eventually, in a marriage of convenience more than anything else, she married a drug dealer. The two of them moved from one hotel room to another as they were repeatedly evicted. They spent their time dealing, fighting, and using. Then they started cooking and selling speed themselves and then that led to using heroin.

 

And all of their money and all of their time and all of their energy was consumed with their bondage to this one thing.

 

Once again, they were evicted and needed a new place to stay. And at that point some Christians that Mary had recently met invited Mary and her husband and their child to come and stay with them for awhile.

 

It probably won’t be a surprise to you to hear that those Christians had themselves not long before come out of a life of addiction to drugs when some other people who were followers of Christ sought them out and gave them a safe place and encouraged them to consider the power of Christ to transform a life.

 

During the time that Mary and her husband lived with this couple she decided this would be as good a time as any to see if Christianity really could back up its claim. She decided to see if it was really true. She said, “I wanted to know whether Jesus could really liberate prisoners. Being an addict, I wanted to know whether Jesus could liberate me.”

 

So she began to study the Bible and to pray and to talk to her friends. She started going to church. And after about a month, she became persuaded that the Christian faith was true, that Jesus was who he claimed to be, and she gave her life to Christ. She said that immediately it was as though the shroud of stress that had clouded her life fell off of her, and she turned away from her drug use.

 

She said, “I was still a little crazy when I became a Christian, but I was truly reborn. I never shot up any more drugs after that. I never took heroin again, and I never smoked again.”

 

And after that, she began this adventure of learning everything she could about what it would mean to follow Jesus and to give him mastery over her life

 

And this is what she concluded: “I had no plans to give up my lifestyle—in fact, I saw no way out. I had been caught in a trap, and I would have died in it. But I went on a mission to find out whether Jesus could liberate me. He did liberate me, and he is still liberating me.”

 

Behind me is an image that Vivian Morton painted that captures our movement from bondage and into freedom, out of the darkness and into the light. You’ll notice if you look carefully in the darkness that represents this woman’s previous life the cross is lying on the ground, that on the cross the darkest and the worst of who this woman was has been absorbed and through that, through Jesus’ death on the cross, her life—her new life—has been purchased and now she lives beautiful, whole and in the light of Christ, a woman who has been set free from the darkness committed unto Christ for freedom.

 

One of my very favorite poems is Holy Sonnet 14 by John Donne. It’s fitting on Palm Sunday to read it as its basic imagery is that of Jesus standing at the gate of the city which represents us and that city is held in bondage, in captivity. And this is what John Donne speaks to Jesus who stands at the gate ready to ride in and set the captives free:

 

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new,

I, like an usurped town, to another due,

Labor to admit you, but O, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I Iove you, and would be loved fain [in return],

But am betrothed unto your enemy,

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

 

Committed unto Christ for freedom. May that be our prayer, and may that be our experience. Captivate us, Lord, that we might truly be free.