Sin wraps us in chains and drags us places we don't want to go. It truly turns us into slaves, people held in bondage unable to do as we please. But becoming "God's slave" is a very different matter. He who gave us a free will so we could choose to love and obey Him in the first place does not take that freedom away when we become born again. God has absolutely no desire to have little mindless human beings running around serving Him. The idea is repulsive to Him. The Bible clearly teaches that what He longs for are children, adopted sons and daughters who serve Him, because they love Him and become holy, because they want to be like the One they worship (Jn 15:15; Ro 8:14-17,23,29; Gal 3:26; 4:6,7; Heb 2:10). And because this is His nature, our service of Him will always be freely chosen. So if I'm to become the "slave of obedience" that Paui describes I must constantly choose to submit myself to God's will. But such glorious freedom brings with it its own form of danger. If I have freedom to obey, then I also have the freedom to disobey, and when I disobey, I open the door for a powerful force to come in and recapture me, a force which will try to take hold of me and pull me away from God if I continue to indulge in It. That's the danger Paul is warning us about in this passage. He assures us that God is more than able to protect us from these deadly forces (Ro 8:31 -39) but now he's reminding us that we must be diligent to let Him. Last episode he told us how to die to sin. He said we must by faith bury the old self with Christ; we crucify that old, selfish, rebellious spirit we inherited from Adam (Ro 6:1 -7). But this episode he tells us how to stay free from sin. He says the way we'll avoid sliding back under control of those old forces is to choose to "enslave" ourselves to God. Let's discover what he means.

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