A Free Slave

it's a real privilege to be here with you guys today um [Music] so as you're aware for a variety of reasons arise wasn't able to run this year and so the conference approached me on the second day that i arrived into the region they're like hey in 20 something days could we do kind of like a stop gap measure and run something for this year and so um it's just called local missions training because the conference in the evangelism department they already have local mission volunteers and so just kind of was the thing that matt could put under that and so we've had 12 students over the last three months being discipled going out in the community at milwaukee and this is the last week and they feel like oh no and i feel like it's done but i heard i heard officially from matt that kingslift church board has committed to doing a rise again in 2022 and we're all in this whole region so excited amen amen it is a powerful ministry um every year that i've been available i've had the privilege to play a little part in and help wherever i can and i'm just really excited that god's bringing it back here to australia and excited for the next generation of workers that's going to be coming out because the harvest really is bountiful i don't know why i couldn't say that word bountiful but it's the laborers that are few anyway um yeah i just want to i want to praise jesus with all my heart that he's able to bring my family into this region and just being able to pass her alongside quentin ashley steve there at uh bray park and obviously matt there's a number in this region that it's it's i feel really blessed and lucky because it feels like a group of friends getting to work for god together and like you just don't get that very often and so i feel i feel very very blessed um i also feel like before i dive into the word i didn't make a mother's day specific sermon and i feel kind of bad about that but hopefully it'll resonate with mothers as well um it's actually um it's actually about slavery um which you know [Music] it's some families you might resonate a little bit yes i'm not sure anyway um yeah once again thank you very much for allowing me to be here to share the word of god together with you guys and um let me have another quick word of prayer and i really did appreciate quentin's prayer i just it's my custom to pray before i preach it helps me get in the right headspace and just give it to god heavenly father lord as we come together i want to thank you so much for the blessing that this church has been in supporting the local missions training program and just for my family over the years lord i want to thank you for the privilege to be able to try and be a mouthpiece here today and lord as we learn about being a free slave as we learn about what your desire is for our life i pray that your holy spirit be present and that your grace empower us to be able to not just be hearers of the word but partakers in jesus name amen a number of years ago i had the privilege to go up to the northern territory to preach at a youth event um for the for the youth in that region and so my wife and i we went up to um the northern territory there and then there was a retired minister who was brought out of retirement to help out a church there in darwin pastor frank williams he came and met us and i was like oh pastor frank and i had the privilege of already knowing him because i went to school with his children at bac and so when he saw me he kind of was a bit kind of like who are you because his kids had heaps of friends and then when i made the connection and i was friends with dion and then he was like oh boris how are you and so he was the guy driving us around and if you've ever been to the territory nothing's close all right when they say we're going down the road they're speaking of roads like the bruce highway um it takes a long time from where we got picked up to go to where i was going to preach and we had plenty of time to be able to get to know each other in the car now frank williams as i mentioned was a retired minister he's an african-american minister born and raised in america and then later on in life he moved to australia and while we were sitting there we were talking about a whole variety of things i asked him i i said pastor frank can ask you a question he said yeah of course i said what was it like growing up as a black man in the south in your generation now at the time that i was talking to him he was probably around 70 years old i did not anticipate the next half an hour of stories that would come my way and it was just a heartbreaking story after heartbreaking story after heartbreaking story he it was stories like he remembers as a grown man in his early 20s getting dressed in his sunday best to be able to go to church and there would be certain houses on their way to church as they would walk to church where they would have to get on their hands and knees and crawl past certain houses because if they didn't the people in those houses would come out and beat them for people of their race tossing up dust in their house he remembers in his town that when the police were having a bad day they would come into the street and grab a closest black person and beat them to a pulp to be able to de-stress a little bit he he told me a bunch of these horrible horrible stories but ones that actually sunk in the worst for me or that made me feel most impacted was when he would tell me that he would save up any free money that he could and with that he'd try to buy bleaching soap that would hopefully lighten his skin or he would buy i don't know what the substance is called but essentially would burn the curls out of his hair and he as a person as a creation of god as someone made in the image of our living god he hated himself and and just tried to be a little less black so that life could be a little less worse horrific right and he could tell that his story started getting to me and that this was a world that was completely unfamiliar to me i was raised in brisbane went to bac my friends are the color of the rainbow like race and color of skin was never something that you would consider with friendship it was just you get along you don't get along and he could see that a window into the world that he was raised was messing with me that i was getting a bit emotional a bit overwhelmed with the information and he says boris one thing you've got to understand is i had it good do you get the weird anyone else feel like that's horrific how could that possibly be described as i had it good and i was just really confused and he went on to finish his sentence he says i was a free man i was never a slave if that's what a free man's life was that started me on this journey of just being really fascinated to learn what was it like for a slave and as i've been reading it is beyond horrific it's beyond horrific slavery was essentially free labor through coercion that's what it was it was machinery they they viewed him as cattle and so they the owners of these slaves they got free labor and they would work their fields they would work their houses they'd take care of their children it would be this free labor all around but who wants to work for free anyone anyone would be work for free and get nothing for it and help someone else get really rich while you have literally nothing no one wants to do that and so the way that they had to achieve it was through coercion and as i've been looking into slavery it becomes very clear that there was essentially three main things three ways that they achieved it but one is most principle and that is if i can get the next slide the number one thing that they had to do was destroy the human will that to destroy the human will in fact in america in that day there was a trade that you could do as a white man you could actually apply to do an apprenticeship to learn how to be a slave breaker have you guys ever heard people who break in horses a horse breaker it was the same concept and the same mentality it would be a trade where you would get paid there was a whole er economic system going on that would pay you that you would get and make a living your career would be breaking slaves in fact there is a story of benjamin franklin um he was a very very bad slave because somehow he taught himself how to read and whenever he'd get a chance to be alone he'd smug smuggle things to read and he was educating himself and it didn't matter what his owner would try to do to him he couldn't seem to break the human will and so after a while of trying and after him trying to escape and getting caught escaped getting caught escaped getting caught these owner finally said not you know what i'm gonna have to pay the money and send you to a slave breaker this slave breaker beat him daily over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and it's actually recorded he actually shares later on and there's a diary that he'd kept and he wrote that darkness is creeping in of him and the will to be human is almost gone and then he finishes a sentence he says tomorrow i become cattle it was defeated it broke him he was just going to submit and just be free labor for the rest of his life get absolutely nothing for it his will had been broken the next morning the slave breaker came in and took him out for his daily beating something happened to benjamin and there's this reignition of will and he starts fighting back and i can't figure out how exactly but from what i've been able to research online they end up having a fight for two to three hours now i don't know if anyone here's been in a fight i know you're a christian and you've never had any bad feelings ever about anything in your life unfortunately i was a dum-dum growing up and i like fighting a bit and a fight seems like it goes forever until your friend records and you're like wait that was 15 seconds and i feel this puffed out they don't last long like especially in like street fights like professional mma fighters when the ufc started they had 25 minute rounds and they had to change it to five minutes rounds because even the most elite humans on earth who did nothing all day except trained for fighting were not able to last 25 minutes do you do what i'm saying fighting two to three hours and you know what at the end of it benjamin franklin whooped the slave trader a slave breaker and the slave breaker was so ashamed so embarrassed so worried that he would lose his whole trade he just kept it a secret and allowed him to just do his thing and never bothered him again now here's a question a real question how many benjamins do you reckon are out there as i read that story i knew that there was just no way that that would be me my human will would have been broken they got it down to a science and they used two main things to be able to destroy the human will they use brutality i i think i got it from here they'll use brutality so that was their one kind of main lever it was just brutalizing people uh there's story after story that you can get of testimonies from these slaves where the slave masters would come in and he'd say john i've got to beat you and this lady said what i've done nothing wrong he's like yeah i've got to beat you so you won't do anything wrong now most of us we can endure some suffering in fact probably all of us can endure some suffering but you can endure it a lot easier when you have an idea of some rules right routine helps people even who are in captivity today it helps them be able to do it but when you're getting beaten for doing good and then you get beaten for doing bad and then you get beaten for doing nothing and then you're beating him for doing something and you can't even gauge what are the parameters so that i can actually behave what does that do to you this is an excerpt from one of the books that i've been reading actually we'll just go with you guys next slide please it's a testimony saying i was severely punished by a board cut full of holes to raise blisters and then i was whipped with a strap to burst the blisters which are then salted and peppered thomas brown said this burnt me very badly now can we go to the next slide evil can we say evil absolute evil the second lever that they used was dehumanizing them now obviously brutalization did this but they were very strategic in in dehumanizing them said they would be sorry for the real confrontational nature of all of this but there would be like assaults and abuse happening on the regular and they would make their loved ones watch and not be able to do anything in fact something that was very very common and this is the main lever that they use to keep them from being human is whenever two slaves fell in love and then got pregnant when the baby was born they would make sure that the baby sold to another farm and then they would separate the husband and wife because they saw something happen that when family when a child was born in all their hard work of crushing their will all of a sudden came back because when they saw their master mistreating their child there was more will than ever to try save that child and i think some mothers here today would be able to resonate with that there is something that god has given us parents that we get dropped these strangers into our life who all of a sudden we'd give our life for and it makes no sense but god's designed it because he's given us love for each other yeah and they knew this and so they soon as there's some joy send that baby to a different plantation send the mother to this plantation because they knew when families together there is a far stronger will and they didn't want to deal with the will they wanted to destroy the will can we say it's evil it's evil this is why it's kind of confusing that in the bible there are laws about how to treat your slave is slavery evil yes or no so why on earth would god put laws on how to treat a slave now some of you may not have ever thought about this but it's a very true statement in god's word he has put laws that he wished his children would never keep does that sound weird to you god has placed laws in his bible that he wished his people would never keep and one of the clearest illustrations of this if you look in deuteronomy there are laws about how to pick a king what is that criteria that israel needs to meet to be able to pick a king but what does samuel tell us was it ever god's will for them to have a king no and so god he hasn't put these laws in place as like oh there's a law about having a king so we must have a king no no he's put these laws in place because he knows how deranged humanity is and so to protect humanity from itself because he can see bad decisions coming he says well if you rebel from me here i'm still not going to let you go so if you do that at least try do this to minimize the damage that you're going to do you see that and i think slavery is definitely one of these laws in fact the book the story of the bible it comes up out of the context of what slavery god's people are the slaves and so as they left guess what the slaves who were now free started to do they started to get themselves slaves and they started treating them horrifically but i'm just going to very briefly give you a bit of a rundown on some of these laws so for example genesis 17 12 he says you were able to have a slave as long as they were regarded a full member of the community does that sound a little bit different to the slavery we just described according to the law if they were not regarded a full member of the community you were not allowed to have a slave you had to let them go free it says that they had to receive the same rest periods and holidays as non-slaves in fact the sabbath commandment says that doesn't it they have to be treated humanely in fact in exodus 21 there are twice where it mentions that if they strike their slave they lose them now is this an ideal situation did god ever want his people to have slaves yes or no no but notice and please don't miss this this is important that every single time god placed the law around about slavery it was always a protection for the slave never for the owner of the slave yeah in other words there is a very evil situation going in and god is seeing his children partaking in this evil situation and god injects himself into that for the preservation for the protection of the slave that's very different in fact it's so different that theologians don't actually call it slavery they call it indentured servitude because if you follow the laws as the protections are in god's word it is actually very similar to what you and i call a job so the fact that the bible has laws about slavery that is a bit confusing but you know what's most confusing to me romans chapter 1 verse 1. let's read this together the bible says paul a bond servant of jesus christ called to be an apostle separated to the gospel of god paul is introducing himself here in a letter to the romans and how does he introduce himself he says paul a what paul a bond servant in other words this word literally translate is someone who's bound to serve we would call that a slave an accurate translation in the english is a slave and it's not just in romans if you look in galatians 1 10 he introduces himself as a slave in philippians 1 1 he talks about being a slave in titus 1 he introduces himself about being a slave it seems that wherever paul's going he's saying hey guys i'm paul the slave of jesus is slavery evil yes or no isn't that a very weird way to introduce yourself like just imagine that imagine that in the seventh-day adventist church we didn't have pastors but we called them slaves and you have like neighbors seeing you come back from church and your sabbath best and they're like oh where'd you guys come from oh yeah we just got back from church oh how was it oh it was awesome we got a new slave yeah he's from south africa we're really excited about him what are you doing next thursday our slaves coming over i'd really love for you to meet our slave what do you reckon would be the pr a good witness now don't miss this don't miss this please don't miss this would they think little of your slave or would they be thinking less of you no one blames a slave for being a slave you follow it's a slave owner that's messed up yeah i'm paul jesus's slave wherever he's going i'm poor jesus is slave i'm poor jesus is slave like what are you doing shh you're making jesus sound pretty messed up yes or no it's weird and i think it's weird because often we are so influenced by the world around us that we don't have a biblical mindset and so when we read scripture we're not interpreting it through the lens of scripture but we read scripture and we interpret it through the lens of the day and the culture that we're living in but see paul understood something very very very critical he understood that we are all slaves it's true jesus taught this too but see jesus said this in john chapter 8 verse 34 he said jesus answered them truly truly i say to you everyone who commits sin is thy what is a slave to sin and we know the verse how many have fallen short how many have sinned but according to jesus anyone who sinned is a what he's a slave to sin peter worded it this way he says they promised them freedom but they themselves are what slaves of corruption for whatever overcomes a person to that he is enslaved and look there are some among us who from our own testimony no that slave pardon me that sin is a slave master there are many who have said over and over and over again never again never again never again and we said never again until we did it again i have felt powerless many times this this is just resonates through that to whatever overcomes the person to that he is enslaved you just feel belittled and i just want to just quickly look at what kind of slave master is sin just quick stats i'm going to run through this really quickly alcohol for example approximately 70 of men and 8 of women are dependent on alcohol in their lifetime that is a lot of people because of the astounding 80 000 deaths that are related to alcohol abuse every year alcohol abuse is the third highest cause of death what about assault on average there are 300 apparently 433 000 victims aged 12 or older of rape and sexual assault in the united states alone one in four people have been sexually assaulted one in six women in america have been the victim of attempted or completed rape in their lifetime is sin don't miss this is sin still doing to people what the slave masters were doing to their slaves is it still abusing is it still dehumanizing is it still brutalizing divorce looking at the probability of divorce based on the numbers of marriages this is in australia 41 percent of marriages end in divorce 60 percent of second marriages 73 percent of third marriages living together prior to marriage increases the likelihood of divorce as much as 40 percent is sin still tearing apart families what about lying i found this study really interesting it says by the age of 4 90 of children have learned the concept of lying and based on studies performed in the past it is estimated that 60 of adults cannot have a 10-minute conversation without lying at least once and within those 10 minutes an average lie of an average of three lies were told guys i want to just suggest to you that what jesus said is absolutely true whoever commits sin is a slave to sin and what kind of master is sin what kind of master is sin is the same kind of master that made you feel disgusted by hearing the stories of what people were doing to humans sin is doing that to humans every single day and whoever has sinned which is how many of us all according to jesus you are a slave to sin paul understood that no one's free and do you want to be free though do you want to be free yes or no church do you believe you can be free yes or no church well unfortunately i've got some bad news for you do you not know that if you present yourself to anyone as an obedient as obedient slaves you are slaves of the one whom you obey either of sin which leads to what death or obedience which leads to righteousness later on the chapter he words it a little clearer but now you have been set free from sin can church say amen are they free yes or no no now that you've been set free from sin and become slaves of god hold up are you seeing this everyone who sinned is the what slave and can god set you free from sin yes or no yes and having become free from sin you're a slave of god paul understood that no one is free everyone's a slave those who are slaves to sin they are slaves of sin but those of us who by the grace of jesus christ are no longer slaves to sin are we still slaves are we still slaves yes or no yeah having become slaves of god now that sounds confusing it sounds like kind of not really great news but let me tell you what is the best news ever it is the best news ever first corinthians chapter 7 verse 22 let's read this together it says for he who is called in the lord wala what while a slave is the lord's freedmen and likewise he who is called while free is christ's slave all right to be honest i kind of thought i'd get some more amens um he who is called in the lord while a slave is the lord's freed man all right we've got one little whisper there there's a book that i read recently by thomas soule or sal i'm not too sure how to pronounce his name it's got a very provocative title it's called black rednecks and white liberals and in there he's got a whole first half of the book where it traces the history of slavery from when it first entered america and the whole experience throughout it and then how it was eradicated it's very very fascinating read and he talks about how obviously well maybe not obviously if you don't know but slavery was most horrific in the south in the north it was illegal long before it was illegal in the whole country especially in the south but around that middle area there was some kind of it was there it was bad but kind of not as bad as the south but not as good as the north and it was in this region where it first became possible for you as a slave to come up with a negotiation with a contract with a pathway out of slavery now how many people do you reckon would prefer to pay for work when they're getting it for free not many in a selfish world probably a lot of business owners today if they just even thought about how much money is going to wages oh man what they could do with that and so here's a situation where you've got slave owners who have all this free labor but there's social pressure starting to form to be able to be like well they should be able to earn a way out and so in this time they would come up with an agreement now if you're the slave owner do you think that they were trying to make easy terms out or were they trying to make it technically possible but the reality is you're not going to do it that's what they were they were all contracts that were technically possible but almost nearly impossible and the only way they could ever be done is if the whole community of slaves rallied around with this one slave and they worked they worked their tails off they copped what they had a cop and they made sure that every criteria that could possibly be meant for this slave to become free would be met and as a community and it's recorded that as a community there are cases of the community working together to meet the criteria for one slave to become free and they did it they got free and for the first time he could work because by the way he still had to work because nothing's free but for the first time he was getting paid and it was next to nothing compared to what the white people were getting paid but you know what when you're born a slave and you work your whole life guess what you get really really good at the work and so you've got this really really really skilled person who no one's willing to pay a fair amount but he doesn't care because something is way more than what he was getting and as word got around of how good it was and how cheap he was what he lost in profit margin he was making up with the market and he was saving money saving money saving money saving money saving money saving money saving money and when he finally got a bit of wealth guess what he did bought a slave during that time of working and saving he was researching where his wife was sent and he was working and saving and working and saving and negotiating with his wife slave master and working and saving and working and saving and when he got the number he went and bought himself a slave his wife and guess what now there was two and they were working and saving and working and saving and researching where their kids were sent and they'd be working and saving and working and saving and negotiating with the slave master of their kid and he'd be telling him a ridiculous price but they didn't care they would work and save work and save work and safe and when they got the money guess what they did they bought a slave their son and now there were three of them who were working and they were figuring out where sister was and they're figuring out where uncle was and where grandpa was and they would work and save and work and safe and go everywhere they could to buy as many slaves as they possibly could but why why were they buying slaves so that even though that they are slaves they can experience freedom do you think these slaves got to act differently to the other slaves do you think they got to go places where other slaves didn't get to go do you think they got to eat at a table that other slaves didn't get to eat now if you're one of these slaves if boris joven i've got bought by peta the oven off i'd get to go places wouldn't i and when someone saw me in a place that they thought i shouldn't be guess what the first thing i'd be yelling to i'm boris jovan of peter jovanov slave are you catching this i am paul the slave of jesus christ i am paul the slave of jesus christ i'm paul jesus is slave see because he understands that no one is free not the lost not the saved but the slaves of jesus though they are slaves they get to taste freedom on this side of heaven by the way i think this is a really important message on this side of heaven there isn't freedom but that does not mean that the slaves of christ don't get to experience freedom maybe it does make sense that wherever paul went he was declaring at the top of his lungs i'm paul the slave of jesus christ see because it's not about if you're free or not no one is it's about who's your master and one master can be sin and sin will destroy your will there are some people in this very room right now whose sin has almost defeated and you've tried to stop it and you've tried to stop it and you've tried to stop it and you've gone back to it and back to it and back to it and right now in your mind in your heart you're this close to saying what's the point i'll promise again but i'll do it again what is the point it's destroying your will to the point where you're saying what is the point of exercising my will i'm just gonna go back to it and some of you have been brutalized by sin i'm not an old man but i've been in ministry for 12 years and that is long enough to know that in this room there are some victims and i know that there are people that have not been treated humanely and sin is a brutalizing dehumanizing evil master but then you have jesus who went through the impossible he employed all the agencies of heaven to go through the impossible to be able to purchase you why this next verse has become my favorite verse in all scripture for freedom christ has set us free he is just like that father and yeah if you don't want to be a slave to sin that doesn't mean you get to be free because the only way to be experiencing freedom is to pick your master and what jesus did what jesus did by paying for you what jesus did by going through the impossible by going through the thing that no human could possibly go through was enabled you to choose your master and he's revealed himself he's told us why he went through this it was for freedom's sake that god has set you free so that even though you are a slave we are the lord's freedmen so that even though we are here on this sinful world we can finally be free and say no we can taste what life more abundant finally is we can leave brokenness we can overcome shame we can look at the testimonies that we heard people it is not normal for people to be going through that crisis and having hope but in christ even on earth though we're still slaves we are his freed children and when jesus is your master you get to go places other slaves don't get to go both here on earth but very soon very soon there's going to be a trumpet sound it's kind of a weird thing to say don't know how they're naturally going to explain that and there's going to be some weird sounds we've never heard some thundering thundering people trying to figure it out but we'll know that is the angels wings flopping on their way home and the investigative judgment happened in heaven would have been finished michael would have stood up and he'd get all the host of heaven to come and take his children home so that they no longer need to be his slaves experiencing freedom under his wings but that we can be free indeed you can pick your master free will is so important to god so important that he's doing everything to preserve it for you you can choose your master and i want to beg you i want to plead with you if you want to experience if you want to taste if you want to feel what freedom is pick a master who bought you for the purpose of setting you free let's pray heavenly father i want to thank you so much for who you are we really are slaves lord and i i honestly didn't think i'd pray this prayer often but i want to thank you that i can be your slave because you do not brutalize you do not dehumanize you do not rob us a free will but father you preserve the human will lord you're trying to restore the image of of of humanity in you father god you're a protector and i want to choose you lord i want you to be my master i want to be free from sin and a slave of god so that i though i am a slave can be the lord's freedom and father god if there is anyone else under the sound of my voice whether they're here or watching at home lord if they have that desire do for them what you've done for me and allow me to be your purchased possession so that when you come back i can be with you until that time i can live with you in jesus name amen

Channel: Kingscliff Church

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Id: 08MqYLJDCXc

Length: 43min 32sec (2612 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021