One may call out, in the agony and thirst of a child waking from a dream of endless seeking and no finding, “I am bound like Lazarus in his grave-clothes! What am I to do?” Here is the answer, drawn from this parable of our Lord; for the saying is much like a parable, teaching more than it utters, appealing to the conscience and heart, not to the understanding: “You are a slave; the slave has no hold on the house; only the sons and daughters have an abiding rest in the home of their father. God cannot have slaves about him always. You must give up your slavery, and be set free from it. That is what I am here for. If I make you free, you shall be free indeed; for I can make you free only by making you what you were meant to be, sons like myself. But it is you who must become sons; you must will it, and I am here to help you.” It is as if he said, “You shall have the freedom of my father’s universe; for, free from yourselves, you will be free of his heart. Yourselves are your slavery. That is the darkness which you have loved rather than the light. You have given honor to yourselves, and not to the Father; you have sought honor from men, and not from the Father! Therefore, even in the house of your father, you have been but sojourning slaves. We in his family are all one; we have no party-spirit; we have no self-seeking: fall in with us, and you shall be free as we are free.”

Commentary

by Earle Canty

When we choose to focus on ourselves, we choose to enslave ourselves.  We make ourselves dependent on ourselves and on others.  We place our self-worth in the hands of sinners, rather than in the holy and righteous hands of the Father and His Son {Romans 8:14-15}.  Since Adam and Eve made that fateful choice in the Garden of Eden to open their eyes, man has been subject to idolatry.  Man has taken on the role of God because he has an inherent bent toward being in control.  That control is a fallacy because the control actually makes us slaves.  We desperately need to stop fighting God for control and allow Him to work His will in our lives.

This is a particularly poignant problem in today’s world.  We are bombarded with psychological mumbo jumbo regarding our need to worry about number one, our need to cater to our feelings, and our need for self-worth and from where that should come.  We seek to be honored by our fellow man, and honor is given to those who are not honorable.  We have forsaken God because we don’t want to be told that there is right and wrong, that there is sin, and we don’t want to be told how to live.  Upside down best describes our current situation, so, rather than being free, we are slaves {John 8:34}.  We just don’t recognize reality.

My Beloved, after reading the above, suggested an analogy to a beautiful red race car.  In order to move, that car needs a driver to step on the gas, steer, and step on the brake.  It also needs maintenance and to be kept clean.  While we like to believe that we are like the race car, the reality is that we often make misjudgments regarding going, stopping, and direction, and there are maintenance issues and cleanliness issues of which we are incapable.