Okay, we're going to be looking at the same text that we looked at last week, but from a very different point of view. I'll start off by telling you a story of our American history that you're all very familiar with, but it's good to be reminded of it, especially on a morning where we're talking about slavery. It was January 1st, 1863 that President Lincoln announced these words. All persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of the state where the people are in rebellion against the United States shall be thenceforward and forever free, and all military and government personnel will recognize and maintain the freedom of these former slaves. Remember what that was called? The Emancipation Proclamation. A then nine-year-old boy in Virginia named Booker T. Washington remembered the day that the announcement came to his house. He said, as the great day grew nearer, there was more singing in the slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring, and lasted later into the night. Most of the verses of the plantation songs had some reference to freedom. Some man who seemed to be a stranger read the Emancipation Proclamation. We were told that we were all free and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, fearing that she would never live to see. The proclamation was only the first, however, in a series of steps necessary to give freedom and citizenship to the slaves. After the Civil War ended on December 6, 1865, so this is almost three years later, the Congress ratified the 13th Amendment, which officially made the proclamation a binding constitutional law. Five years after that, in 1870, the 15th Amendment gave all races full personhood under the law by allowing them voting privileges regardless of past servitude. Now, three things then became necessary for the black man in his struggle out of slavery to freedom. First, he had to hear the proclamation. If he never heard the announcement of his new legal status, he would never know that he had been freed. And so the emancipation would be useless. For example, the news of the emancipation did not reach Booker T. Washington for nearly two years. So he had been freed for two years, but didn't know it. Second, he had to believe that he was free. It is well known that many slaves continue to live as if they were slaves. many decades after they were freed. And then third, and this is sort of related to the second point, he had to learn to deal with the implications of what it meant to be free. So positively, you can think about an education and learning to live life without the supervision of an owner. And negatively, you can think about dealing properly, dealing well. with all manner of racism, intimidation and persecution from those who deeply resented his new freedoms. So there's a lot going on with the whole issue of slavery and just didn't just kind of stop and end with the 13th Amendment, did it? Today, we're going to continue to look at this passage in Galatians three and four. Now, last week, we studied our identity in Christ as adopted sons of God. Today, we're going to look in more detail at the position from which we came before we were adopted into his family, which is the position of slavery. The point of this section is that Christians have moved out of slavery into sonship. A good deal of the passage is taken up with explaining the three things that held us in slavery. Take your Bible and look at these. You might even want to underline them if you're the kind of person that does that. In verse 22, we are described as being under sin. In verse 23, we are under the law. And then in chapter four, verse three, we're under the elementary principles or the stoichia that I preached about last week. I'm going to refer to them for the sake of helping you remember these three as the world, the flesh and the devil. The passage begins with a reminder in verse twenty one that the law is in full alignment with the promises of God, who spent so much time talking about that, probably two, three, four or five weeks talking about that in one way or another. Righteousness was never gained by law keeping, and God never gave the law for that purpose, to get righteous or to gain righteousness and to merit God's favor. But as somebody has said, those who use the law as a way to justification in life are misusing it. And it is this misuse that nullifies the promise. It's not the law that nullifies the promise, it's the misuse of the law that does. This reverse reminds us again of the problem and the reason for the letter. Somebody has come into the Galatian churches and told them that they have to return to the law in order to be justified in God's sight or sanctified in God's sight. It's probable that these false teachers are of Jewish origin and the Galatians, of course, are made up almost entirely of Gentile Christians. Greeks. And this creates a tension. These Jewish teachers were bewitching the Gentile converts to give up their freedom in Christ and to return to slavery. They basically said that to be a Christian, you have to become a Jewish proselyte through obedience to the laws of Moses. And circumcision that was given even to Abraham before him. Now, of course, Paul starts off the letter by saying that this teaching is damnable. May you be eternally condemned. And that is so on two fronts. On the one hand, it ignores that everyone prior to faith is under slavery. Now, of course, I said even last week that even Christians are slaves, so in one sense, everybody's a slave, but our slavery is more like being a servant. And it's being a servant of a good and loving heavenly father. But the slavery that Paul has in mind here is very different than that is slavery, as I said, to sin, to the law and to fallen, powerful, angelic rulers. The point being that even Jews are in slavery apart from Christ. And so then if that's true, then becoming a proselyte by keeping the law isn't going to solve the problem of being a slave. On the other hand, it ignores that in Christ, apart from law, there is neither Jew nor Gentile in verse twenty eight, but all have come into the same family as sons and daughters of the living God. And by faith, now that's such an important idea, and there's really three gospel verses at the very end of chapter three, I'm going to look at those all in a whole sermon next week. Let's take a look at the three things that enslave us here this morning. So the first one is sin, verse twenty two, it says the scripture imprisoned everything under sin. Now, in the world, the flesh and the devil, I'm corresponding this to the world, I thought about John the Baptist, who said, behold, the Lamb of God, it takes away the sin of the world or Jesus about the Holy Spirit. He convinces the world of sin. Or you can think of Romans 5.12, which says sin came into the world. So you see this correlation between sin and the world. World here refers to everyone and perhaps everything as well. Depending upon the translation, you will read that everything is imprisoned under sin. That's the way the ESV has it. Or everyone like the New American Standard has it that way. Now it's probably both. But it certainly includes every human being who ever has and ever will live except for Christ. And this is the doctrine of total depravity. Sin has not left any of us untouched. I think about these verses that we like to go through when we're teaching on the tulip. On the key, Ecclesiastes 720, surely there's not a righteous man on Earth who does good and never sins. or the song, no one living is righteous before you or what we read in the in Romans three today, which kind of climaxes in three twenty three, all ascend and fall short of the glory of God. Now, it tells us that sin imprisons us. And the word can mean to shut up or to enclose. Think of it this way, sin is a jail cell. It is the permanent home of criminals. It is where you live. Now, it isn't a jail cell like we have in America with plush wall-to-wall carpeting and 40-inch HD TV televisions and king-size beds and catered meals. This is the prison of days gone by, full of rot and mold, damp and moist with seeping water. With spiders and beetles and rats crawling around on the floor and shackles that hold you bound against the wall, that's the kind of prison that sin is. And people don't often think about sin as a prison. In fact, people call sin freedom and choice. They call it. But think of the rhetoric used in the abortion debate as a perfect example of this. No longer is this a discussion in our country over what or who is in the womb, because everybody knows full well what it is in the womb. It's a discussion over women's rights, freedom of choice, the right to do whatever you want. What you don't hear in the papers or on the news is the ordeal that many, and perhaps most, women go through for years and years after they've murdered their tiny infant. They have nightmares, cold sweats, suicidal guilt, and other bitter consequences of this so-called liberty and freedom. But what are the consequences? Are they not actually the results of being in bondage? Imprisoned to the sin? Consider Romans one, where the apostle tells us that the wrath of God against mankind is the sin that we commit. We haven't think of the wrath of God is the punishment for the sin like Sodom and Gomorrah, it's the fire and brimstone that came down and destroyed them. That's not what Romans one says. This is that the sin is the punishment. Sin devastates people, families, relationships, neighborhoods, cities, nations and economies. It corrupts art, music, speech, discourse, politics, the environment, anything you can think of. Tony Jackson refers to sin as the atomic bomb. As an atom that blows up culture after culture and eventually brings an end to the very universe as we know it. Because the creation itself is in the bondage of corruption brought about by sin to do an inner city. And you can see the atomic bomb at ground zero as it works its way out into the rest of the city. Now, the verse says something strange here, it says that scripture imprisoned everything under sin. I know he read that earlier and saw that. That's a bit odd. How can Scripture imprison those who do not have the Scripture? The word used here is graph a. It simply means writing, in this case, it's the writing, not just writing, and so this is usually meant the Old Testament from Paul, and certainly possible that that's what it means here, but there's a parallel verse in Romans eleven thirty two. Which is almost the exact same thought, and it says God has imprisoned all to disobedience. He uses the same word for imprisoned in both verses, and what comes after in both verses is also very similar. In both verses, it basically says he does this so that he might have mercy to Christ. To those who believe. And so people like B.B. Warfield argue that scripture here is a way of speaking about God. God has imprisoned them all under sin. It is God's word or decree against mankind. Now, if you want to think about that theologically, perhaps the writing here is the covenant of works, which is the writing of God upon. The heart of a man in Romans, Paul writes, When Gentiles who do not have the law by nature do what the law requires, here's the part. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts. The covenant of works is tied to the law, and that leads to the next thing that enslaves, which is that you are slaves to the law or to the statutes. Galatians 323. Before faith came, we were held captive. under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. Now, in this one, the law corresponds to the flesh. Now, this is an interesting idea set forth in Romans, eight, three, the law was weakened by the flesh and first John to sixteen, the flesh is the last of the eyes, the desires of the flesh and the pride of life. All that we long for and once, but cannot have because God has put it off limits for us as we're going to see to guard us and keep us safe. We don't like that God has done this. We don't really think that God has kept things off limits to keep us safe. We don't really believe him. And so we give into our flesh and we indulge in it and we commit all sorts of sins like those mentioned in chapter five of Galatians. Listen to these. Sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, revelries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies and things like these. Now, the same word that's used for sin is used for the law, it says it imprisons us. But it also has another word. It says that it held us captive. So sin is our prison. I was trying to think of what what would the law be? The law is the legal grounds of our being in prison. It is the book that the judge looks at and compares with our actions. And he throws the book at you, right under the covenant of works. This is exactly what happens. As it says in Romans, God has made it plain to us what we are to do. We have the law written on our hearts and therefore the whole world is accountable to God. And I tend to think that Paul is probably using law here in a more technical sense of the law of Moses, in other words, I think he probably has Jews, especially in mind Jews like the false teachers in Galatia. I think what he may be doing is mentioning these three things that imprison us and using it this way. The first imprisons everyone. The second, the law especially imprisons Jews. The third, the devil, especially imprisoned the Gentiles. Now, you see Paul doing this very thing in Romans one, two and three. He starts off with Jews or Gentiles, and then he says, You think you're a Jew? You think you're better? You're under the law. And he concludes with what we read for the lot of answers. The whole world is accountable to God. But even if Jews are especially in mind, it's obviously the case that Gentiles have the moral commandments written on their hearts, so we can't get away from being in prison to the law either. Now, somebody brought up this last week to me. So what are you going to do with this? Let me give you a little point of clarification here, you'll see it says before faith came. Or until the coming of faith or in verse twenty five, but now that faith has come. Now, that does not refer to a time in history, but to a time in your life, in a person's life. Don't read this as referring to the time before Christ, if by that you mean that Christ, that before Christ came to the earth, there was no faith in Christ. Now, what he's saying, it refers to the time before any of us, whether it's Abraham or Paul or the Galatians, or you believe that you were saved by faith in the promises of God through Christ before faith came to you. In other words, this is the first use of the law to drive you to Christ. It refers to the covenant of works that we are all born under, but especially the Jews and that we only escape through faith. Now, he talks about the law starting with twenty three and then he kind of stops it. And he picks it up again at the beginning of chapter four, and he switches metaphors from the law imprisoning us to the law being a guardian. Actually, this happens in verse twenty four of chapter three. He uses the same word in the next verse. He says, Faith has now that they just come. We're no longer under a guardian. Now, this is the word that the King James famously renders of a schoolmaster. Do you know what it's talking about? They were looked at this word, you might be surprised, it doesn't refer to the teacher of a child like in a public school. It's not what a schoolmaster is. It's used in the ancient world of a slave. The schoolmaster is a slave whom the father appoints as the guardian of his child. And this slave was to accompany the boy to school and back because, you know, how boys are on the way to school and back. He carried his books and his writing utensils for the boy. He was there to protect him from molesters and accidents. And he had the task of imparting good morals and manners to the lad. He had a reputation for being rude and rough. And he was to supervise the boy until he reached puberty. Is that what you had heard about the slave, about the schoolmaster? That's what it is. The law was thought of in this way back as far as Plato and Aristotle believe about believe it. And what I want you to think about is how positive Paul views the law here. It accompanies a person from childhood to adulthood. Childhood is exactly how God refers to Israel when it comes out of the wilderness. It helps a person carry the load of learning, it protects the child from harm. Isn't the law good if you follow it? And yet it shows no mercy if it's disobeyed. You would be hard pressed to find a better analogy of the law than this, actually. So now, after the verses 26 to 28, he returns to this metaphor and explains it, and I think he feels the need to do this because he doesn't want you to become confused again on the nature of the law, because on the one hand, he has said that law bring slavery and imprisonment. It tells you what to do and you don't do it and it locks you up. But on the other hand, it's a slave who teaches the son of a free man. So which is it? Isn't that contradictory? And the confusion stems from mixing the metaphors. And because of the discussion that we are sons of God in Christ, if you remember last week's sermon. So, for one says, I mean that an heir, as long as he's a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything. But he's under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. God always wants you to keep in mind when you're thinking about the law. That you are still sons of God. You cannot forget this. You can view this From two perspectives, from the perspective of time, you were a slave prior to faith, having no sonship other than sort of the generic sonship that everybody has, because we're sons of Adam, who's the son of God. But there's also the perspective of eternity where God has predestined you to sonship before time began. So even though you were under God's wrath prior to faith, he foreordained that you would believe. And in the sense, in that sense, God uses the law in your life as an elect person to guard you and to manage your ways until that moment should come that he would grant you faith through the gospel. Notice it says until the date set by the father. I love that predestination right in the middle of that verse. And so as your heavenly father who loved you before the world began with an efficacious love God gave to you the law so that through its proper use, the Holy Spirit might use it and the gospel of lead you to Christ. And so the law has never ceased for Paul to be a good thing. Rather, it is men who use the law unlawfully. That's the problem with the law. The goodness of the law is forefront in Paul's mind, but many people get all twisted and knots on this. Read the commentaries. It's unbelievable. They'll sit here and they'll say Paul can think any less highly of the law than he does right here. I think it's exact opposite. It isn't the law that's the problem. Think about Jesus. Was the law a problem for him? No. It is we who are the problem. It is the flesh. which takes the good use of the law and perverts it and tries to make it do something that it cannot do. And it was never given to do because of original sin. That's also something else, the temptations of the flesh, which are powerful in their own right, are often pressed upon by an outside source. So you think about Eve, for example. who probably never would have eaten the forbidden fruit had Satan not come and tempted her. And so we come to the third thing that makes us slaves. This is the stoichia, the elementary principles, and as I mentioned last week, this does not refer to the law. It's not another it's not a synonym for law. It refers to the sons of God, to the heavenly rulers that God placed over the Gentile nations of the world at the Tower of Babel. The stoichia corresponds then to the devil, the world, the flesh and the devil. These rulers were to rule the world in equity and justice, but they refused to do so, choosing instead the worship of themselves and lifting up of their own names. And such is the history that is remembered in all of the world's stories. Now, at this point, I want to bring in an interesting idea for you to think about. I thought, should I really bring this up? I think I will. I mean, let me give it a go and see if you can follow my thinking here, because I think it's kind of interesting. I talked about the covenant of works. Now, this is a covenant that's been broken by all mankind, and you know that there's nothing new about that. Now, the covenant of works, when you read our systematics, is sometimes called the covenant of creation. So if you read covenant of creation, covenant of works, the guys are talking about the same thing. Now, Jeremiah tells us that God actually made a covenant with creation. He talks about the covenant that I made with the day and the night. That's really kind of strange language. It apparently includes both natural laws like gravity, or orbitation or procession, you know, the things that actually make the day and the night work. But it also includes moral laws that moral beings in the universe have to abide by. Now, we're included in that because it's a covenant of works. We're under the law. But it's not just us. Job, 38, has this covenant of creation and it's Clearly seen as a covenant that God makes with the angelic host. With the sons of God, or here the stoichia. God asks Job, where were you when I started creating the world? And then I brought this verse of last week when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy. So the sons of God there are before they exist before Adam is even born. So these are heavenly being. Singing when God creates the world. In Job 38, seven, and then he talks about this covenant with creation and how he placed boundaries upon the sky and the sea. All the way down to verse thirty three. He talks about this for a long time in verse thirty three. He talks about the ordinances of the heavens and their rule over the earth. That's covenant language, language of law. And in between, verse seven and thirty three, he speaks about binding and chains. And loosing the cords. Now, if you think about eschatology, binding and loosing is very familiar language to you in the New Testament. This is spiritual language. Remember when Jesus gave the disciples power to bind and to loose? He refers to the keys of the kingdom. Keys which are used, especially in church discipline to excommunicate and to forgive. Or remember when Jesus sends out the 70 disciples who returned to him saying. They're shocked, even the demons are subject to us in your name, and Jesus says at that very moment, I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Well, what's he talking about? He's talking about during his ministry. He has bound the strong man. So binding. You know, the language of the binding of Satan, Revelation 20. So many people put this in the future. I think that it is actually referring to Jesus first coming on the earth when he says he bound the strong man. He sees the dragon, the ancient serpent, who's the devil, and he bound him for a thousand years. And after that, he must be what loosed. So binding and loosing is what Job is talking about. Now, listen to how Job refers to it versus thirty one to thirty two in chapter thirty eight. What is bound and what is loosed? The Pleiades, Orion, the Mazaroth, and the Bear. What are these? These are constellations. What is a constellation? Stars. Isn't that interesting? Jerome actually translates the unidentified Mazaroth as Lucifer in the Latin. This would then be talking about the binding of Lucifer. At any rate, Job then tells us that these stars have ordinances and rules as well. And so the passage in Job is talking about a covenant that the stars in the sky with the mysterious being so long associated with them by ancient peoples are bound to friends. Angels are bound to a covenant just like men and women are. Angels are moral creatures who had to obey God's law. And the problem, as we know, from the very beginning of the Bible all the way through is that many of them did not remain in their heavenly state. They fell into sin as the dragon's tail swept a third of those stars out of the sky. They broke covenant with God. They became wicked rulers who tempt men to sin and lead them into abominable worship and practices. These beings, as we talked about last week, held particularly powerful sway over the Gentile nations. This was God's doing at the Tower of Babel when the nations were dispersed. These beings were given to the sons of men as a sort of retribution for our impertinent attempt to reach up to the heavens. So the Bible understands that these beings held all Gentiles in slavery. to their own wicked wills and capricious whims until the day when Jesus came and defeated them on the cross. I was very happy that Stan read what he read this morning. I read just another section of Colossians, because it says the same thing at the cross. Jesus disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them. And who are these rulers and authorities? As he read this morning in Galatians 1.16, those that are in heaven and on earth visible and invisible. Now, that's the background that you need to understand in order to understand the rest of our passage. Now, let's go to Galatians 4.10. So we're talking in the context of being enslaved to the stoichia, to the devil. He says, you observe days and months and seasons and years, and I'm afraid I've labored over you in vain. I want you to notice what he doesn't say, he doesn't say that you are being taught by these false teachers to observe these things. He does say that about circumcision, though, earlier in the book, he doesn't say that they are being tempted to observe these things, but they haven't yet done so. That's also the way it is a circumcision. They haven't yet done so, but he's very afraid they're going to do it. They are presently observing these holy days and haven't been taught to do so. Notice the verb observe is a present tense indicative verb. It's not future, it's present. But who is doing this observing of days? Well, who's he talking to? He's talking to the Galatians. Who are they? Gentiles. This is critical for a proper interpretation of this verse. The question, if these people are Gentile converts who are presently observing days and seasons and months, what days and months and seasons and years do you suppose they are observing? Here's my suggestion. Walk into a Chinese Gentile restaurant and look at the placemat. What do you see? You see the Chinese zodiac, don't you? Complete with birth dates, the sign you were born under, the present zodiacal year. At the end of your meal, what do you get? The fortune cookie. What comes on the other side of the fortune that you never read? numbers. What do people do with these numbers? They become superstitious representations of good and evil days or months or whatever. Now, take that analogy into any Gentile land that you go into and you find the same thing. Friends, what we are not talking about in this verse is a return to Jewish holy days. Nor is he talking about keeping the Sabbath principle on the first day of the week. Actually, it's the Sabbath idea that makes so many Christians today uncomfortable. And this deserves a short comment. I'm sure that most of our guys in our group probably preach the entire sermon on this. I'm just going to give you a couple of paragraphs to think about. A couple of weeks ago, I referred to a teacher. Now, this guy is a Calvinist New Covenant theologian. who sincerely believes that Paul was referring to Jewish holy days here, days commanded in the law of Moses, one of which was the Sabbath, because that's these guys kind of hang up. He, like many others, uses this passage to prove that in the New Testament, we no longer keep Sabbath. The idea is that when Paul says we're no longer under the law, that this means we're no longer under any kind of obedience. to that which is not repeated in the New Testament. Anything that you return to that's not repeated is demonic legalism. And this is actually what he said about this passage, he understood correctly, a lot of people don't, but he got this part right, that the story here are spiritual beings that enslave. But in seeing these as Jewish holy days, his only conclusion was that to return to keeping Jewish holy days, specifically the Sabbath, was to return to, quote, paganism and, quote, demon worship. Now, think about this, Sabbath is demon worship. He even concluded by going, it's incredible, I wouldn't believe it if Paul didn't say it right here. Now, I'm not saying that every law in the Old Testament is to be kept in the way that it's kept in the Old Testament. That's absurd. But what never seems to have crossed his mind is that if it is a return to demon worship. Then it must have originally been demon worship. But if that's true, then God commanded the Jews to worship demons. Is that really something that we're prepared to believe? And so rather than Jewish holy days, it makes much better sense to see these Gentiles that they never gave up their superstitious belief in things like the zodiac, astrology, star worship, horoscopes, pagan calendars and on and on. Does that make sense? And that ironically, their desire to listen to the circumcision party and accept Jewish laws now is further demonstration that they never really trusted Christ by faith alone. Rather, they are still slaves to the very beings that they that those who trust in Christ are freed from. They are proving themselves. By continuing to observe religious practices that venerate the very star deities and sons of God and stoichia that they're free from that enslaved them. No wonder he says that he fears that he's wasted his time on him. And what does it say for Christians today who are returning to such things and think nothing about it, but that it's cute and harmless. So there's three things that can enslave us in the passage, send the law and heavenly beings. But here's the good news. Formally, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to these formally. All who trust in Christ are freed from the power of sin, from the condemnation of the law and from the whispers of the devil. But you say, I still struggle with sin. I feel enslaved to send to the law and to the temptations of the devil. Well, the Bible's answer is that this is a feeling. It's a subjective feeling, but it's not the objective reality, unless, of course, you are still looking to something other than Christ to set you free. If you're looking to those things to save you, then. There's a real problem. But if you're not, if you're looking to Christ, then these have no more power to hold you in captivity, to condemn you and to keep you prisoner. So how do you make this objective reality subjectively powerful in your own life? Well, that's, of course, the sixty four thousand dollar question. And no, I was not alive when that shows on TV, I just heard rumors about it. Because I think there was a guy named Van Doren that was really good on that show. There was a movie made about that, wasn't there? You have to have three things happen here. First, is that you have to hear the good news. That Christ has triumphed over the stoichia. And made a public spectacle of them. That he has observed the law in your place. And that he did it all without sin. The devil, the flesh in the world, he overcame and he did this for you. That announcement must be heard. And until it's proclaimed, people are still in captivity. So living a good life, you know, living the gospel through what you do isn't going to save anybody from their slavery to these things. They have to be told there has to be an emancipation proclamation. Remember, Booker T lived with his family in slavery for almost two years until the proclamation came to his family. Second, you have to believe that it is true for you. Now, this belief is ongoing. It's one thing to believe in God, it's another thing to believe God. It's one thing to hear that slavery has been ended. It's another thing to accept it as real and true. Have belief creates a new kind of attitude towards these three masters, it creates the power of knowing that they no longer own you or have any legal claim upon you. Without this belief, you will just be like the Galatians who continue to live as if enslaved, continue to be coaxed into accepting legalism, continue to be blown about by every wind of doctrine. And remember, the apostle is extremely concerned about this kind of a person. So believe today that Christ has set you free from sin, statutes and Satan. And then the third thing, and remember, also say it's ongoing because you're going to lose, you're going to start to doubt this, because then you recover that and you believe again. Third thing is that you have to live under the suffering that comes from those who do not like your new God given freedom. And you have to overcome it. Satan, especially, does not like that Jesus is resting people out of his kingdom. His rage is sure, but what does Martin Luther say? We will endure. Many American slaves, especially of the first generation, but even generations after emancipation, continue to live defeated lives as if they were not really free. They continue to live as slaves under their old master's roof. They never left his house. They became dependent upon others for help. They never went out and got a job. They never got educated. They constantly blamed people for the predicament that they were no longer in. In fact, they still do this to this day, even though it's been 150 years, many still do that. Life was not a bed of roses. They faced angry mobs, the KKK, institutional and national prejudice and many other problems. But legally, and here's the thing, there was no longer anything standing in the way of any dream they wanted to go after. That's just the reality. All that stood in the way was their own refusal to stand up under persecution and suffering. And those that did rose up. Now, we don't overcome the world by pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, I'm not saying that. Rather, Christ has overcome the world. And we trust in the power of Christ who has suffered in us like every way, but without sin. God gives us Holy Spirit who helps us in our weakness to say no to the world, the flesh and the devil. That's called sanctification. Each of us is prone to return to our prisons to act as if we are not free. We feel sorry for ourselves. It's difficult for us to forgive. We get self-centered. or depressed or angry the world. And the solution is to return to Christ and to pray to him and ask him to forgive you and to reorient your thinking towards redemption and towards loving others and doing the best for them. Feel through knowledge of the truth, the love that God has for you, feel it. You can really feel it. But feel it through the knowledge of the truth. That he's forgiven all of your sins. Isn't that an amazing thing? God has forgiven everything that you ever have done or will do. He's done it before you ever before you ever have committed any one of those things. And so live in the light of your freedom. We'll learn more about that when we come to chapter five, what that means. But it's the freedom, not of slaves to these things, but freedom of the children of God. And then worship God Almighty and sing the old Negro spiritual in its eternal context. Remember, it's on Martin Luther King's grave. Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty. I'm free at last. Let's pray. Father, your word is precious to us. It's a precious pearl of Christian comfort. Thank you for how you freed us. From slavery and imprisonment in the book. And from the wrath of the judge. Father, it's good for us to think about how we have been slaves. And to go back and remember that situation that we were in. Even as it's good for the black man to look back and say that His ancestors were in slavery for hundreds of years, but now he has freedom that came about through the Civil War. It's not good for us to live as if we're still there, though, Lord, and we all do that. We all continue to do it. And what we need is for your word to penetrate our minds and teach us the truth that you've set us free from these three things. I would pray that your Holy Spirit would be powerful in our lives, that He would help us to know the truth and to love the truth that you set us free from the world, the flesh and the devil. And that you've done this for your glory and so that Christ can be magnified for all the things that he's done for us. And it's in his name I pray. Amen.