Slavery to Sin

A black bear broke into the Knoxville Zoo in Tennessee. NBC News reported the following story: "A neighbor called the Knoxville Zoo late Monday night and alerted a ranger, saying there was a bear in a nearby park, according to a zoo official. A short while later, the ranger saw what he presumed to be the same bear climbing over a fence and into the zoo.

It was unclear where, exactly, the ursine interloper wound up. The ranger had to wake up the zoo's four resident bears on Monday to conduct a 'nose count.' “They weren't too happy with us." It's fairly common for zoos to encounter smaller animals like dogs, cats, or squirrels trying to break over or around or through the zoo's walls.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Apparently, the bear in this story couldn't handle all that freedom and wanted to return to comfort of captivity. Sound like a familiar story? How often do people attempt to turn away from the sin that has them in spiritual bondage, only to return to it again? (Prov. 26:11; 2 Pet. 2:22).

“The first duty of every soul is to find not its freedom but its Master” (P.T. Forsyth, 19th-century Scottish Theologian).

But who wants a master? The answer is: You do if you know what’s good for you. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson (not yet a Christian) has 40,000 hours of counseling under his belt, and here is what he says he learned from all that listening to people:

You don’t get away with anything. You might think you can bend the fabric of reality … and violate your conscience without cost. But that is just not the case; you will pay the piper. When you pay, you might not even notice the casual connection between the sin and the payment. People’s lives take a twist, and they go very badly wrong. And when you walk back though people’s lives with them, you come to these choice points where you meet the devil at the crossroads, and you find out that you went left, let’s say, and downhill, when you should have gone right and uphill. And now you’re paying the price for that.

When he drives his Mazda hatchback, Seattle local Dave Welding is accustomed to listening to talk radio station KUOW, the local NPR affiliate. As a matter of fact, it’s all he can listen to. His car’s radio is literally stuck on the station.

One Sunday, while listening to the station, his car’s connectivity master unit (CMU) was somehow “fried” by the station’s signal, according to Welding. Now, not only can he only listen to that one station, but none of the functions of the CMU work, including navigation, Bluetooth connectivity, the clock, or other vehicle statistics. Welding says his screen is constantly turning off and on, starting and restarting.

According to a Reddit forum for Mazda enthusiasts, a similar phenomenon has happened with other local Mazda owners, all of whom were also KUOW listeners. Welding said when he contacted a local dealership, he was told that a new CMU costs $1500, and they don’t have any in stock.

In an effort to solve the problem a Seattle Times columnist spoke to several experts, including computer science professor Dan Tappan of Eastern Washington University. Tappan theorized that the problem might’ve happened because the station sent image files without a file extension. Without the file extension, the computer doesn’t know how to treat the file, and locks up, unable to do anything at all. In other words, a little bit of extra data, meant to enhance the listening experience, instead renders the whole unit unusable.

Welding has since covered the CMU’s distracting screen with cardboard, and is thinking of somehow decorating it with “something calming.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Likewise, it is easy for believers to make careless mistakes and get sidetracked from doing God’s will. We can get “stuck” by a decision or a choice that we make and fail to live the way God intends for us.

An inmate caused a mild drama in the Nigerian High Court after a judge acquitted him of all charges against him, but he refused and demanded to go back to prison. Instead of the usual jubilation that follows any ruling of "discharged and acquitted," the inmate in question headed straight back to the prison. He was intercepted by a prison guard who reminded him he was free to go home. To the chagrin of eyewitnesses, he said he was going nowhere, demanding to be allowed re-entry into the prison.

The calm of the court premises was shattered by the freed prisoner's shouts and pleas to be allowed to go back to prison, as he thrashed about and struggled with several prison officials. According to eyewitnesses, it took the effort of over six prison officials, court workers, and policemen to get the freed inmate out of the court premises.

Possible Preaching Angle:

That's a picture of us all. We have been set free in Christ, but we often find ourselves returning to the prison of our old way of life and behavior. Healthy Christians remind themselves of their settled status in God’s courtroom. We have been "approved by God" (1 Thess. 2:4) and “set free” (Rom. 6:18-22).

Officials from Colorado Parks and Wildlife recently posed for a photo of a large rubber tire that was previously stuck around the neck of a bull elk. The elk was four years old, weighed approximately 600 pounds, and required heavy sedation before his antlers were cut to remove the burdensome tire.

Officer Scott Murdoch said, “It was tight removing it. We had to move it just right to get it off because we weren’t able to cut the steel in the bead of the tire. Fortunately, the bull’s neck still had a little room to move. We would have preferred to cut the tire and leave the antlers for his rutting activity, but the situation was dynamic and we had to just get the tire off in any way possible.”

People on neighboring properties had reported seeing the elk wearing the tire for about two years prior, which suggested a potentially burdensome existence. Murdoch said, “The tire was full of wet pine needles and dirt. There was probably 10 pounds of debris in the tire.”

According to Murdoch and other officials, the bull was back on its feet within minutes of being administered the sedative reversal.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God is able to free us from the things that burden us, even when those burdens are out of our control or consist of things we don't fully understand

In his best-selling book Essentialism, author Greg McKeown describes how we develop a sense of what’s called “learned helplessness.”

The phrase comes out of the classic work of Martin Seligman and Steve Maier, who were conducting experiments on German Shepherds. They divided the dogs into three groups. The dogs in the first group were placed in a harness and administered an electric shock but were also given a lever they could press to make the shock stop. The dogs in the second group were placed in an identical harness, and were given the same lever and the same shock with one catch: the lever didn’t work, rendering the dog powerless to do anything about the electric shock. The third group of dogs were simply placed in the harness and not given any shocks.

Afterwards, each dog was placed in a large box with a low divider across the center. One side of the box produced an electric shock; the other did not. Then something interesting happened. The dogs that either had been able to stop the shock or had not been shocked at all in the earlier part of the experiment quickly learned to step over the divider to the side without shocks. But the dogs that had been powerless in the last part of the experiment did not. These dogs didn’t adapt or adjust. They did nothing to try to avoid getting shocked. Why? They didn’t know they had any choice other than to take the shocks. They had learned helplessness.

Before walking out of jail a free man in February, Albert Woodfox spent 43 years almost without pause in an isolation cell, becoming the longest standing solitary confinement prisoner in America. He had no view of the sky from inside his 6 foot by 9 foot concrete box, no human contact, and taking a walk meant pacing from one end of the cell to the other and back again.

Then in April 2016 he found himself on a beach in Galveston, Texas, in the company of a friend. He stood marveling at all the beachgoers under a cloudless sky, and stared out over the Gulf of Mexico as it stretched far out to the horizon. "You could hear the tide and the water coming in," he says. "It was so strange, walking on the beach and all these people and kids running around."

Of all the terrifying details of Woodfox's four decades of solitary incarceration … perhaps the most chilling aspect of all is what he says now. Two months after the state of Louisiana set him free on his 69th birthday, he says he sometimes wishes he was back in that cell.

"Oh yeah! Yeah!" he says passionately when asked whether he sometimes misses his life in lockdown. "You know, human beings … feel more comfortable in areas they are secure. In a cell you have a routine, you pretty much know what is going to happen, when it's going to happen, but in society it's difficult, it's looser. So there are moments when, yeah, I wish I was back in the security of a cell." He pauses, then adds: "I mean, it does that to you."

On January 28, 1945, as World War II was groaning to a close, 121 elite Army Rangers liberated over 500 POWs, mostly Americans, from a Japanese prisoner of war camp near Cabanatuan in the Philippines.

The prisoners, many of whom were survivors of the infamous Bataan death march, were in awful condition, physically and emotionally. Before the Rangers arrived, the primary Japanese guard unit had left the camp because of Japan's massive retreat from the Philippines. The new situation was precarious. Japanese troops were still around and in the camp, but they kept their distance from the prisoners. The men of Cabanatuan didn't quite know what to make of their new freedom—if freedom was in fact what it was. And then, without warning, the American Rangers swept upon the camp in furious force.

But one of one of the most interesting facets of the story was the reaction of many of the prisoners. They were so defeated, diseased, and familiar with deceit that many needed to be convinced they were actually free. Was it a trick? A trap? Was this real? One prisoner, Captain Bert Bank, struggling with blindness caused by a vitamin deficiency, couldn't clearly make out his would-be rescuers. He refused to budge. Finally, a soldier walked up to him, tugged his arm, and said, "What's wrong with you? Don't you want to be free?" Bank, from Alabama, recognized the familiar southern accent of his questioner. A smile formed on his lips, and he willingly and thankfully began his journey to freedom.

Finally, well away from what had been, for years, the site of an ongoing, horrific assault on their humanity, the newly freed prisoners began their march home. In the description of one prisoner, contrasting it with the Bataan nightmare years earlier, "It was a long, slow, steady march …but this was a life march, a march of freedom."

The African nation of Mauritania was the last nation in the world to outlaw slavery—in 1981—and it wasn't until 2007 that a law was passed allowing for the prosecution of slave owners. The situation of slavery in the country is the worst in the world, and in rural areas entire communities of slaves still exist as the authorities turn a blind eye.

The New Yorker's Alexis Okeowo reports on the situation: "No one in their community who looks like them has ever known another way of life. One former child slave told me, 'In the village, when a slave says he does not want to be a slave anymore, people will ask, Why? Who are you? Your mother was a slave; your grandmother was a slave. Who are you?' … 'To the slave, his identity is his master,' [local abolitionist and member of the country's slave caste Biram Dah] Abeid said. 'The master is his idol, one he can never become, and he is invincible.'"

Possible Preaching Angle:

What a description of the enslaving power of sin. Our whole identity can become consumed, leaving us unable to imagine a life of freedom.

In 1999, 25-year-old Christopher Miller was arrested after he forced employees into the back room of the Stride Rite shoe store on Hooper Avenue in Toms River, New Jersey. After a 15-year sentence, on Friday, March 21, 2014, Miller was released from South Woods State Prison in New Jersey. The very next day, Miller, now 40 years old, took a bus from Atlantic City to Toms River and went to the same shoe store.

Employees tell police that he entered the store and demanded cash, telling two workers to go to the back room. When the employees refused, Miller became agitated and took the cash register drawer, which had $389. He then took the workers' cell phones and fled on foot. Police say he was found a few blocks away, with the cash stashed in a gutter and the phones in a garbage can.

Toms River Police Chief Mitchell Little speculated, "Maybe [prison life is] the only life he knows, and the only thing he could think of was going back to the same store and doing the same crime again—getting caught and going back where he was taken care of and told what to do and getting meals and shelter and everything else."

For six months, a German farmer near Regensburg tried in vain to capture his runaway bull. The bull had escaped during the summer and hid out in the Bavarian woods. He attempted to lasso the animal, but the bull would always flee into the woods. The farmer tried shooting the beast with a tranquilizer, but the darts proved ineffective.

But where the farmer failed, neighbor Werner Dechant succeeded. Dechant saw the black bull eating grain out of a bucket on his property and tried and failed to snare the cautious beast. But Dechant had an idea for when the animal returned. The next day, Dechant mixed more grain with a bottle of vodka. The day after, he soaked the grain in two more bottles of the spirit. Once liquored up, the escaped bull was easy to capture. According to one news report, "The bull has now been returned to his owner—and will not be allowed out again."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Alcohol; Addiction; Drunkenness; (2) Sin; Spiritual Bondage—the "vodka" in this story could be anything form of sin or spiritual bondage or temptation that lures us into giving up our freedom in Christ.

A powerful 60-second TV commercial depicted Mexico's long march out of poverty and oppression. At the beginning of the ad, thousands of Mexicans, men and women, young and old, are bound by chains to a huge boulder. With their faces contorted and their eyes downcast, they trudge up a mountainside with chains wrapped around the boulder and their bodies. The boulder holds them back. Hungry buzzards fly overhead. They push forward again, straining and wincing, but the boulder slides back downhill. Everything looks hopeless …

But, suddenly, hope dawns! One of the men defiantly removes his chains. One by one, they all stand up straight and take off their chains. Finally unburdened, they smile and start walking up the mountainside, leaving the boulder and chains behind. At last, they are free! As triumphant music plays, thousands of smiling men and women stride confidently up the mountain.

But what is the product being advertised? What is the savior and hope for the Mexican people? In the last five seconds of the ad, a phrase appears on the screen—"Keep Walking Mexico"—with a company logo. The logo is the stylized "Striding Man" for Johnnie Walker, the world's number one selling Scotch whiskey. Today, four bottles of Johnnie Walker are consumed every second, with some 120 million bottles sold annually in 200 countries. It's all about Johnnie Walker's campaign to not just sell whiskey, but to sell a lifestyle and an aspiration.

The story is told of a certain African tribe that learned an easy way to capture ducks in a river. Catching their agile and wary dinner would be a feat indeed, so they formulated a plan.

The tribesmen learned to go upstream, place a pumpkin in the river, and let it slowly float down into the flock of ducks. At first, the cautious fowl would quack and fly away. After all, it wasn't ordinary for pumpkins to float down the river! But the persistent tribesmen would subsequently float another pumpkin into the re-gathered ducks. Again they would scatter, only to return after the strange sphere had passed. Again, the hungry hunters would float another pumpkin. This time the ducks would remain, with a cautious eye on the pumpkin, and with each successive passing, the ducks would become more comfortable, until they finally accepted the pumpkins as a normal part of life.

When the natives saw that the pumpkins no longer bothered the ducks, they hollowed out pumpkins, put them over their heads, and walked into the river. Meandering into the midst of the tolerant fowl, they pulled them down one at a time. Dinner? Roast duck.

Possible Preaching Angle: Wayne Cordeiro adds, "If we don't correct our hearts back to Jesus, it won't be long until we start tolerating "pumpkins." They have a seductive way of sneaking into [certain areas of our lives]. They creep in one by one until we sink beneath them and enter a watery grave."

Pastor Matt Woodley writes:

My friend Steve warned me that he didn't believe in forgiveness. "God could never forgive me," he said. "Okay, maybe he could forgive 70 percent of my sins, but not all of them." When I tried to explain that when we trust Jesus he forgives 100 percent of our sin, Steve interrupted, "Yeah, fine, but you don't know the stuff I've done." Then he told the following story:

Nineteen years ago this guy stole my wife away from me. They got married and moved to Florida while my life unraveled. After I was arrested for assaulting a police officer, this guy smirked through the entire court hearing. When I was convicted, he flipped me the finger. I've hated him for nineteen years. He's coming up here next week, I have a 32-caliber pistol strapped around my ankle, and when I see him I will kill him." Then he chillingly concluded, "I've thought all about it. I'm 63-years-old. I will get a life sentence, but I'll also get free medical and dental and a warm bed and three meals a day. All of this bitterness and resentment feels so right; forgiveness seems weird.

Steve was right about one point: forgiveness often feels like an unnatural act. So what should followers of Jesus tell Steve? Why forgive?

After Steve told me this story, I paused for a long time before I finally stammered, "Well, I guess it doesn't matter if you go to jail, because you're already in jail. The guy who stole your wife and smirked at your hearing isn't in jail. You are. That guy is free, but you're a prisoner of your own hate; and you're slowly killing yourself. And unless you forgive, you'll remain trapped for the rest of your life."

A week later he called me and said, "You know, I get your point. I put the gun away. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in jail or enslaved to my own hate. Will you pray for me that Jesus will release me?"

Forgiveness, like every other aspect of following Jesus, involves a long journey. As we consistently receive Jesus' forgiveness for our sins, it will soften our hearts towards those who have wounded us. Then, as we continue to trust and grow in Christ, slowly, by God's grace, we'll find more freedom to forgive than we ever imagined.

Frederick Douglass grew up as a slave in Maryland in the early nineteenth century and experienced slavery's every brutality. He was taken from his mother when he was only an infant. For years as a child, all he had to eat was runny corn meal dumped in a trough that kids fought to scoop out with oyster shells. He worked in the hot fields from before sunup until after sundown. He was whipped many times with a cowhide whip until blood ran down his back, kicked and beaten by his master until he almost died, and attacked with a spike by a gang of whites.

But even so, when Frederick considered trying to escape to freedom, he struggled with the decision. He writes in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave that he had two great fears.

The first was leaving behind his friends:

I had a number of warm-hearted friends in Baltimore;friends that I loved almost as I did my life;and the thought of being separated from them forever was painful beyond expression. It is my opinion that thousands would escape from slavery, who now remain, but for the strong cords of affection that bind them to their friends.

His second fear was this: "If I failed in this attempt, my case would be a hopeless one;it would seal my fate as a slave forever."

Today, people who find themselves in slavery to sin, and who think about escaping to freedom in Christ, may have similar fears. They may fear leaving behind friends. They may fear they'll fail in their attempt to break from sin and live free for God.

They should take heart from Douglass's experience. On September 3, 1838, he remembers:

I left my chains, and succeeded in reaching New York without the slightest interruption of any kind;. I have been frequently asked how I felt when I found myself in a free State;. It was a moment of the highest excitement I ever experience;. I felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions.

Eating lunch at a small cafe, Mark Reed of Camarillo, California, saw a sparrow hop through the open door and peck at the crumbs near his table. When the crumbs were gone, the sparrow hopped to the window ledge, spread its wings, and took flight. Brief flight. It crashed against the window pane and fell to the floor.

The bird quickly recovered and tried again. Crash. And again. Crash.

Mark got up and attempted to shoo the sparrow out the door, but the closer he got, the harder it threw itself against the pane. He nudged it with his hand. That sent the sparrow fluttering along the ledge, hammering its beak at the glass.

Finally, Mark reached out and gently caught the bird, folding his fingers around its wings and body. It weighed almost nothing. He thought of how powerless and vulnerable the sparrow must have felt. At the door he released it, and the sparrow sailed away.

As Mark did with the sparrow, God takes us captive only to set us free.

A man purchased a white mouse to use as food for his pet snake. He dropped the unsuspecting mouse into the snake's glass cage, where the snake was sleeping in a bed of sawdust. The tiny mouse had a serious problem on his hands. At any moment he could be swallowed alive. Obviously, the mouse needed to come up with a brilliant plan. What did the terrified creature do? He quickly set to work covering the snake with sawdust chips until it was completely buried. With that, the mouse apparently thought he had solved his problem. The solution, however, came from outside. The man took pity on the silly little mouse and removed him from the cage.

No matter how hard we try to cover or deny our sinful nature, it's fool's work. Sin will eventually awake from sleep and shake off its cover. Were it not for the saving grace of the Master's hand, sin would eat us alive.

Whatever injury wicked men-in-power inflict upon good men is to be regarded ... as a test for the good man's virtues. Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For, a wicked man serves not just one master, but, what's worse, as many masters as he has vices. For, it is in reference to vice that the Holy Scripture says: "For by whom a man is overcome, of the same also he is the slave" (2 Peter 2:19).