1 Timothy 6:1-2 Slavery and Submission

Introduction: Why This Passage?

Go ahead and open your Bible to the book of 1 Timothy, chapter 6.

We're continuing to work through this book, and we arrive at what may be one of the most disturbing and confusing passages in all of the Bible. So, one quick word before we dive into these two verses: You may be wondering why in the world a church in 21st century America would preach a sermon on this passage.

There are really two reasons for it. One is because I preach through books of the Bible, and this is what's next. Preaching through books of the Bible means that I can't avoid topics that might seem uncomfortable for Christians.

But the second reason, I think, is more important, which is that all Scripture is God-breathed, right? And good and edifying for teaching, for reproof, for building up in righteousness, which means even difficult passages that might seem initially hard to wrap our heads around, or might seem utterly absurd to us, are ultimately good for our souls. And I think as we listen and think about this topic today, that it will actually be encouraging to us as well.

So we're going to be looking at 1 Timothy chapter 6, verses 1 and 2. Let me read it for us.

All who are under the yoke as slaves should regard their own masters as worthy of all respect, so that God’s name and his teaching will not be blasphemed. Let those who have believing masters not be disrespectful to them because they are brothers, but serve them even better, since those who benefit from their service are believers and dearly loved.Teach and encourage these things. — 1 Timothy 6:1-2 (CSB)

Let's pray. Lord, even this morning, as we think about this passage, we are just reminded once again of how inadequate we are. So I pray, Lord, that you would give us supernatural strength. Give me strength through this cough. Help us to think thoughtfully about your Word, that we don't turn away or pretend to ignore things, but that we would dive deeper into your Word in exchange that we would see your glory. I pray this in Jesus' name, amen.

The Hypocrisy of Slavery and Christianity

Frederick Douglass was a famous writer who escaped the life of slavery in the 1800s. In his memoir, *The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass*, he recounts his life as a slave and critiques the version of Christianity that he experienced in the Antebellum South. In fact, in his epilogue, he writes a poem as he reflects about the contrast, the irony, the hypocrisy of the slavery that he experienced. Let me just read you a part of it here.

He says, "Come saints and sinners and hear me tell, how pious priests whip jack-and-down, and women buy and children sell and preach all sinners down to hell and sing of heavenly union. They'll church you if you sip a drum and dam you if you steal a lamb, yet rob old Tony, stole and sam of human rights of bread and ham, kidnappers, heavenly union. They'll loudly talk of Christ's reward and bind his image with a cord and scold and swing the lash aboard and sell their brother in the Lord to handcuff the heavenly union. They'll read and sing a sacred song and make a prayer both loud and long and teach the right and do the wrong, hailing the brother, sister-throng, with words of heavenly union. We wonder how such saints can sing or praise the Lord upon the wing who roar and scold and whip and sting into their slaves and mammoth and cling in guilty conscience union. Love not the world the preacher said and winked his eye and shook his head. He seized on Tom and Dick and Ned, cut short their meat and clothes and bread, yet still loved heavenly union. The preacher whining spoke of one whose heart for sinners broke. He tied old nanny to the oak and drew the blood at every stroke and prayed for heavenly union."

Is this what Paul is advocating for in 1 Timothy 6? As we read passages like this in our Bible, we have no idea what to do with it. I mean, how in the world could Paul possibly talk to Christian slaves made in the image of God and tell them that they need to obey their masters—more than that, to consider their masters worthy of honor and respect? How can you teach such inhumanity, to be expected to obey God in the midst of their chains? Is Paul joining the chorus of hypocrisy that Frederick Douglass identified in his poem, telling slaves to shut up while proclaiming heavenly union?

These are difficult topics, and we don't want to avoid them. We want to address them directly because the Bible doesn't shy away from them. The Bible addresses Christian slaves where they are in the slave ecosystem in the Roman Empire. But in order to get there, we're going to have to do quite a bit of work to understand more about slavery in America, what that was like, how Roman and Jewish slavery compares to our understanding of slavery, and then what the Bible itself actually has to teach about slavery. Then, finally, we'll get to Paul's exhortations to Christian slaves seeking the honor of the Lord in their predicament.

With a topic like slavery that has so much baggage around it, the majority of this sermon is going to be understanding what he means by this word "slave." And then after we've done all that work, we can then turn back to 1 Timothy 6 and see what Paul is actually trying to tell Christian slaves to do.

The Origin of Human Dignity

But first, you may wonder why even bother with a Christian understanding of slavery anyway. You may read a passage like this and say, "Isn't the Bible justifying slavery? Is it better to just shut off any kind of old, expired form of religion and just believe in being nice to people? After all, society develops; it's clear that there are going to be things in ancient times that don't make sense today, and at the end of the day, don't we just want to be nice to each other?"

That's a nice thought. But I wonder, as a Christian and as a pastor, why you think that? Where does the idea that every human being is worthy of dignity and respect come from? You may think that's so obvious that it doesn't even need to be proven. After all, the Declaration of Independence says that "we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."

But these truths aren't self-evident. As ubiquitous, as universal as we may think that is today, this kind of thinking is not common. In fact, history is laced with story after story after story of humanity not treating one another with fairness. In fact, even today, in 21st-century Western society, the best secular historians that we have today, the best anthropologists, scholars of humanity, do not think that human rights exist at all. Yuval Noah Harari wrote a famous book called *Sapiens* where he tried to recount the entire history of all of humanity from a modern evolutionary lens, and he wrote in his book, a New York Times bestseller that came out in the last ten years: "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. *Homo sapiens* have no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas, and chimpanzees have no natural rights."

That's what modern society teaches today. Human rights are a fiction; they just exist because they make society work. If you're not a Christian, and you're here this morning, especially if you don't believe in any God, I wonder if you think Harari is right. Is it really true that human beings have no natural rights? If so, then there's no reason to oppose racism, ableism, the Holocaust, and certainly not slavery. It's just another means to an end, violating some imaginary rule that human beings made up. Without some moral justification rooted in your worldview of reality, you cannot say that slavery is wrong.

In fact, the Declaration of Independence that I just quoted doesn't even root human rights ultimately in the self-evidence of it being right. The quote says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." These rights are "endowed," given by their Creator. Once you lose the Creator, you lose the value of creation.

Contrasting Forms of Slavery

In fact, that's exactly what happened in the American slave trade. See, the slave trade in the Americas didn't begin with the Bible; it actually began with philosophy. Historically, it began with Aristotle. British historian Tom Holland (not the actor who plays Spider-Man) recently points out in his book *Dominion* that the Spanish slave trade, as they went into the Americas, began not with the church fathers, but for Aristotle. As the philosopher says, "It is clear that some men are slaves by nature and others free by nature."

Chattel slavery, or owning people as property as we understand, didn't begin with the Bible, but with the checkbook. Beginning with the Spanish conquest into the American colonies, Europeans moving into the Americas saw the economic advantage of using human beings for physical labor and sought to justify the use of it because of its benefits. And with the advantages, the lucrative nature of the slave trade also came the justification for it.

This racist ideology that justified enslaving Africans for the purpose of cotton labor in the Antebellum South becomes justified over time by Southern pastors using the Bible to create theology to justify their economic superiority. So their economic advantages and gain from this labor, from these Africans, then incentivizes them to look at the Bible and try to create some kind of spiritual reality out of it. Southerners taught that because of the curse that was brought on Noah's sons—Shem, Japheth, and Canaan, or Ham in particular (the third son gets cursed when Noah blesses and curses his sons)—and because of that, one of the lines in Genesis was that Shem would rule over Ham, over Canaan. And they would teach by extension of that, that Shem's descendants were white Europeans and that Ham's descendants were Africans. As a result, that it was justified that Africans would be owned by white men.

And they would even go as far as to say that the descendants of Shem, these white men, had a different image of God than the descendants of Ham, and that the image of God under Shem is designed to be superior to the image of God that Black people had under Canaan. That is what we would call heresy—false teaching—while taking their own incentivized ideas and importing them into Scripture. I'll talk more about that later in the sermon. But this practice is not new. It is a stain on American Christianity. It is a stain on our own denomination, in the Southern Baptist Convention. It is a stain that almost every single American denomination fell under this heresy of the Curse of Ham.

But I also want to acknowledge that this kind of practice is not new. People have always manipulated belief and truth in order to justify their own evil desires. Even in the 20th century, racism found the oppression and sterilization of minorities in the eugenics movement and taught that people who were Black and Brown were less genetically inferior because they were less developed on the scale of evolution. So even among secular scientists, they would try to justify their racist ideology on the basis of natural selection, that Africans were less developed than white people. So my point isn't that American Christians are innocent in this movement. My point is that it doesn't matter if you use scientific theory or Christian theology, you can use any view to try to justify horrendous evil.

But you don't see this justification happen in the Roman Empire amongst Christians. Slavery in the Roman Empire was different than the chattel slavery that you see in the United States. Ancient slavery was not dependent on race, but on economic status. It was primarily a debt obligation. People called it debt bondage. People would often sell themselves into slavery in order to pay off debts. Manumission, or the ability to pay for one's freedom, was a relatively common occurrence.

Even the economic scope of a slave was different. Like when we think about different careers or different jobs or different majors that you may go into in college, you think about kind of a widening scope of how much money you can make and what kind of status you can get into. We tend not to think about that when we think about slavery. We kind of view it all as one giant category of being subhuman or abused for labor. But in Roman society, there was a scale even to slavery. You could go up the ladder economically. You could be a slave who owned other slaves. I was reading about Roman history and saw an example of a slave who owned 4,000 slaves as a slave, or oversaw entire industries on behalf of your rich owner. They were slave doctors, industry men, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, your identity as a slave could apply honor to yourself if your master was high enough in society. In fact, it was considered less honorable in Roman society to be a poor freedman than it was to be a slave. One historian notes that impoverished freedmen would have to look for work every day with no guarantee of being hired and would often sell themselves into slavery for the sake of job security, food, clothing, and shelter.

So when Paul is writing to Timothy here regarding slaves, we are dealing with a different system in a different time with different customs. So does that mean that the American system of slavery was bad, but the Roman system of slavery was okay? No, they're both bad. Complexities in a system don't make the system of slavery itself permissible.

What the Bible Teaches About Slavery

In fact, I'd argue that all of the evidence in the Bible points against slavery, not for it. As one pastor says, "The Bible never commands or commends slavery." And when commands regarding slavery are given, they aren't to command slavery, but to regulate it against its abuses.

So if you have your Bible, go and turn back with me to Exodus 21. You can see the laws regarding slaves given by God right after the Ten Commandments, Exodus 21. I'm going to read verses 2 through 6 for us.

“When you buy a Hebrew slave, he is to serve for six years; then in the seventh he is to leave as a free man without paying anything. If he arrives alone, he is to leave alone; if he arrives with a wife, his wife is to leave with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children belong to her master, and the man must leave alone. “But if the slave declares, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I do not want to leave as a free man,’ his master is to bring him to the judges and then bring him to the door or doorpost. His master will pierce his ear with an awl, and he will serve his master for life. — Exodus 21:2-6 (CSB)

Exodus 21 provides regulations or instructions for how to deal with people in slavery. And there is a built-in limiting factor to its practice: every slave will be free by their seventh year. They choose to opt in, they may do so, but they have to do it voluntarily. There are systems in the civil process to affirm that slave's commitment to their master.

And these regulations are not the same thing as recommendations. In fact, we see this exact principle applied in other issues all throughout the Bible. So the Old Testament, for example, has laws on divorce, actually in the same section in Exodus. But just because the Old Testament has laws for divorce doesn't mean that God approves of divorce as a concept. Jesus himself says that Moses "permitted to divorce your wives because of the hardness of your hearts. But it was not like that from the beginning. And I tell you, whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery." So what's Jesus saying there? He's saying that Moses regulates the evil of adultery because of the hardness of their hearts. People are using adultery to take advantage of people they're in need. And because of that, he regulates it with the law, but he points further back. He says it was not like that in the beginning, before the Fall.

And you can argue the same exact line of reasoning for slavery. Did any human own humans in the Garden of Eden? No, absolutely not. But in order to protect slaves and to provide them the means to relieve themselves of their debt burdens, Moses provides regulations.

Even when you get to the New Testament commands regarding slavery, like the passage that we're looking at today, slavery is restrained, not released. So let me go to the most obvious passage about this. Go forward in your Bible, from Exodus to 1 Corinthians chapter 7. This is Paul talking about slavery and various different circumstances. But in verse 20 of 1 Corinthians chapter 7, he particularly gets into the life of the slave. It says this:

Were you called while a slave? Don’t let it concern you. But if you can become free, by all means take the opportunity. For he who is called by the Lord as a slave is the Lord’s freedman. Likewise he who is called as a free man is Christ’s slave. You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of people. — 1 Corinthians 7:21-23 (CSB)

Do you know what Paul is doing there? Paul forbids Christians from voluntarily becoming a slave. Masters are instructed in Ephesians chapter 6 to treat their slaves fairly, "because you know that both their master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him." God doesn't look at the slave and the master in a human slavery matrix. All of humanity are his subjects.

In fact, the Bible reinforces this view over and over and over again, that the true owner of humanity is God, not man. Jesus stands up at the question of, "Should we pay taxes to Caesar?" He holds up a coin. He says, "Whose image is this?" They say, "Well, Caesar's." And Jesus says, "Well, give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and give to God what is God's." And we know from Genesis 1:26-27, all of humanity is made in whose image? God's image. Jesus is making an argument from the lesser to the greater. All of us belong to God, which means it is wrong for a human being to own another human being. It distorts the image. There is no favoritism with God.

Why should a Christian not become a slave in 1 Corinthians 7? Because "you were bought with a price." Even in Genesis 50, after Joseph's brothers are fearful for their lives—this is after the Joseph story that many of you would be familiar with; Joseph's second in command under Potiphar, the whole family moves over to Egypt, then their father Jacob dies, Israel dies, and the other brothers are deeply afraid because they sold their brother into slavery. There's any opportunity for just desserts, and Joseph was just holding back because his dad was still around. They are done for. And it's fascinating. Joseph hears their lie that they made up about their dad making up some kind of plea to treat them fairly and calls them into his palace. They come into Joseph's presence. They fall onto their feet. And you know what Joseph's brothers tell Joseph when they're begging for mercy? It says, "We are your slaves."

At the moment where Joseph, by any human standard, had every right to enact any amount of revenge he wanted, he appeals to a higher authority. He tells them, "Don't be afraid. Am I in the place of God?" (Genesis 50:19). You realize what Joseph's saying there in his response? He's saying, "If I were to own you, if you were to be owned by me, if you were to belong to me, I would be taking the place of God himself." We belong to God, not to any man.

Freedom from Sin: The Ultimate Redemption

And if all of that wasn't enough, it is worth remembering that the most climactic picture of salvation in the Old Testament, the Exodus, Israel is freed from the bonds of slavery. In fact, this is how God himself identifies himself in the Ten Commandments before he gives his commands. He says, "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery." The Exodus redemption was exactly that—a redemption, a liberation. Every single time, every year, that they would practice the Passover, it was a memorial, a remembrance of the time that God freed his enslaved people from bondage to evil. Except that while they were freed from their Egyptian chains, their souls were still enslaved to sin.

In Romans 6, Paul says that we were "slaves to sin." All of us are slaves to a spiritual master, and you and I can never purchase our own freedom. We can never work hard enough, become good enough, earn enough because sin grips our heart. And the Bible uses the image of slavery to explain this astonishing work that Jesus did for us. Jesus flips this picture completely upside down. Rather than cracking the whip on slaves to work to liberate themselves, Philippians 2 says that Jesus, "existing in the form of God emptied himself by assuming the form of a slave, taking on the likeness of humanity, and that when he had come as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross."

Jesus submits to his Father, his Master, by paying the penalty for sin through his death on the cross. He paid the price for sin on behalf of all who would trust in him, and in rising from the dead, he completed that payment. The redemption was completed. It was accomplished. Are you enslaved to sin this morning? Are you chained to your own lust, your pride, yourself? The more freedom that we pursue outside of Christ, the more enslaved we become. Only Jesus can free you from your sin and give you true everlasting freedom, and you can go to him today.

The good news of the Gospel is that you can cry out to him, and he can pay your debts completely. He can purchase you. He can redeem you for your freedom and give you the salvation that you so desperately want. That's why we celebrate the Lord's Supper. It's not because we're celebrating a liberation from Egypt, but from our Master, Sin. Christ's purchase of our freedom with his blood. And he doesn't just purchase our freedom; he adopts us into his family. This isn't a slave being released to be an impoverished freedman who's starving for work and begging every single day to try to make ends meet. You are adopted, given a heritage, into the richest, the most majestic, the most gracious dynasty of all the universe, because you're being brought into the family of God himself.

Christian Service and Dignity

And it's with this framework of slavery to family that then shapes all of our lives. God becomes our Master and our Father. The Bible uses both images when they talk about the Christian. Onesimus was Philemon's slave in the New Testament who ran away from his master. And after meeting Paul, he comes to know Christ. He becomes a Christian. And Paul sends him back to his master with a letter. And this is what Paul writes:

I appeal to you, instead, on the basis of love. I, Paul, as an elderly man and now also as a prisoner of Christ Jesus, appeal to you for my son, Onesimus. I became his father while I was in chains. Once he was useless to you, but now he is useful both to you and to me. I am sending him back to you—I am sending my very own heart. I wanted to keep him with me, so that in my imprisonment for the gospel he might serve me in your place. But I didn’t want to do anything without your consent, so that your good deed might not be out of obligation, but of your own free will. For perhaps this is why he was separated from you for a brief time, so that you might get him back permanently, no longer as a slave, but more than a slave—as a dearly loved brother. He is especially so to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord. — Philemon 1:9-16 (CSB)

See what Paul is doing there? He's doing more than just telling Philemon what to do. He's trying to completely reframe the way that Philemon thinks about life, about human beings. He's telling Philemon to do the right thing. Even though he could force Philemon to do it, he wants Philemon to understand and to celebrate this new reality of the spiritual family and treat Onesimus as a brother, because no one owns their family. You don't enslave your siblings, your nephews.

But that being said, not everyone would be in that situation. And so Paul will vary his instructions depending on the circumstances. 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verse 24, Paul says, "Brothers and sisters, each person is to remain with God in the situation that he was called" (1 Corinthians 7:24 CSB). That's exactly where 1 Timothy chapter 6, verses 1 to 2 come in. Paul is operating where slaves have now come to know Jesus, and he's telling them: your reality as a freedman in God transcends your current predicament. That's a bigger identity than the chains that you may have around your ankles.

But instead of inciting a violent revolution, he frames their obedience not in light of their inferiority or their master's superiority, but to God's reputation. He tells them, "You are a freedman in God's sight. You are also a slave to righteousness," like Paul says in Romans 6, "so honor God in your obedience." Not necessarily to your unbelieving master, but submit in obedience to your heavenly Master. Be a good witness to your unbelieving master so that they don't think less of Jesus because of your resistance. If you get a slave who's less obedient because they become a Christian, then that can reflect poorly on Christ himself.

For those who serve believing masters, love them, not because they're your master, but love them because they're your family. That's what he says in verse 2, that they're now your brothers. And Paul here is not defending the structure of slavery. In fact, if you understand the language of what Paul is saying here, he's actually subverting the entire system of slavery by switching it out for the language of family in verse 2. In fact, that word "service" that he uses in verse 2 isn't drawn from slavery. This isn't the idea of a servant serving their master. It's actually top-down; it's like a service, like how a king serves his people. He's telling the Christian slave, "Serve your master," but it's like the slave is now the one in authority reaching down and pouring out themselves for the sake of those under their care.

What Paul is doing in verse 2 is he is dignifying Christian service, that you love your brother in Christ. Do you think about your life this way? Do you look at unjust structures? Where none of us are in slavery, but do you look at situations where it seems like the deck is stacked against you? Are you motivated by bitterness and obligation? A fascination with getting by with a bare minimum? Or are you motivated by love? Do you clock in to work desperate to get out? To not be noticed by your boss? Do you have a reputation for being a recluse? Someone who has to be constantly monitored, told what to do? If people at your work knew that you were a Christian, how would they respond?

Spurgeon, when people would apply for membership at his church, would send workers from their church to go ask questions of their co-workers. Tell them, "Hey, this person applied for membership at the church, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle. How are they?" Because they want them to understand publicly that their reputation was tied to Christ and the church, even in the way that they worked in their secular jobs. Paul roots Christian service here, not in duty, but in love. You love your true Master, Jesus Christ, and so you submit to your heavenly Master as you work under the authority of those over you.

The Christian Root of Abolitionism

This is not a justification of slavery. This is a revolution of the soul: that you are more than your vocation, that you are more than your physical realities, that you are even more than your own freedom. But instead, we are "slaves of the Most High." Romans 6:18 says that we were "freed from sin and become slaves to righteousness." This kind of teaching was absolutely revolutionary. And this dignifying of every subject of the King was the intellectual definitive blow that brought down the entire system of chattel slavery in the West.

Whether it was William Wilberforce, John Newton, Frederick Douglass, the movement to abolish slavery wasn't against Christianity; it came *from* Christianity. Abolitionists were crystal clear about what the Bible taught and used it to prick the consciences of those who claimed to follow Jesus as their Master.

Joseph Parker was the first pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, planted in 1858. In the 1800s, he wrote in his memoir about his encounter with a Southern slave owner named Edmonds who begged him to stop teaching the Bible to his slaves. I just want to read you his reflections on this. Edmonds looked up at Parker and told him plainly, "I think you should not religiously instruct the Negroes anymore." Surprised, Parker asked why. Point to example one slave who had recently been converted. "Don't you think John is a Christian? Is he a worse slave than before?" "I believe John is a true Christian," Edmonds responded. "If my hope of heaven were half as bright as my confidence that John is fit for it, I should be a much happier man than I am." "Is John not as good and faithful a servant as he was before his conversion?" Parker pressed. "Entirely faithful and I can trust him with anything, but he feels himself," Edmonds paused, searching for the right words. "He feels himself a man accountable to God. You see, when Isaac was buried the other day, I saw him standing on the pile of earth he had thrown out and heard him exhorting his fellow servants to prepare to meet their God in the judgment. You see, John feels he is a man accountable to God, and what God requires of a man and a master may require of his slave may be very different things and opposite. So you must stop instructing my slaves."

Feeling his blood rising, Parker went on the offensive. "Do you believe that Jesus Christ has given us a system of religion which has been in us to preach to every creature which is dangerous for all to be instructed in?" "We can't philosophize on that subject," said Edmonds, waving his hand dismissively. "But suppose you go down to the Negro quarter tonight and read that part of the sermon on the mount which says, 'Therefore whatsoever you would have men do to you, do you also to them,' and you explain and talk to them of all the excellence of this precept and so on. Have I a single Negro on the plantation so dull that he will not stop and say, 'If you please, Master, does master Nick treat us as he would have us treat him?' You must answer them. Now if you say yes, they know you lie and you could do them no good. But if you say no, you damage my character among them. I tell you, sir, we could do nothing toward giving Christian light and instruction. We are bound to keep them as dark as possible. You must desist from teaching them at all."

Can you just imagine hearing that from a man who professes to follow Christ? At this, Parker's heart stirred, "My dear sir, can you stand the full blaze of the light of salvation through Jesus Christ and rejoice for yourself and your family while you shut it entirely from those absolutely dependent on you? For while you remember that the soul of the master and the slave are regarded of equal value by him who died to save them and before whom both are soon to appear in the day of judgment." But at this, Edmonds burst into tears. "Mr. Parker, for God's sake, don't name the day of judgment in connection with slavery. But you must desist from teaching my slaves."

As Parker puzzled over Edmonds' instructions and whether to comply, he came to see the system of slavery for what it was. "Slavery seemed to me," Parker wrote, "an outrage upon the rights of man." Not long after, without warning, Parker was informed that he must leave Edmonds' house and never return. And packing his belongings and tearfully leaving the children and the slaves he had grown to love, Parker set out for the North, not to return to the plantation again until after the Civil War.

No one was confused about whether the Bible itself properly taught, justified the system of slavery. Frederick Douglass himself contrasted the hypocrisy that he saw from Southern slave owners—even his own master. If you've never read *The Narrative of Frederick Douglass*, read it; it is an amazing, harrowing tale. But even Frederick Douglass himself understood this difference, and I'll close with his words. He says, "I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slave holding religion of this land, with no possible reference to Christianity proper. For between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference. So wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ, and I therefore hate the corrupt, slave holding, women whipping, cradle plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity."

Do you worship that Jesus? If you do, then you have reason to celebrate. Every day, in the face of mass injustice, in the face of cruelty, even in the face of chains, you can celebrate an undeniable, indispensable, self-evident truth endowed by your Creator: that Jesus Christ died to redeem you. That's what we get to celebrate every Sunday. That's what we get to celebrate every time we take the Lord's Supper, that we have been freed from the bondage of sin and have been made slaves to the Most High. And more than that, adopted into his family as a church of Christ. We pray that you would help us to see this truth from your Word. Thank you, Lord, that you see the dignity of every man. I pray, Lord, that you would help us to be faithful in our service, no matter what unjust circumstance we may find ourselves in this world, and that you would help us to be faithful witnesses that are hopeful in this true reality that we have in Christ. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.