My Master

“The first duty of every soul is to find not its freedom, but its master…If within us we find nothing over us, we succumb to what is around us…He is not an other; He is my other.” P.T. Forsyth.

Our man-centered Christianity has led us to revolve our thinking around our “free will” and make ourselves the center of attention. I would like to know how a dead man or woman (Ephesians 2:1-3) can exercise free will. I would like to understand how a slave to sin (Romans 6:6, 17), whose nature is such that it is an enemy of God (Romans 5:10), can pronounce itself the center of the salvific universe, as if its will sits on a throne and bestows its approval on the work of Jesus Christ.

To be sure this is all a mystery, the workings of God in the hearts of men and women. But also to be sure, the Gospel is about Jesus Christ and His glory and not about us being the arbiters of our destiny. As someone once prayed, “Through grace let my will respond to Thee, knowing that the power to obey does not rest in me, but that Thy free love [and grace] alone enables me to serve Thee.”

If we could imagine the most abject condition of slavery, the most frightful conditions, conditions that would make us recoil in horror, become physically sick, and produce nightmares…we would not come close to our own condition of slavery outside of Jesus Christ. When darkness covered the land and Jesus Christ cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, it was because our darkness, our sins, our sinful nature, our own slavery…was placed on Him – the depth of that abyss on the Cross is such that we cannot penetrate it, and if we could it would kill us mortals.

The person who is the master of his or her own soul has a fool for a master. In Christ alone can we find that enigmatic slavery that makes us free (Galatians 5:1; 2 Corinthians 3:17 – 18; Romans 6:11; 8:15).