10-26-2025

“FREE TO SERVE!”

Text: John 8:31-36 – Reformation(Observed)

Sunday October 26th, 2025

Trinity - Creston

       Grace, mercy, and peace is yours from God our Father and from our crucified and risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!

       Our text for this Reformation Sunday is the Gospel Lesson – John 8:31-36 that was just proclaimed.

Let Us Pray:  Dearest Jesus, send your Holy Spirit to remind us that we are no longer enslaved by the guilt of sin.  Justified by you we are free to serve our neighbor with the unchanging love you have shown and continue to show us.  Amen.

Dear Fellow Redeemed in Christ:

There is something about human nature that puzzled me for a long time. Although we talk a great deal about freedom and seem to say it is a good thing, we often tend to enslave ourselves. Let me give you a few examples to illustrate this.

Imagine a man or woman who had a troubled marriage. Let's say that the spouse was an alcoholic and unfaithful and the marriage ended in divorce. Now after a reasonable time, this person marries again. It is more likely than not that this person will marry another alcoholic who is unfaithful.

Suppose a person comes from an abusive family situation. Finally, they grow up and move out of the house. They marry someone. It is more likely than not that the person they marry is abusive.

These examples are extreme, but there are other examples that affect each and every one of us. We all hate sin, but we still find ourselves enslaved to such things as gossip, lying, substance abuse, pornography, greed, and so forth. Sin enslaves our every waking moment.

This situation not only applies to individuals, but whole nations try to enslave themselves. The Israelites flight from Egypt is a good example of this. Even though they bore the sting of Egyptian whips for centuries, they often complained to Moses and said they wanted to go back to Egypt. Listen to one of their complaints. [Numbers 11:5] We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. They were willing to trade their freedom for spicier food.

In fact, if you take an overview of Biblical history, you will find a continuously repeating cycle. First God blesses the people. Then, in spite of God's blessings, the people decide to abandon Him. They quickly find themselves in slavery to one of their neighbors.

Then they cry out to God and He rescues them and blesses them. No matter how often God rescues them, they don't seem to learn. It isn't long before they are back in slavery again.

Things weren't any different at the start of the sixteenth century in Martin Luther's day. Then the people were slaves to the Pope and the Pope was a slave to gold and silver. The Pope was doing things like appointing children as archbishops for the right amount of cash. He was also selling relics such as "fragments of the bread Jesus used at the last supper" or "splinters from the cross."

The Pope encouraged people to venerate these relics in order to reduce time in Purgatory. He even sold legal documents called indulgences that granted forgiveness and so reduced the time in purgatory. You could even do these things for your dear relatives and shorten their time in purgatory. The people of Germany were just as enslaved as the Israelites in Egypt.

Why do people enslave themselves like this? As painful as slavery is and as frustrating as it is, people continue to return to it. Jesus gives us the reason in the Gospel we recently heard. He said, "Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin."

All the oppression of the ages, all the slavery, all the stupidity, all the frustration that makes life on this planet difficult can be traced back to this one simple fact. Sin is our natural state. We are born sinful and remain sinful all our lives.

Because of this sin, we owe a debt to God that we can't repay. That debt makes us slaves to sin. We are born slaves to sin and if we are slaves to sin, we are also slaves to sin's partners, death and the devil.

What is the result of this slavery? Jesus said, "The slave does not remain in the house forever." A slave has no rights. A slave holder can do anything with a slave.

We are born as the property of sin. Sin will get all the labor he can out of the slave and then sell him to the plantation of his partner death. Death opens the door to another existence.

For the slave to sin, the next life consists of continually experiencing all the pain and agony of the death experience without the relief of finally dying. Once the slave takes up residence at the plantation of death, there is no escape.

The frustration, injury, illness and death we experience here in this life is a mere shadow of the suffering that waits for those who remain slaves to sin. Every pain, every illness, every frustration is but a veiled reminder that the future for the slave of sin is eternal torment.

Fortunately, death is not the only buyer at the slave auction. There is another buyer who looks just like one of the slaves, but He is in fact bidding against sin, death, and the devil in the auction for our souls. Sin, death, and Satan desperately want to buy every slave, but every time they make a bid, this other buyer raises it.

This auction is not like any auction you have ever seen. It does not involve the gold and silver that the pope loved so much. Instead, it involves blood, suffering, and death. For you see this other buyer is bidding from a very bloody cross. This other buyer is Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Son of Man. He is [John 1:29] the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!

He has outbid sin, death, and the devil, and has paid for us from the treasury of His own blood. As The Small Catechism says, "[He] has redeemed me, a lost and condemned person, purchased and won me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil; not with gold or silver, but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death." Jesus paid our sin debt to God.

The Son(Jesus) paid dearly for the slaves of sin and now we belong to him. Now we are His slaves. What does the future hold for us? The answer to that question lies in what happened on the third day. For the grave could not enslave Jesus. He rose from the dead. He charted a new path away from the eternal curse into eternal blessing.

 With His death He bought us and then He freed us. With His life He gives us the promise of eternal salvation with him in heaven. This promise is sure for Jesus says, "If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed."

This proclamation of freedom is good news for everyone, everyone that is, except sin, death, and the devil. They wanted to win the bid. They hunger for control over our souls. They are furious. They will do everything within their power to deceive us into believing that we are still slaves.

The Son's Emancipation Proclamation is our protection against these forces. For Jesus said, "If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

This evil trio will do all they can to block the proclamation. Look at what they have done to those who put the words of the proclamation on paper. Isaiah, the great evangelist of the Old Testament, was sawed in half. Tradition tells us that Matthew lost his head about 60 A.D. A mob tore Mark to pieces during a pagan celebration. Luke was hanged.

John was thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil, but the Lord spared him and he became the only member of the original twelve apostles to die of natural causes. Paul, who wrote thirteen of the 27 books in the New Testament, was beheaded. Peter, the leader of the early church, was crucified upside-down. Nevertheless, the Lord protected His proclamation and the Holy Spirit used it to free slaves from sin.

Violence against those who put the proclamation on paper was not the only weapon the forces of evil used against the proclamation. In fact, their covert methods are much more dangerous.

They infiltrated the church and began spreading the idea that this proclamation was too holy for the common person, that only people with vast theological training should study the actual proclamation. Then these learned theologians would share only what the people needed to know.

By the time Martin Luther began his study of the proclamation, even the priests were not familiar with it. The proclamation was hidden away from the people and written in a language they didn't understand.

People who possessed a translation of this proclamation in the common tongue were subject to the death penalty. Many people were burned at the stake for possessing a copy of the proclamation in their own tongue.

But God preserved the proclamation. He worked through Martin Luther to give the proclamation to the people once again. Once Luther translated it into German, the presses couldn't make enough copies for the people.

One of Luther's enemies made this complaint, "Luther's New Testament was so much multiplied and spread by printers that even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who had accepted this new Lutheran gospel, and could read a little German, studied it with the greatest eagerness as the fountain of all truth. Some committed it to memory and carried it about in their heart.

In a few months such people deemed themselves so learned that they were not ashamed to dispute about faith and the gospel not only with Catholic laymen, but even with priests and monks and doctors of divinity." Oh that the enemies of Christ would have this complaint today.

The Reformation continues today. The enemy still tries to infiltrate the church and hide the Son's Proclamation from the slaves. The culture still tries to tell us that the proclamation is irrelevant. Our own sinful nature even tries to tell us that the proclamation isn't important.

Sometimes we feel defeated, but the words of Jesus bring us comfort and encouragement: "If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

We have Christ's Word. We are His disciples. We know the truth. We are free. Every time we read the Son's Emancipation Proclamation, we hear that we are no longer slaves, but sons and sons remain in the house forever. Amen. 

The Peace of God which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior.  Amen.