Who do you obey?

"Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey---whether slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness." [Romans 6:16]

Once again, my mentor Oswald has astounded me. He writes on March 14, "The first thing to do in examining the power that dominates me is to take hold of the unwelcome fact that I am responsible for being dominated." Just as Paul said, when you "offer yourself"... you wind up enslaved. To OC "offering" is "yielding" oneself. If a child yields to selfishness, he will become a slave of selfishness. So parents must help their children to overcome selfishness, to not yield to it. Some people yield to despair. Some yield to their ill health, or laziness, or pride, or lust, or greed, or the bottle, bitterness, hatred, and a host of evil spirits. Then they can never overcome it, because they are not in control anymore, but enslaved. This is how habits become so terribly hard to break.

How could we be so stupid, to let ourselves be enslaved? "Give me liberty or give me death!" is the battle cry of Americans. Yet we are enslaved to debt, to pornography, drugs, and so many things that clearly lead to death. We are a people given over to greed, to the instant gratification of everything we fancy. So we have given away our freedom and liberty for convenience or fun or pleasure or ease. It is so sad.

What is more, many Christians (who claim to be servants of Christ) have yielded almost nothing to Him, have given him nary a token of actual obedience. One would think they feel that Jesus actually wants us to have all these gratifications, rather than holiness, and that his words, "If you love me, keep my commands", is some kind of code that no one can really understand. So we obey one another, our bosses, the law, the cultural norms, but never obey his commands.

Lord, help me to yield to Jesus, rather than the desire for more possessions and more time and more enjoyment. Even more freedom is meaningless apart from that freedom that comes from You, Who are the Truth that sets us free. Lord, help me to teach this true obedience to my children, before they become slaves of self and of society. Please set us free, Lord Jesus, as we obey your commands, little by little.