"The Christian life is the life of sons & daughters; it is not the life of slaves. It is freedom, not bondage. Of course, we are slaves of God, of Christ, & of one another. We belong to God, to Christ, to one another, & we love to serve those to whom we belong. But this kind of service is freedom. What the Christian life is not, is a bondage to the law, as if our salvation hung in the balance & depended on our meticulous & slavish obedience to the letter of the law. As it is, our salvation rests upon the finished work of Christ, on His sin-bearing, curse-bearing death, embraced by faith.
Yet so many religious people are in bondage to their religion! They are like John Wesley in his post-graduate Oxford days in the Holy Club. He was the son of a clergyman & already a clergyman himself. He was orthodox in belief, religious in practice, upright in conduct & full of good words. He & his friends visited the inmates of the prisons & work-houses of Oxford. They took pity on the slum children of the city, providing them with food, clothing & education. They observed Saturday as the Sabbath as well as Sunday. They went to church & to Holy Communion. They gave alms, searched the Scriptures, fasted & prayed. But they were bound in the fetters of their own religion, for they were trusting that they were righteous, instead of putting their trust in Jesus Christ & Him crucified. A few years later, John Wesley (in his own words) came to 'trust in Christ, in Christ only for salvation' & was given an inward assurance that his sins had been taken away. After this, looking back to his pre-conversion experience, he wrote: 'I had even then the faith of a servant, though not that of a son.' Christianity is a religion of sons, not slaves."
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