Daily Manna · Day 93 · April 3
Free Indeed
“If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”
Imagine a man sitting in a room with the door standing wide open. Nothing is keeping him there, and yet he has not moved.
This verse comes from an argument that is going badly. Jesus tells some Jews "which believed on him" that if they continue in His word, "the truth shall make you free." They are offended at once: "We be Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man." That is a startling thing for them to say. Their people's story includes four hundred years in Egypt and an exile in Babylon, and at that very moment Rome rules their country. They are not exactly lying. They have simply arranged the facts so that the word "bondage" never fits them, and that is the attitude Jesus speaks to.
So Jesus shows them what slavery really is: "Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin." The word "servant" here means a slave. Jesus is not talking only about the disgraced or the openly guilty. He means anyone who keeps on sinning, whoever his ancestors were and whatever people think of him. Then He adds a detail from ordinary household life: "the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever." A slave had no lasting place in a family, and he could be sold at any time. A son could never be sold. So the freedom Jesus offers is first of all a change in your standing, and from there it goes on to change how you live. It is given by the one Person in the household whose place can never be taken away.
That is why the promise begins with "if," and why the "if" is about a Person: "If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed."
Perhaps by the middle of this week you are back in the same old sin, and the shame that follows is so familiar it almost feels like company.
So listen carefully to what the promise says. It never promises you will stop failing by Friday. It says that when the Son sets you free, your place in God's house is settled, and your life begins to change from there. A son whose place is secure has something to fight from that a slave never had. The door is open, and the Son is the One who opened it, so you are free to get up and walk through it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 93 is Before All Things (Colossians 1:17).