Break Free

My great-great-grandfather was a Tennessee Colonel in the mid-nineteenth century who owned a tobacco processing plant. Like all businesses in the South, the manual labor was done by slaves. The work was surely better than that out in the tobacco fields, but they were still slaves.

The colonel had his own ideas about that, however. The way the family history tells it, he used to brag to anyone who would listen that he was a somewhat enlightened man. Sure, he had slaves, but he was a benevolent owner who treated them well.

At some point near the end of the Civil War, the time came to free the slaves. The Caldwell Tobacco slaves, who had been so well treated all those years, showed their gratitude to the colonel by burning the place down on their way out.

The family history does not say if Colonel Caldwell was perplexed by this turn of events or if perhaps the reality sunk in that, no matter how well you treat slaves, they are still slaves and probably don’t like it.

This is a fun family story. But when I think of it today, my mind moves from the colonel to those slaves who thoroughly destroyed what had been their home when freedom came their way. It is easy, on one hand, to condemn their actions as lawless revenge. Under that thinking, it would be considered nobler to just walk away.

But I wonder if perhaps there was more to their actions. By burning the factory, they actually destroyed both the symbol and the means of their enslavement. In their small world, that factory was slavery itself. It was one thing to be told that you are now free, but destroying the oppressor might ensure that you would not be enslaved again.

Maybe I am reading too much into this, but I think that it is possible and, what is more, I think there is a point here for Christians. Rather than relate to the factory owner, who in my case has a name and family connection, we ought to think from the vantage points of the nameless slaves.

For that is what we were: seemingly unimportant slaves to sin with no hope of ever being able to change our condition. But the wonderful day came that Jesus freed us—freed us from Satan and sin which held us captive. No longer did we have to live in the house of slavery and do the bidding of an evil owner.

The important point of the analogy for me is our exit from the slavery of sin. Surely we have all experienced the frustration of being drawn back into behavior that we thought we had left behind. We were freed in theory, but we seem to have pulled back into the factory to serve the evil master.

Perhaps we need to burn the place down. I am not speaking in a literal, physical sense, but metaphorically. If your sin problem is alcohol, you can’t destroy all of the liquor in the world. The problem is not the existence of alcohol, but the desire for it in your heart.

Jesus said, “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell” (Matthew 5:29-30).

I think that we rightly take this as hyperbole, but the point of the exaggeration is how seriously we need to eliminate the ability to sin from our lives. With a little less drama, Paul said, “But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts” (Romans 13:14). The point, however, is the same. We need to not just walk away from the slavery house of sin, but need to do whatever is necessary to destroy it in our lives.

If you have identified smoking as a sin issue to be dealt with, fight the battle at the store and don’t buy them. Then you will have “made no provision” later when tempted to smoke. Is internet pornography your snare? Install filters that tell someone every time you visit a pornographic site.

To be forgiven from sin, yet remain enslaved to it is not part of Jesus’ plan for our lives. We can be freed if we are willing to take drastic action to tear down the house of slavery.