John 8:31-36
So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” They answered him, “We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will become free’?”
Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.
Welcome to Getting ready for Sunday, a podcast of first Lutheran Church. Each week, I introduced the readings for the upcoming Sunday with some notes and explanation so you can be ready for worship when you arrive. I look at the Old Testament, Psalm epistle and Gospel reading for the upcoming Sunday and offer a few notes and explanation. The Gospel reading for reformation Sunday, October 29 2023, comes from John chapter eight, verses 31 through 36. So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. They answered him, We are the offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, you will become free? Jesus answered them. Truly, truly I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever, the sun remains forever. So if the sun sets you free, you will be free indeed. Here ends the reading. Jesus begins with a plain statement. If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples. So if we listen to Jesus, and we study and hear and remain abide, dwell in His Word, we will be His disciples. And then that leads to a result. And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. So if we abide in Christ's word, Christ's word fills us and we live in it. And if we dwell in it, then we will know the truth about the world. And the truth will set us free. What is that truth about the world, that we live in a dark world that can only be saved by the light of Christ, that the forces of sin are always calling towards us, calling us away from God, all we have to do remain with him, we will be His disciples and we will be saved. Now this brings about a response in the Jews who believed in him because that's who Jesus is talking to, not not strangers. But the Jews who were following him. They say, We are the offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you can say you will become free? I can imagine American saying something similar, where the freest country in the whole world, how can you say you will become free, we don't have tyrants, we don't have anybody who's in charge, we are ruled by the people. Both of them are making a claim. They say, Abraham is our Father, and we've always been free with him. We've never been slaved by Romans or anybody else. We're not owned by anyone. We can't become more free than we are. And Americans might reply, we have political freedom. We can make decisions and do things without asking for a tyrant to rule over us. How can we become free? What they're missing is the spiritual freedom that Jesus offers them. And he goes on to say, Jesus answered them, Truly, truly I say to you, everyone who practices sin, is a slave to sin. Yikes. Sometimes the idea of freedom that we have in our hearts is actually the freedom to sin. Like, we don't want to be oppressed by the desire to do good. We want to be free to do evil. Ah, the oppression of wanting to do good, right? When we practice in when we practice evil, we're a slave to it. And so much of our hearts and our desires, it's like that. And Jesus says something about what happens when you're a slave. He says, The slave does not remain in the house forever, the son remains forever. So if the sun sets you free, you will be free. Indeed. A slave is not a member of the household. But the Sun is. And if the sun sets us free and welcomes us into the house, we're part of God's household. We who are who were once slaves to sin, if you have faith in Jesus Christ, if you receive Him through His Word and Sacraments, He sets us free. And we will be truly free free not just like in a political sense in America or free like the children of Abraham sense that the Jews are talking about, but truly free from the most enslaving thing of all our slavery to sin. And Jesus sets us free from that. What a great passage. That's it for day. We'll see you on Sunday. Bye
Transcribed by https://otter.ai