Slaves To Sin No More!

“In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace.” Ephesians 1:7

One of the most stunning words in the Bible is “redemption.” It literally means “a buying back from, re-purchasing (winning back) what was previously forfeited (lost).”

The word redemption came alive to me in 2009. I was leading a pastor’s conference in Africa in both Tanzania and Zanzibar. The Island of Zanzibar is about 99% Muslim and at that time had less than 15 Christian pastors on the entire island, which sets off the coast of Tanzania in the Indian Ocean.

While on the island, they took me to what used to be the hub of African slave trade. This is where the rich Arabs and Europeans would come to purchase slaves to resale them. I was not prepared for what I was about to see. You can google the images and see it for yourself.

There were large concrete holes in the ground called “Slave Pits” and inside these detestable pits were stone replicas of African slaves. Men, women and children chained from their hands to their feet and around their necks with thick, heavy chains, the very one’s they used on real humans.

It sickened me to see the reality of what happened there. Families ripped a part, while the vile slave traders made property of these people they captured and sold. I could hardly keep my lunch from coming up. Standing there, hearing the cries from these families in my mind as I tried to imagine what it would have been like to have seen this for myself, the Lord reminded me of the word Redemption.

While there were evil men in this day, no doubt there were also men who purchased African slaves only to give them back their freedom. Now, imagine someone handing a slave their freedom and saying, “I have paid the price. You are free! Go live your life in freedom.” Can you picture that?

Now here is what the Lord showed me standing over the slave pit. What if the slave who had been purchased and given freedom decided to sneak back into the slave pit the next night? What if he went back down in that dirty, grimy hole and re-shackled himself with the chains that enslaved him just hours before? Could you even conceive something like that happening?

And the Spirit of the Lord said to me, “Chad, that is what you do when you choose to sin. You take the freedom that I purchased with my blood and you crawl back into a pit and re-shackle yourself.”

Christ came to die on the cross to “redeem”, to buy back, re-purchase, to claim as His what was forfeited because of our sin. How could we ever crawl back into a pit of sin again?

Think deeply on Galatians 5:1, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”