A Slave Mentality

The Israelites were free. It's hard for us to imagine what that really means to millions of people who would know nothing but slavery. The cruelest, most difficult slavery in which you are nothing more than a piece of property, in which your only value is how much you can produce and work. If you cannot produce, you have no value. You have no value to society. You have no value to the state.

And here they were leaving the slavery. They didn't even know what freedom was. You could say, wow, you're free. What did that mean? I mean, well, somebody's not going to beat me today. It means that I don't have to get out of bed and grab a little piece of bread and a piece of fish and get off and be at a place, a certain place, because the Israelites tended to live in their own communities, but they had to be at certain places every day. And they had to show up and be counted. And they had to put in a full day's work until sundown. And that was your only value. You have no real security. You have no real wealth. What you produce, the only thing you produce for yourself is what you have in your little garden that you grow, or the fish that you catch in the Nile to supplement the meager rations you get as a slave. But they're free, and they're leaving. And it's a miracle because as they leave, there's this pillar that looks like a cloud or heavy smoke, and it moves, and they follow it. And at night, it turns into fire. And they can see at night. It's an incredible miracle beyond anything they could ever imagine. And off they go. Into freedom, into liberty, into words that didn't even have meaning yet. And they end up at the Red Sea. Just a couple days later, and they lose all of it. I mean, here they are, trapped, the sea in front of them, mountains on two sides, and the Egyptian army is forming to attack and kill all of them. The best they can hope is to be taken back into slavery. The worst is that they are going to watch their children be slaughtered by the Egyptians.

And all of a sudden, freedom didn't mean anything. It really had no meaning. They were willing to barter that freedom in a heartbeat, just to be able to live one more day. Just to go back and live life the way it had been when there was certain security. Now, it is hard for us to understand, maybe, why they gave up so easily. In fact, when you look through the journey of Israel throughout the time period, they left Egypt, or they ended up right there on the doorstep of the Promised Land about a year later. In that time period, ten times, ten times they would face some kinds of crisis. And all ten times, the majority of the people said, I would rather be a slave. I would rather go back and lose all my freedoms than be what I am now, to go through what I am going through now. Why? Why was it so easy? It's so easy to condemn them. It's so easy to look at them and say, you don't get it. Why would you want to go back to that? Actually, the lessons we can learn from them are very important for us today. Because if we're not careful, we actually have the same mindset. We just don't realize it. Because when the Israelites left Egypt, they still had a slave mentality.

For generations, they had been trained. They had been bred. They had been in an environment to teach them to think like slaves. And just because they were now free, and they packed up their animals, their belongings, and off they went out across the desert, didn't mean they still didn't think like slaves. You could take them out of Egypt. Getting the Egypt out of them was going to be a whole lot more difficult. In order to maintain control over a large population of slaves, a society has to form that does certain things. The Egyptians were absolute experts at maintaining a huge slave population. In fact, the slave population made them even larger than the free population. How do you maintain that? What do you do to keep people from simply saying, we're not going to be slaves today? We're going to fight back? We're going to die if we have to, but we will not live like this. We will not be beaten. We will not be considered inferior. What keeps people living that way? To create a society that maintains that level of slavery is actually a very sophisticated psychological process that has to happen. What you have to do is convince these people that to not work is worse. That the violence that will happen to you if you do not produce work is worse than being a slave. You have to convince them that they are inferior. Now, I want you to think about what it was like to be an Israelite, a nomadic people. You know, when Joseph went into Egypt and then his family came into Egypt, they were a nomadic people that lived in many ways, I mean, right out of the Bronze Age. And they came into a society that built pyramids.

They came into a society that built monuments, that built buildings so spectacular that even to this day we marvel at how did they do that. The beauty of ancient Egypt, the spectacular buildings that they had, the monuments, the road system was something unbelievable to a nomadic tribe. And these people were brought in, and within a few generations they are subjugated by people who tell them, we are smarter than you. We have schools of higher learning. You herd sheep. We build roads. You herd sheep. We build obelisks 100 feet high. You herd sheep. You herd sheep. Who are you people? You have no value except to us in supporting our superior system, because we are superior people. You have to then take those people, and you have to take away all their hope, that they absolutely believe that they cannot get out. They have no control over their lives. A slave must believe he or she has no control over his or her life. If I have control, then I have value. But you have no control. You're told what to do every day. And if you don't do it, acts of violence are brought upon you and your family that you have no control over. They can take your food away. They can take your house away. Everything you have is only because of the benevolence of the slave masters. That's it. Now, you have to understand as much as we can, people, nomadic people who had spent generations being convinced that they were an inferior people with no value except the work they could do for these superior people, who produced a civilization they couldn't even dream of in their wildest dreams. This is the state of Israelites. Let's go back and look at something, and you'll see a little bit of what I mean. Let's go back to Exodus 5. Exodus 5. This is where Moses goes to Pharaoh for the first time. You know the story, but I want to look at some of the details of the story. He goes to Pharaoh for the first time, says, let these people go. We have to go out into the desert in order to worship our God. And Pharaoh says, well, that's a joke.

And so, Pharaoh now makes a decree. Let's pick it up in verse 10. This is actually just chapter 5.

And the taskmasters of the people and their officers went out and spoke to the people, saying, that says, Pharaoh, I will not give you straw. Go get yourself straw where you can find it, yet none of your work will be reduced. Now it takes straw to make bricks. Straw was what held the bricks together and gave it strength. So the Israelites here, many of them, their job was to create bricks. Bricks so they could build buildings, homes, roadways, temples, government buildings. It says, so the people were scattered abroad throughout the land of Egypt to gather stubble instead of straw. And the taskmaster forced them to hurry. Now, not only was their reward for being asked to go worship their God more work, but now the taskmasters, now they remember these are people with clubs and whips. These people are beating them and saying, you must hurry up. You people are so lazy. This is why you were slaves. You were so lazy.

They forced them to hurry saying, fulfill your work, your daily quota, as when there was straw. Also, the officers of the children of Israel, whom the Pharaoh's taskmasters had set over them, were beaten and were asked, why have you not fulfilled your task in making brick, both yesterday and today as before? So the officers, these are the ones that were in charge of helping the Egyptians, would put certain Israelites in charge as managers to help them manage the people. So these managers of the children of Israel came and cried out to Pharaoh, saying, why are you dealing thus with your servants? There's no straw given to your servants, and they say to us, make brick. And indeed, your servants are beaten, but the fault is in your own people. Wait a minute. The problem is that for all these years, you've given us straw. Egyptians show up with wagons full of straw every day, and we make bricks. Your people are breeding straw.

So the slaves now have the audacity to say, this isn't our fault. This is the fault of Egyptians. Notice what it says. And he said, you are idle. You people are lazy. It's your fault. Don't you understand? You are slaves. It's always your fault. You're always stupid. You're always lazy. It's your fault. Now, this is generation after generation where these people had been told this. If we're going to understand why the Israelites failed, and why we are told to study their failures lest we fail, we have to understand what it is to have a slave mentality. He says, you are idle. Idle. Instead, twice. You're lazy. You're worthless people. Sometimes we'd be better off just killing all of you and getting better slaves. They have no security. There's always this threat. We will strip away your security. We will throw you out on the street, and you can't even feed yourself. You have no value. You're idle. Therefore, you say, let us go and sacrifice to the Lord. Therefore, go now and work, for no straw shall be given you, and you shall deliver the quota of bricks.

And it says, and the officers of the children of Israel saw that they were in trouble. They couldn't fulfill it. And guess whose fault it was going to be? It was going to be their fault. They would be beaten even more. They would be expected to work. Instead of a 16-hour day, you work a 20-hour day. Because you're lazy, lazy, and you're stupid.

And this is what the Israelites had been trained in, and how they've been trained to think. They were blamed because it was always the fault of the slaves. It could never be the fault of the slave masters, because they were superior.

Slavery always depends upon a superior class, in one way or another. To the Romans, it was simple. If they conquered you, you were inferior. So everybody they conquered were inferior. So they just made slaves of everybody. It was simple to them. If we couldn't conquer you, then you're superior. But it's not true. So, you know, wherever you see huge institutionalized slavery, though, it has to be the same concept. In order to maintain control over the people who are the slaves. Because you must control them. If you don't, guess what they do? Someday they decide they're as good as you, and they try to overthrow you. And you cannot allow that to happen, because then why? Well, then you'll have a war. I mean, you'll fight, you have to fight the slaves.

Let's look at another place where you see this type of slave mentality at work in Exodus 14.

So it's so easy to look at the Israelites and say, how stubborn, how stupid, how ridiculous. Oh, yeah, that's what they had been told for generations. How stupid, how ridiculous, how worthless you are.

Exodus 14.

This is now where they are at the Red Sea. Pharaoh's army is coming. They have seen God do all these amazing things. They are free. They're walking away from Egypt carrying gold.

They have clothing. Valuables. The Egyptians just dumped on them everything. Said, here, take, you're all dead people anyways. Just take whatever you want and just get out of here. They were wealthy. Now, they didn't have a roof over their head. This freedom was a little more difficult than they thought. Freedom is never easy. Freedom was a whole lot more difficult than they thought. And now, it's like, well, what are we going to do? We're all going to die.

Once again, let's start in verse 10.

And Pharaoh drew near, and the children of Israel lifted their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians marched after them. So they were very afraid, and the children of Israel cried out to the Lord. They were very afraid. They had spent their whole lives being afraid. Every day was a day to be afraid.

It's all they knew. The Egyptians were power. The Egyptians were violent. The Egyptians were to be feared. And now, they were coming after them. The Egyptians were more real to them than God. Now, remember, there was a pillar of fire right there.

It was still there.

Remember, they had seen all the plagues poured out in Egypt. Remember, they had watched their firstborn live, and the firstborn of Egypt die. And they knew God had done that. And yet, the Egyptians were more fearful, because the Egyptians had spent generations teaching them to fear them.

They were slaves, and the taskmasters were coming, and they would be helpless. And even if they grabbed the sword and tried to fight back, they would die, and they knew it. And the Egyptians were more real to them than God.

Then he goes to the one that says, verse 11, Then they said to Moses, Because there were no greys in Egypt, have you taken us away to die in the wilderness? Why have you so dwelt with us to bring us out of Egypt? Is this not the word that we told you in Egypt, saying, Let us alone that we may serve the Egyptians? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than that we should die in the wilderness.

Slave thinking.

A piece of fish and a chunk of hard bread at the end of a day, and a little bit of beer. They drink lots of beer in Egypt. A little bit of beer is better than going hungry.

Slave thinking. The little bit I have is better than nothing.

Working from sun up to sundown, then going home, and trying to mend your own clothes and grow your own food and do everything else is better than this freedom in which we have no control. We have nothing. We have nothing except to fear those who beat us and took away our value and told us we were worthless and built amazing buildings. And we just tended sheep.

It would have been better to stay there and do that. At least we understood that. We knew the rules. What are the rules in front of the Red Sea? How does life work in front of the Red Sea? How does life work out here where God says, okay, you have to trust me. I don't know how this works. That's better. Now that's slave mentality.

That is better. That's a better world than the world that God is offering to me, because I don't understand this world. I'm too afraid. I'm too small. I'm too insignificant. I'm too stupid. I'm too lazy. I can't do this.

Time after time, it says they reacted in absolute panic, absolute fear. And God was there. They didn't deny God. God was never as real to them as Egypt. Because Egypt had brainwashed them.

You and I are observing these days of Unleavened Bread to commemorate our coming out of spiritual Egypt, to commemorate Jesus Christ as our Passover.

But I would like to ask us today, are we guilty of still laboring under a slave mentality?

A slave mentality, because you and I used to be slaves.

In a slavery that was just as cruel, just as real, and we were just as brainwashed as the Israelites ever were.

Let's go to Luke 4. Here's how Jesus started His ministry. Luke 4. Luke 4.

Verse 16. So Jesus comes in Azareth, where He'd been brought up. And as His custom was, He went into the synagogue in the Sabbath day and stood up to read. And He was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah. When He had opened the book, He found the place where it was written. And here He reads from the book of Isaiah, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me. This is a very important messianic prophecy. So He's applying it to Himself. He has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and a recovery of sight to the blind, and to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. And He closed the book and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all who are in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began to say to them, Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. He started His ministry by saying, I have come to free all you captives.

That's us.

That's us.

We were slaves.

Slaves in spiritual Egypt. And He came to free us.

From that captivity that we had.

Unfortunately, unfortunately, we still struggle with a belief that Egypt has a power over us.

You and I are still trying to drag Egypt with us, just like they were trying to drag Egypt with them. And if we're not careful, we still think like slaves. We think like slaves because we are trapped in the same bad habits we were trapped in 15 years ago. That's slave mentality. I fight it, you fight it, we all fight. We are slaves because we let ourselves be driven by dysfunctional emotions that are not godly. And so we are driven by anger and by hatred. We are driven by envy and greed. We are driven by so many of the things that still slaves to these things. So we have dysfunctional relationships when we are the people of God, when our relationships should be the most gifted relationships in the world. We still struggle with a lack of real power in our lives. Unfortunately, Pentecost is coming up.

We lack this real power in our lives because we still think like slaves.

The Apostle Paul talks about this in Romans in a fascinating passage. Let's go to Romans 6.

Romans 6. Romans 5, 6, 7, and 8 is one of the pinnacle passages in all the Bible, all the Scripture. Paul explains that the theology of forgiveness and justification and sanctification and all these concepts, the Holy Spirit, and he does it not only as a theologian would, but he does it from a personal viewpoint. He keeps talking about himself in it. It's just an amazing passage. You can study your whole lifetime and never get everything that's in there. But let's look at what he says here, starting in verse 16. Romans 6.

Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one, slaves, whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death or of obedience leading to righteousness? So you ask a question, and then he's going to explain this over the next few verses. The question is, don't you understand, if you obey sin, you are a slave to sin.

I mean, usually when a person commits a sin, because of God's Spirit, even while they're committing it, it's like the voice in their head is yelling, don't do that, don't do that.

And then afterwards there's this guilt.

And you say, why did I do that? It's because we're slaves, because we really think we have no power. We really think we're that stupid. We really think we're that worthless.

And without God, we actually are.

But we're not called to be that way. Just like the Israelites weren't called to stay slaves. They weren't called to stay slaves. They were called to become free people, the freest people on the face of the earth. There was nobody that was going to have freedom like they did.

And basically, the study of the life of the history of Israel and Judah is the study of a people who never could adjust to freedom.

They stayed slaves forever. Or are you and I staying slaves?

That we've sort of given up on our struggle against sin, because well, I'm going to fail anyways.

Is that why God has called you? Is that why Christ died for you? Is that why you ate unleavened bread for the last seven days?

Because we have no power.

He goes on verse 17, But God be thanked that though you were slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine in which you were delivered. And having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. Now Paul here doesn't let us off with, okay, you're no longer slaves of sin. You can do whatever you want. He says, now we must become slaves of something else, totally, completely committed to something else in our lives. You cannot replace sin with nothing, which is actually part of the problem that the Israelites had. You cannot replace it with nothing. It must be replaced with something else. Bad habits must be replaced with good habits. Wrong thoughts must be replaced with good thoughts. Wrong emotions must be replaced with good emotions. So what we do is we try to change our behavior, and we maintain thought processes and emotional processes that are sin. And then we can't figure out why we're still behaviorally addicted to sin. Because we're slaves. But here Paul says we have been called not to be slaves. So we have to break through the slave mentality.

Verse 19 is a very interesting little statement. He says, I speak in human terms because of weakness of your flesh. He says, oh, I know. This sort of breaks down, you know, slavery is a very negative thing, and now you have to say I'm a slave to righteousness. What does that mean, Paul? Paul says, wait a minute. Just don't go running off here. Just listen to what I'm saying. Just before you go running off and analyzing this too much, the point is clear. So then he makes his point. Verse 19, just as you present your members or your body as slaves of uncleanness and of lawlessness leading to the death of the people, slaves of uncleanness and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness.

He says, you've got to replace it with something else.

This is why we have to have God's Spirit in us, but we also must be submitting to that Spirit. Verse 20, for when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. We had, you know, it's funny, being a slave to sin makes you feel like you have freedom. The Israelites believed they had more freedom in Egyptian slavery than they had wandering around in the wilderness with no water.

At least they had the Nile. There was water there. That's more freedom than this. They were wandering around not knowing where the next drink's coming from.

And so the Nile was more real than God supplying water.

It was more real. They could remember it. They could remember how it tasted and how it smelled and what it felt like when they splashed it on their skin. They remembered all that. It was more real. He says, verse 21, What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. Sin produces eventually death. But now having been set free from sin and having become slaves of God. So he keeps dragging this analogy on, you know, after he says, okay, just bear with me. I know I'm stretching this, but just think about it. You have to replace it with something else. It means we have to become slaves of God. We have to be that dedicated, that completely giving of ourselves to God. So that we let Him do what our lives and replace our slavery with something else, or you simply remain another form of slave.

He says, but now having been set free from sin and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness and the end everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life and Christ Jesus our Lord.

Are we still slaves? Well, to a certain degree, all of us still are. That's the reason the question has to be asked. How much do we still struggle with failure? And our first thought is, well, I knew I was going to fail anyways. Why even try? That is slave mentality.

But how many times do we think that way? You know, it's not going to work out. Somebody's going to come along to mess it up anyways. I had it, one of my daughters, you say that all the time. What's the use? What's the use? Oh, stop it!

What's the use?

But isn't that how we look at life so much at the time? Spiritually, what's the use?

We have been called out of this Egypt. What I find interesting about the ancient Israelites is you never see a conversation. I'm not saying they didn't have these conversations, but when you look through the history of that ten times, that whole year that they kept rebelling against God after he took them out of Egypt, you never see any discussion about what it must be like in the promised land. Oh, the promised land! Yes, we can't wait to get there! Every day, all they were trapped in is every day. But you see, that's how slaves are trained. There is no hope. There's no future as a slave. You just hope not to die. You hope to grow old. So you don't have to work so hard. You just hope not to die. You hope to grow old. So you don't have to work so much. And everybody else goes off to work while you lay on your cot in your little mud hut. That's the goal of life. There's no future. There's no retirement. There's just slavery. So they lived only in the day. And so every day was a crisis of fear and a crisis of anxiety. Because who's going to take care of me today? My slave masters must take care of me. If they don't, I die. My value comes from them telling me, today you have value because you worked. See, here's a little bread, here's a little beer, and here's a little fish. You have value today. And so they lived in this fear. And it just wasn't real. But what I find amazing is, as time went on, and it didn't take them very long, they began to look back on slavery with this sort of nostalgic distortion. Nostalgia is not all bad. I mean, it's nice to sit around and talk about, you know, with people maybe that you had some past experience with and how you went to the feast together, or you get together with the kids, and you share stories about, you know, that nostalgia can be a good thing. But here's what happened with the slave mentality. Because security was totally dependent on the Egyptians, whatever bad times happened, they would go back and distort the emotion, and they would say, oh, this was such a better world. It really was better to be a slave. It really was better to have somebody else take care of us all the time. Even though they beat us, even though they, you know, they treated us horribly, it was better than this freedom of wandering around through the desert and not knowing where we're even... Where are we? I say the pillar, so I guess God's still there. But I liked it when I got up and, you know, sort of knew where I was. Look at Exodus 16. He began to distort it, their viewpoint of the past.

Verse 1. And they journeyed from Elim, and all the congregation of the children of Israel came to the wilderness of sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt. This is one month later. So one month after that first Passover, one month, you know, they got through the Red Sea. Wow. You know, they got through the Red Sea. What's amazing at the Red Sea, by the way, is God understood this because He told them, you watch what I do to the Egyptians.

They have you all brainwashed. Watch what I can do to them. What did God do? Destroyed the entire army. Wiped it out. Safe. And they still feared the Egyptians more because they were brainwashed. They were still more real. So here they are, one month later. Then the whole congregation, this is verse 2, of the children of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. And the children of Israel said to them, O that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt.

All of God would just kill us then. Killed all our firstborn just like He did the Egyptians. When we sat by the pots of meat, and when we ate bread to the full, and you brought us out into this wilderness that killed the whole assembly with hunger. Oh, those good old days. You know, remember those big pots of meat. You'd stick in the giant fork, you'd pull it up, and you'd carve you off a big chunk. Oh, those were good old days. Back when we got one day off every ten days. That was the Egyptian week, by the way.

Egyptians gave them one day off every ten days. The seventh day week was just an odd thing to the Egyptians. Oh, you got the... yeah. It's the day off. We get the big chunk of meat. We get some fresh bread. Ah, remember the smell of that? And now what do we eat? I don't know.

What is it? What do you mean? What is it? That's what it is. What is it? Manna. What is it? I don't know. But that's what we eat. The manna from God wasn't as real as the memories of Egypt. The memories of Egypt were so real that they distorted everything they saw. When I was a young teenager, I'm trying to remember exactly how old I was, and I can't remember. I must have been between 12 and 14, somewhere near. Some friends and I, we used to go visit these two brothers. They were in the church. And we would take off across their house.

They lived out in the country, and the only thing around anywhere around was across the street with a bar. And then their house was on the other side. And then there was this gully that would go up the hill and then up into huge areas where they had stripped on it over the years. So this was just for boys, this was exploring. There were animals, and there were just these strip mines that we would explore. There were patches of woods.

So this was a real great thing for us. And one day, the three of us leave the house. We'd go out, and we're starting up that gully, which we'd always take to go up to the top of the hill so we could go exploring. And one of the brothers, I can't remember which one, yelled, Money! And jumped on the ground like a crazy man. The other brother and I stood there and watched and started to realize that the whole gully was full of money. What had happened was over the years, the drunks would come across the street and sleep it off in the gully.

And they knew that. They always just left them there. So every Friday night, every Saturday night, the gully was full of sleeping drunks. And over the years, all this money had fallen out of their pockets. The three of us, I mean, dirt's flying, leaves flying, we're yelling and screaming and laughing and all that stuff in every pocket we have. Coins. There was no paper money. But quarters, nickels, dimes, 50 cent pieces. I don't remember how much money we found, but it was for us a treasure.

Great memory, right? Except that, three years after that, every time I'd go to visit, the three of us would take off and go up and spend hours in the gully trying to find money. We never found money again. But we had this distorted view, this distorted memory, that this was our goldmine. And this was an unending supply of money. I mean, we could not go... if we left the house and started up the hill, if you saw the three of us, we walked with our head down, like this. Never looked up, up we would go. We would stop. We would look. Never again. And yet, time after time, we went back. And we tried to reproduce this experience where we would find all this money. We could have spent the rest of our lives walking like that. Think of all the people we'd never met. Think of all the accidents we would have walking along with your head down. It's sort of what the Israelites did. They would go back and they would grab these little moments in time, and that became the distorted view of the past, where they could never get out of these distorted views that somehow God had robbed them of a better life.

I have met many people throughout my years in the Church who have come to the conclusion that God robbed them of a better life.

I've had that conversation many times. If God had not called me when He did, I could have had a lot more fun in school.

If God had not called me when He did, I could have played football. If God had not called me when He did, I would have probably had a better job. If God had not called me when He did, that is the ultimate enslave mentality. If God had just left me in Egypt a little bit longer, life would have been so much better.

And yet I have talked to scores of people who believe that over the years. Do we wrestle with? If God would have just left me alone, God is offering us the Promised Land. I fear sometimes we don't think about the Promised Land. We simply distort the past and think about where we should have, what may have happened.

Oh, if we would have just stayed there in those big pots of meat.

Oh, if God would have just not called me when He did, I was about to get a promotion and I'd be making $100,000 a year.

Yeah. Welcome to real slavery.

Welcome to slavery. Oh, no! I didn't say it had been so good. Yeah, I'd been working 12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week. I'd have forced me, but I'd have owned a Mustang.

I've always wanted a Mustang.

I just bought this used card. It's a Ford Taurus. I took it over to the Ford dealer to just have a little bit of work done on it before the... Ah, I'm tired. Warranty. Thank you. It was up. And we're standing there, and there's three of us men, and we're looking at all... They're about my age. We're all looking at all these Mustangs. And the one guy said, I've owned like five of those in my lifetime. The other guy said, three.

And they brought my Taurus up. I said, I've reached the age where I drive a Taurus. And they both went, yeah, us too.

The other one guy said, I now drive a Fusion. I said, at least I drive a Taurus. And I said, I drive a Fusion.

We're slaves to cars. We're slaves to all kinds of things, aren't we? We're just slaves. We think we have all this freedom.

The Israelites could never see God. He was there, but he never was as real as Egypt. Look at Exodus 19. Exodus 19. And then I want to go to one more scripture in the New Testament. Exodus 19 verse 3.

They stood before Sinai, and God was going to give them the Ten Commandments. And here's what he wanted them to understand. This was personal between him and them.

God wanted a personal relationship with the children of Abraham. This wasn't just, here's a few laws. I want you to obey them. And, you know, I'm going to come down and thunder out, and I've saved you from slavery. He wanted a personal relationship. They needed to understand their value came from God Himself. They couldn't get over the fact that they had been told that they were worthless. They could not accept that God gave them value. Here's what God wanted to give them. Verse 3.

They told you you weren't people of value. They told you, and they made you slaves. He says, I destroyed them to show you that you're not.

Isn't that interesting? The first thing He says to go tell them, remember, look what I did. That is only about three months later. Remember what I did to them. They can't come after you anymore. They can't beat you anymore. They have no control over you anymore. How I bore you on eagle's wings and brought you to Myself. He says, I brought you here to Me. This is real personal. Therefore, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be a special treasure to Me above all people, for all the earth is Mine. And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. And these are the words which you shall speak to the children of Israel. I brought you here because I want you to be My special people. They could not get that. They believed God was going to fail them every single time. Every time there wasn't enough water, God's failing us. Every time there wasn't enough food, God's failing us. Every time they didn't seem to know where they were going, God's failing us. When they got to the Promised Land and they realized that there were walled cities and armies there, they believed what? God failed us. God never measured up. He never measured up. All they could see was their smallness, and they never saw the greatness of God. They only saw their own smallness. And they were trapped in this thinking. They were trapped thinking like slaves. And they never broke out of it. That entire generation, except for a couple of people, died in the wilderness because they never could stop thinking like slaves. He could get them out of Egypt. He could not get Egypt out of them. What about us? What about us? We read earlier where the Apostle Paul compared our pre-Christian lives to slavery. Let's read something else he wrote in Galatians chapter 3.

Galatians chapter 3. I'm going to read this from the NIV. It's a very complicated part of Scripture, and there's a whole lot of thoughts that are sort of coming together here. And I'm not going to hit all of them. I just want to look at the subject. Read this from the NIV here. Verse 26 of Galatians chapter 3. This is us. Christ came to free us from our captivities.

And this is us. You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ. There is either Jew or Greek, slaved or free, male or female. You are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. This is the church. To the church, we are told, you were brought out of this slavery, this captivity, and it doesn't matter what your ethnic background is. It doesn't matter what your race is. None of that matters anymore. What God is doing is He's bringing people together to be the spiritual seed of Abraham. Not to bring us out of physical Egypt, but to bring us out of spiritual Egypt. To break the propaganda that Satan has told us, the mind control that Satan has had on us, to break that so that we are what? We are the children of God. You're the sons of God. Do we understand that? Do we grasp it? Or are we like the Israelites? Oh yeah, God says we're His special people, but He sure doesn't treat us that good. You know, at least He could have taken us to the part of the desert that wasn't so hot. And these Midianites, wow, what are we going to do with these people?

Chapter 4, verse 1. What I am saying is this, that as long as air is a child, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. You know, a royal family might have a child that's going to be king or queen sometime in the future, the next king or queen. But that child is treated as a child. And he's actually no better than a slave in many ways. Told what to do, when to get up, when to go to sleep, what to eat, when to eat, how to eat, how to act. Everything is dictated to that child.

He says, he is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. So also, when we were children, we were in slavery under the basic principles of the world. Now, now we're back to sin. We're back to, you and I, we're all slaves. But something changed. We're not slaves anymore.

But when the time had fully come, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law. We were condemned by the law because we were sinners, we were slaves to sin. The law condemned us. He redeemed us, the whole Passover concept. He bought us back from the slavery. So he bought us out of slavery. So why?

Because if we don't get this, we still think like slaves. Look at the rest of the sentence. To redeem those under the law that we might receive full rights of sons. Full rights as the sons and daughters of God.

What slave mentality is keeping us from that? Because this is what God says he's given to us. Just like he told those ancient Israelites, you're my special treasure. You are my people. They didn't get it. Do we understand who we are?

That this is the calling. And it doesn't matter what your background is. It doesn't matter whether you're male or female. It doesn't matter whether you have a high IQ or a low IQ. It doesn't matter whether you're good-looking or not good-looking. It doesn't matter whether you have a lot of abilities or a few abilities. That's not the measurement here. It doesn't matter what your ethnic background is. It doesn't matter what your racial background is. It doesn't matter. To redeem those under the law that we might receive the full rights of sons. Because you are sons. Notice how personal this is. God sent the spirit of his son into your hearts, the spirit who calls out Abba, Father. The spirit that calls out at the most intimate name you can call your father.

That's how personal this is to me. What can hold us back? What slave mentality is holding you back from rights given to you as sons by God? That's what it says. I'm not making up anything here. I'm not having to explain much. What's holding you back from that? What slavery to sin are you still allowing in your life? Because you still think like a slave. And we still let Pharaoh rule over us.

So, verse 7, you are no longer a slave, but a son. And since you are a son, God has made you an heir. God already says you are an heir of all things. That's how he sees you. How much of spiritual Egypt are you trying to drag into the Promised Land? Sometimes I picture ourselves like the ancient Israelites have a big bag over a shoulder, and it's filled with all kinds of idols from Egypt. We're dragging it across the desert. Just dragging this bag full of idols saying, I'll probably need these when I get there. When you're dragging it along, I'll need these when I get there. Christ said that he came to proclaim liberty to the captives and to set at liberty those who are oppressed. All slaves are oppressed, and you and I have been oppressed by Satan. We've been oppressed. And we think like slaves. It's time to stop. It is time to respond to our calling as children of God, to break the bad habits with God's help. We don't do it ourselves. To stop these destructive emotions that lead us into terrible relationships. To stop these dysfunctional behaviors that we just, well, it's sort of like the world, so we're just sort of like, we're just Egyptians, spiritual Egyptians. No, we're not. That's not who we are. So one last question. How much of a slave mentality still puts shackles on what God wants to do in your life?