There are many people.

There are many who reject God's wisdom and authority because they're afraid their freedom and fun will be constrained.

But is that the case? Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg helps us think through the bondage inherent in this line of thinking,

and he explains how we can live truly free lives.

Let's open our Bible to chapter 8 in John's Gospel.

We set ourselves the challenge of verses 31 to 38, and we found ourselves there because the

next truly, truly along our path is found in verse 34, where Jesus says, truly, truly, I say to you,

everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.

And we covered point number one, which was noticing in the opening verses, Jesus was giving

instruction to aspiring disciples. And then we went on to consider the reaction

of these religious Jews to Jesus' statement. They were aware of the fact that the way in which

he framed his words made it perfectly clear to them, indeed unavoidable, that the assumption on the part of

Jesus was that they themselves were enslaved. And of course, they didn't like the sound of that.

Religion often doesn't. You don't realize who we are. We are the offspring of Abram and so on.

And what we left for us to handle was to address the source of this

freedom, which is the freedom that is at the end of verse 36, free indeed, free indeed. And Jesus has set

this up with his truly, truly, which is essentially,

I tell you most solemnly. And what he goes on to tell us is that the problem in terms of

enslavement is not an external problem, but that the ultimate enemy of freedom is on the inside. That's what he's

explaining. And he says it very straightforwardly, doesn't he? The slave doesn't remain in the house

forever? The sun sets you free. But the fact of the matter is, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.

Now, he's not in this instance saying that every sinful act equals slavery, although that is

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