The following sermon is by John MacArthur, pastor, author, and Bible teacher with Grace

to You.

If you've never contacted Grace to You, we want to send you a free booklet by John that

unpacks fifteen Greek words in Scripture that explain a stunning paradox, how a God

of perfect justice can show mercy to sinners who deserve only punishment.

Request your free booklet titled 15 Words of Hope by writing to Hope at gty.org.

This offer is good in North America and Europe through June 2023.

And now unleashing God's truth one verse at a time.

Here's Grace to You, Bible teacher John MacArthur.

Once it turned back to the 15th chapter of the Gospel of John, this is a subject that

has been much on my heart probably for fifteen years or so.

I remember flying to England, flying to London to do a banner of truth conference.

And for the first time really awakening to the truth that I want to point out to you today,

I knew it was there but it was below the surface until that particular flight.

I spent hours tracing a specific word through the Scripture and coming to a fresh

understanding of the concept of slave, slaves of Christ which is the theme.

And it was a few years later that I wrote a book and I presented it to the publisher

and they were not sure that I should be allowed to title the book slave.

That term is fraught with all kinds of expectations and implications.

And they tried to get me to change the title and I refused to do that because essentially I was uncovering a cover-up

by using the word slave and I wasn't going to cover up the uncovering of a cover-up

by changing the title.

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