The Slave Mentality

As of late, I have been getting down to the nitty gritty with regards to the slave mentality. You might be asking what prompted this post, and the truth is that nothing did. I was sitting just pondering on other things and it came to mind: the never-ending struggle between humans and sin. I struggled with strongholds in the past, and continue to struggle with sin to this day. Yes, I grew up in church; and yes, I am a believer. As a matter of fact, I believe that I have been made new; however, the fact that I must die to my own desires daily remains (Luke 9:23, Gal. 5:24).

I came to the topic of the slave mentality because I found myself wondering about my piercings. For over a decade, I have worn gauges on my ears without thinking much about it. As I read in the old testament about a certain someone who owned slaves, my mind went on this little trip (no drugs involved J). I began to analyze the why behind the bible mentioning slaves, remaining slaves by choice. The bible mentions that when a slave’s time was up, and they had paid their debt to their masters they were given options. They could either choose to leave, and be free; or they could remain in their masters’ house serving by choice. I did a bit more research on this and found out that many times, slaves had grown to love serving their masters. This was often considered to be a slave by or because of love. BOOM! Mind blown, because in our western modern mentality, there is no way that a slave could love his/her master. No way, Jose. In fact, former slaves many times despised their masters so much that many of them rose and killed their former masters.

In this modern day, we would never accept such thing. Slavery of human beings is a horrible thing. But I pose this question(s): is it wrong to be a slave for love? And I want to be clear, that I am not referring to being a slave to serve the benefit/profit of another human being, but of God.

Could/should you and I, have a slave mentality towards God’s love?

I think our biggest problem as humans is that we tend to focus on the wrong things. Sure, slavery is bad when you are serving one person’s or group’s selfish desires. I 100% agree with that, no doubt. But what about being a slave to the right cause, or for the right outcome? What about God’s love being so incredibly good to us, I now feel indebted to serving him with all I have for the rest of my days? Is that wrong? I mean, the only argument would be that one may/or may not lose their own identity? But what if the identity that God has for you is a million times better, then whatever you could come find on your own?

The responsibility for humanity’s decline lies in that we became slaves

to the wrong things. Pop culture, money, work, sloth, lust, etc, are things that we have become slaves to; and the only person that we desired to serve was ourselves. Serving myself brought me so much sorrow and regret that I eventually, had nowhere to turn than up. We must continue to die to ourselves, and if it helps you, think of it as being a slave dedicated to serve God because of his unrelenting love for us. I encourage you today to think about what master you are currently serving, yourself or God.