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Who is Your Master? (2 Peter 2:17-20)
We live in world that would have us believe we
enjoy unlimited freedoms. Choice is the holy-grail of our society and
the 'right' to choose our preferred lifestyle, change what isn't pleasing,
adopt, adapt and cast aside as it suits us is taken for granted. The truth
is very different we realise when we begin to live with the consequences
of our choices. As someone once observed, a clean shave costs a beard,
in other words you simply can't have it both ways, though some people
do try.
When I was a boy I had a friend called Chris. He was the best mate I ever
had back in the days when making friends was easy and natural. Chris's
uncle and aunt kept a pub; the family business passed on from his grandmother.
Chris often slept over, and I would call in the pub for him on the way
to school, then we would walk to school together. We were only boys and,
while for Chris there was nothing remotely romantic about the pub, for
me it was an Aladdin's cave of bottles filled with strangely coloured
liquids, and strange acrid smells.
It was here that later, as a teenager, I would learn to drink and here,
still as a young boy, I would learn my first piece of pub doggerel:
"I've just been doing some thinking
And a thought has just entered my head
If you don't have a drink when you're living
You'll have a hell of a job when you're dead."
It was one of the few clean one's I picked up over the years.
Chris had a second uncle who lived on the premises. Harry was a very nice
man who had lost a limb in an industrial accident and, as children do,
I stared a bit too much when I saw him. He also spoke funny with a kind
of slur that I couldn't explain and didn't understand at the time. One
morning I called at the pub for Chris and he wasn't ready so he called
me in.
As I passed the bar to go through to the living quarters I looked in and
there was Harry sitting on his own in the dark at a quarter to nine in
the morning with a bottle of stout and a glass. It seemed to me a strange
breakfast and only as I grew up did I realise that Harry was an alcoholic.
I had thought he was simply having a drink at an odd time of the day but
he wasn't having the drink, the drink having him. I stood at Harry's grave
recently and reflected on how, even for his generation, 60 was not a 'good
old age' to die. Was he robbed of choices? Or had he made his choice and
suffered the consequences? Either way, his choices were not limitless
- and neither are ours.
Now Peter is telling us something very important about who or what masters
us in these verses. We cannot say that we have no master that's the first
point. We may delude ourselves with all this modern talk of freedoms and
choices but the truth is we either serve Christ, or we serve Satan. Paul
reminds us:
Don't you know that when you offer yourselves
to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey
- whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience,
which leads to righteousness? (Romans 6:16)
There are all sorts of voices calling to us in the world, promising all
sorts of 'freedoms', opportunities or, as in Harry's case, comfort and
solace, and the voices we heed will determine the master we serve, that
is the second point. The voices can be so enticing "appealing
to the lustful desires of sinful nature"
and 'choices' seem to abound, but in the end we will serve them, they
will not serve us, "for a man is a slave
to whatever has mastered him". We end up,
like Harry, 'choosing' to have a drink at a quarter to nine in the morning
because we simply have no choice.
I rewrote the poem I learned as I realised that all was not as it seemed
in the pub:
I've just been doing some thinking
And a thought has just entered my head
If you're too drunk to live while you're living
It's too late to live when you're dead.
St Augustine wrote that God has made us for himself and we do not find
rest until we find it in Him. The fact is there is more joy in living
one day for God who made us than in a life of living for the next drink,
thrill, etc.
May we heed the right voices this week and, in living for Him, and know
the rest only He can give.