“NOW YOU HAVE observed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, my persecutions, my sufferings, what befell me at Antioch, at Ico´nium, and at Lystra, what persecutions I endured; yet from them all the Lord rescued me. Indeed all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Tim. 3:10–12). There is a strange portion in that passage: “Yet from them all the Lord rescued me.” He was then in prison! He called himself “an ambassador in chains” (Eph. 6:20). He was in chains, but an ambassador still, and never more an ambassador of the kingdom than when in chains. From that prison his influence extended to the ends of the earth and to the ages.
All Paul’s chains were only physical. Inwardly he was free—as free as the birds that fly. His spirit roamed all thought, all history, all conditions, and he spoke through his letters as though he were master of that outside world. And he was! The ages have proved it.
Many are ambassadors in chains, and all their chains are inward. They are bound by fears, resentments, self-preoccupation, unresolved guilt. They are infinitely worse off than Paul, who was in nothing but outer chains. I paused to talk to a couple who had come to see me. We had been giving a pension to a woman whose deceased husband had worked for us for many years, but had to stop because she was living with her stepson and had children by him. Both of them were in chains, and all their tears could not wash out a line of that record. Worse, they had tied God’s hands, and mine. We were in chains, too, helpless to help them, for there was only denial of guilt. There is no bondage but sin.
My Lord and my God, when we throw ourselves upon Thy redeeming mercy our bondage is at an end. Until then we are fettered with our self-wrought fetters. Make us free inwardly, and we shall walk the earth conquerors. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: If I have to have bondages, let them all be outward, none inward.
