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[This Transcript generated with AI - my apologies for any errors]

Mark chapter 1.

I was listening last night to a Bob Dylan song.

And Bob Dylan, only songwriter to my knowledge, who has won the Nobel Prize for literature, doesn't have a great voice to listen to, but the songs are often interesting.

And the particular song that I was listening to was Gotta Serve Somebody.

And that song runs through a list of all these different things you could be, and I'm not going to remember it word for word,

But he says you could be a powerful businessman or you could be somebody living on the street.

You could be sleeping on the floor.

You could be sleeping in a mansion on a king-size bed in a fancy home.

You could be anybody in this world.

But in the end, you gotta serve somebody.

It might be the devil and it might be the Lord.

You gotta serve somebody.

And while we might question whether we should take our theology from songwriters,

He's not coming up with that on his own.

The Apostle Paul says the exact same thing in Romans chapter 6, where he says that believers or anybody, not just believers, any human being is either going to be a slave to sin or a slave to righteousness.

Romans 6 verse 20, when you were slaves of sin, you were free regard to righteousness.

But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed?

The end of those things is death.

But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.

The options are not slavery.

Freedom, it's what kind of slavery?

Yeah, there's freedom in there.

True freedom, Jesus says in John 8, is to know the truth and the truth will set you free.

But as you know the truth and the truth sets you free, God's definition of freedom is to have the free ability to gladly obey him, to gladly serve him, to be a slave.

And so the New Testament writers often identify themselves as slaves or bondservants of Jesus Christ.

That's one of the most striking things in the letters of James and Jude.

These guys were half-brothers of Jesus.

But when they write letters to churches, they don't start off by asserting their authority as, well, here I am Jude, a half-brother of Christ.

No, he says, Jude, a brother of James and a servant or a slave of Jesus Christ.

We all have to serve somebody.

Jesus makes clear in Matthew chapter 6 verse 24 that there really are only two options.

You can't serve more than one master at a time.

You can only serve one.

There in Matthew 6 24 Jesus says you can't serve God and money, but the word that we get translated as money is mammon, which is a name for a false god.

You can either serve false gods or you can serve the real God.

And as human beings, God has given us a choice.

Now we're born inclined to make the wrong choice.

Ephesians 2 says that we are by nature children of wrath following the course of this world, following the course of the prince of the power of the air, the spirit now at work in the sons of disobedience.

We are born naturally inclined to serve Satan, not God.

But we are made in the image of God.

Genesis 1, 26-28.

says that God made man in his image and his likeness.

And Genesis 9, which is after the fall and after the flood, still refers to man as being made in the image of God.

So that imprint, that stamp, that knowing we need to be serving God is something we can't escape.

Everyone has that.

That impulse, that desire to find something or someone to worship that isn't ourselves, that is

part of God's image in us.

We know we are to be worshiping.

In Joshua chapter 24, he puts before the people a really stark contrast.

Joshua 24 says, If it