A few days before he died John Wesley wrote a letter to William Wilberforce on the subject of the slave trade in which he said that American slavery “was the vilest that ever saw the sun.” In Though the Mountains Shake, Amy Carmichael thought that if Wesley had known of the sex slavery of temple prostitution where baby girls are married to the gods and which had been going on for centuries he would have pronounced it the “vilest that ever saw the sun.” My comment here is that all slavery everywhere in all centuries has included sex slavery. In addition to the evil of slavery there is that added evil of the rape of children and adults. It is going on today in many nations. Northern Uganda is one example. Prostitution in most countries is slavery. The women are owned by their pimps. Japan sent Korean women to be prostitutes for their army. The Russian revolution in 1917 sent the wives of 10,000 Russian Army officers to be women for the Russian Army on the Eastern Front. England stopped their slave trade. The Civil War stopped slavery here in the U.S. But sex slavery is still endemic in the world. It is like the war on terror, there is no front. The front is everywhere.
There are several reasons why obedience seems hard. I will comment on some of them and then speak positively on how obedience is easy. We think: 1) Obedience is an infringement on freedom. Since we are free in Christ, and obedience is somehow contrary to that freedom, we conclude that obedience is not good. Yet we know it is good. Thus, we become confused about obedience and are not single-minded. 2) Obedience is works. We who have been justified by grace through faith are opposed to works; therefore, we are opposed to obedience. 3) We have tried to obey and have failed—frequently. Therefore, the only solution is to disobey and later confess to receive forgiveness. It is easier to be forgiven by grace than to obey by effort. 4) We confuse obedience to men with obedience to God. Although these are sometimes one and the same (see Romans 13, 1 Peter 2-3, Ephesians 5-6, Colossians 3, and Titus 2), sometimes they are not the same (see Colossians 2:20-23, Mark 7, 1 Timothy 4:1-5, a
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