On the first day of January 1863, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect in the United States. By law, every enslaved person in the rebelling Confederate states was declared free. It was one of the most significant legal acts in American history.
But in the state of Texas, far from the front lines of the Civil War, very little changed. Slave-owners kept the news quiet. There were few Union soldiers there to enforce it. For two and a half years, men, women and children who were legally free went on rising before dawn, working the cotton fields under the overseer’s whip, and going to bed in slave quarters. They were free on paper. They lived as slaves.
Then, on 19 June 1865, a Union general named Gordon Granger arrived in the port city of Galveston with his troops and read aloud a public order. It began by announcing that, in accordance with the proclamation, all slaves were free. People who heard it wept, sang and ran into the streets. Some walked off the plantations that same day. The anniversary is still celebrated in America as Juneteenth.
Here is the part that should make every believer stop and think. Nothing about their legal status changed on 19 June. They had been free since 1 January 1863. What changed was that someone finally told them, and they finally believed it.
I am convinced that there are many sons and daughters of God still working in the cotton fields. Their freedom was secured at the cross. Their adoption was declared. But nobody has clearly told them, or they have heard and not yet believed, and so they go on rising before dawn to serve a master who no longer owns them. This teaching is a Galveston announcement.
An heir who lives like a slave
Paul begins one of his great passages on sonship with an illustration from family life in the ancient world:
Now I say, That the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all; But is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father. Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world.
A wealthy father in Paul’s day might have a son who was heir to the entire estate. But while the boy was still a child, he was placed under tutors and governors: guardians who managed his affairs, stewards who controlled his money, and household servants who supervised his daily life. In practical terms, Paul says, the heir “differeth nothing from a servant.” He could not make his own decisions. He had to obey instructions. He looked, on an ordinary day, exactly like one of the slaves, “though he be lord of all.”
But that arrangement was always temporary. It lasted “until the time appointed of the father.” When that day came, the son was released from the guardians and entered into the full freedom and responsibility of an adult heir.
Paul says that this was the condition of God’s people before Christ. “Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world.” Then, in the next verses, he announces that the time appointed of the Father has arrived. God sent forth His Son, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, “that we might receive the adoption of sons.”
The great tragedy is that some heirs never realise the day has come. They have been released from the guardians, the inheritance is theirs, and they still go on asking permission for everything, still living under the old supervision, still behaving as if they “differ nothing from a servant.”
The schoolmaster had an assignment
A chapter earlier, Paul uses a related picture to explain the purpose of the law of Moses:
But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed. Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.
The word translated schoolmaster is the Greek paidagogos. It did not mean a teacher in the way we would use the word. A paidagogos was usually a trusted household slave whose job was to supervise a boy from about the age of six until he came of age. He walked the boy to school and back, carried his books, watched his behaviour, corrected his manners and sometimes disciplined him. He was a guardian and an escort, and his authority over the boy was real.
But his assignment had a goal. His whole purpose was to bring the boy safely to the point of maturity. Once the boy came of age, the paidagogos was no longer needed. Nobody thought less of him for that. He had done his job.
Paul says that is what the law was for. It guarded and supervised God’s people “unto Christ.” It kept them, corrected them and pointed them toward what was coming. “But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.”
This is important, because it means that the law was never God’s final arrangement for His people. It was holy and good, and it served a vital purpose for a season. But its purpose was always to lead somewhere beyond itself, to Christ, and to the sonship that comes through faith in Him. A believer who goes back to living under the law as the basis of his relationship with God is like a grown man who insists on having his childhood escort walk him to work every morning. He has misunderstood what the escort was for.
PunchlineThe law was a guardian with an assignment: to bring God’s people safely to Christ. Once faith has come, the heir is no longer under the guardian.
Sonship was always the goal
It would be a mistake to think that God only began wanting sons in the New Testament. Sonship was in His heart from the beginning. When God sent Moses to Pharaoh, He gave him a remarkable message: “And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD, Israel is my son, even my firstborn” (Exodus 4:22). Then came the demand: “Let my son go, that he may serve me” (Exodus 4:23).
Look at the contrast. Pharaoh saw Israel as slaves, a workforce for his building projects. God saw them as His son. And God’s intention was not to take them from one slavery into another. It was to bring them from bondage to Pharaoh into sonship with Himself. “Let my son go.”
That was always the direction of the story. The writer to the Hebrews says that God’s purpose in sending Jesus was “in bringing many sons unto glory” (Hebrews 2:10). Not many servants. Not many employees. Many sons. And Jesus, the eternal Son, “is not ashamed to call them brethren” (Hebrews 2:11).
The same passage tells us what Jesus came to break: “And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Hebrews 2:15). All their lifetime. Bondage is not only something outside us, like Pharaoh’s whip or a plantation overseer. It is also something inside us: a fear that keeps us servile, anxious and small. Christ came to deliver us from both.
So the new covenant is not a new idea grafted onto an old story. It is the fulfilment of what God wanted all along. Under the old covenant, Israel was called God’s son corporately, but the relationship was mediated through the law, the priesthood and the sacrifices. Under the new covenant, every believer receives “the Spirit of his Son” into his heart, crying, “Abba, Father.” What was once true of the nation as a whole has now become true of each one personally and inwardly.
Two mothers, two households
Later in Galatians, Paul gives us an allegory that is easy to skip but very powerful. He goes back to Abraham’s two sons, Ishmael and Isaac. Ishmael was born to Hagar, an Egyptian slave woman, when Abraham and Sarah tried to bring about God’s promise through their own efforts. Isaac was born to Sarah, the free woman, by the miraculous fulfilment of God’s promise when she was far too old to bear children.
Paul says that these two mothers represent two covenants. Hagar represents the covenant from Mount Sinai, which “gendereth to bondage.” Sarah represents the covenant of promise, which brings forth children of freedom. Then he draws the conclusion:
Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise. But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now. Nevertheless what saith the scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman. So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free.
“We, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise.” You were not born into God’s family through human effort, the way Ishmael was. You were born through God’s promise and God’s power, the way Isaac was. Your sonship is a miracle, not an achievement.
And then Paul quotes Sarah’s startling demand from Genesis: “Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman.” It sounds harsh, and in the original story it was painful for Abraham. But Paul’s point is clear. You cannot live in both households at once. You cannot base your relationship with God partly on promise and partly on performance. Sooner or later, the slave-woman’s way of thinking will try to claim a share of the inheritance, and it must be refused.
Many believers try to keep both. They are children of promise in their doctrine, and children of the bondwoman in their daily experience. They know they are saved by grace, and they relate to God every morning as if they must earn His favour. Paul’s word to them is firm and loving: cast out the bondwoman. “So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free.”
If the Son makes you free
Jesus addressed this directly in a conversation with people who believed they were already free. He had said to them, “the truth shall make you free,” and they were offended. “We be Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man,” they replied. Jesus answered them:
Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever. If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.
“The servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever.” There is a world of difference between a servant and a son. A servant lives in the house on condition. He has a place as long as he works, as long as he behaves, as long as the master is satisfied. He can be sold, dismissed or replaced. A son lives in the house by birth. His place does not depend on his last performance review. He abides for ever.
Then comes the great promise: “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” Free indeed. Not free on paper while still working in the cotton fields. Really free. The freedom Jesus gives is not a legal fiction. It is a new status and a new life, and it reaches all the way down.
Notice also that it is the Son who makes us free. The freedom of sons is given by the Son. He shares His own standing with us. We are adopted into His relationship with the Father, which is why Paul calls us “joint-heirs with Christ.” We are not freed slaves who are allowed to hang around the edges of the household. We are brothers and sisters of the Son, with His Spirit in our hearts.
The heart of the new covenant
NuggetWhy do I call sonship the heart of the new covenant? Because when God described what the new covenant would accomplish, He described a family relationship.
Through Jeremiah, quoted in Hebrews 8, God promised four things. He would put His laws into the minds of His people and write them on their hearts. He would be their God and they would be His people. They would no longer need to teach each other, saying, “Know the Lord,” because “all shall know me, from the least to the greatest” (Hebrews 8:11). And He would be merciful to their unrighteousness, and remember their sins no more.
Look at what lies at the centre of that promise: all shall know me. Under the old covenant, knowledge of God came largely through mediators. The priest went into the holy place. The prophet heard the word of the Lord and carried it to the people. The ordinary Israelite stood outside. But the new covenant promises that every member of God’s people, from the least to the greatest, will know Him personally. That is the language of family. Servants know their master’s orders. Sons know their father.
John was so overwhelmed by this that he could hardly find words for it:
Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.
“Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.” The phrase “what manner of” carries a sense of astonishment, as if John were saying, “Where in the world did a love like this come from?” It is foreign to everything we know. Human beings do not naturally love their enemies enough to adopt them. God did.
And notice the present tense: “Beloved, now are we the sons of God.” Not one day. Not when we have proved ourselves. Now. What we shall be in the future has not yet fully appeared, but our sonship is already a present reality. When Christ appears, we shall be like Him. Until then, we live as sons who are being prepared for that day.
There are things that sons have which slaves never have. A son has access. Paul says that in Christ “we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him” (Ephesians 3:12). A slave waits outside the door until he is summoned. A son walks in. A son has an inheritance: “if a son, then an heir of God through Christ” (Galatians 4:7). A slave owns nothing, however long he works. A son has a name. He carries the family’s identity wherever he goes. And, perhaps surprisingly, a son receives the father’s discipline. The writer to the Hebrews says that God deals with us “as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?” (Hebrews 12:7). Nobody bothers to train someone else’s slave for the future. A father disciplines his children because he is preparing them to share in what is his.
That last point deserves a moment. Some believers interpret every correction from God as proof that they are still slaves, still under the whip. Hebrews says the opposite. Correction is one of the signs of sonship. It is the Father’s investment in a child He intends to bring to maturity. The slave fears punishment. The son receives training. The experience may feel similar in the moment, but its meaning is completely different, and so is its outcome: “afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby” (Hebrews 12:11).
Old habits of the slave
If all this is true, why do so many believers still live like slaves? Part of the answer is simply habit.
Think about Israel after the Exodus. God had broken Pharaoh’s power with ten plagues. He had parted the Red Sea. He had drowned the army that pursued them. Israel was free. Yet within weeks of crossing the sea, they were complaining that life had been better in Egypt. “Would to God we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots” (Exodus 16:3). Later they said, “We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick” (Numbers 11:5).
It is astonishing what the memory of slavery can do. They remembered the fish, and forgot the whips. They remembered the onions, and forgot that Pharaoh had drowned their baby boys in the Nile. Someone has rightly said that it took one night to get Israel out of Egypt and forty years to get Egypt out of Israel.
The slave mentality shows itself in recognisable ways. A slave expects punishment whenever something goes wrong, so he interprets every difficulty as God’s anger. A slave does only what he is told, so he cannot imagine God trusting him with initiative or responsibility. A slave never feels he owns anything, so he cannot enjoy what has been given to him without guilt. A slave serves to avoid the whip, so his obedience is driven by fear rather than love. And a slave assumes that his place in the house is temporary, so he can never quite rest.
Paul says to the Romans, “For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear” (Romans 8:15). Again. You were once in bondage to fear. That was your old condition. The Spirit you have now received is not that spirit coming back in a religious disguise. If your relationship with God is still dominated by fear of punishment, you are listening to an echo of Egypt, not the voice of the Spirit of adoption.
Getting Egypt out of us takes time, patient teaching and repeated exposure to the truth. It is why the Galveston announcement needs to be read again and again, until it reaches the people at the back of the field.
Serving within the family
Someone may ask: if we are sons and not slaves, does that mean we no longer serve God? Not at all. But the nature of our service has completely changed.
The law of Moses contained a fascinating provision. A Hebrew servant was to serve for six years, and in the seventh year he was to go free. But there was an exception:
And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: Then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him for ever.
“I love my master... I will not go out free.” Here is a man who could leave, and chooses to stay. He is no longer serving because he is compelled. He serves because he loves. And the mark of that choice, a pierced ear at the doorpost, stays with him for the rest of his life as a sign that his service is voluntary and permanent.
That is the picture of new covenant service. When Paul opens his letter to the Romans, he calls himself “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle” (Romans 1:1). The word for servant is doulos, a bondservant. The freest man in the New Testament chose to describe himself as Christ’s slave. Not because he was compelled, but because he loved.
Jesus made the distinction explicit: “Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends” (John 15:15). A slave receives orders. A friend shares his master’s heart and purposes. We serve Christ, but we serve Him as sons and friends, people who know what the Father is doing and gladly join Him in it.
Paul puts the balance perfectly: “For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another” (Galatians 5:13). Freedom is not permission to indulge ourselves. It is freedom to love. And he tells the Romans that, having been made free from sin and having become servants to God, “ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life” (Romans 6:22). The freed son serves more fruitfully than the slave ever did, because love is a far stronger motive than fear.
So when you serve in your church, give your offering, care for your family or work honestly at your job, you do not do it as a slave earning his keep. You do it as a son who loves his Father and shares in His work. The labour may look the same from the outside. Inside, it is completely different.
Go back with me to Galveston, Texas, in June 1865. Picture a woman working in a cotton field on the edge of town, bent over the plants in the heat, her hands raw from picking. She hears shouting from the road. Someone is running toward the field, waving his arms. “We are free! The soldiers have come! It has been read in the town! We are free!”
She straightens up slowly. For a moment she does not believe it. The overseer is still standing at the edge of the field with his whip. Then she looks at the faces of the others around her, and she sees that they are already dropping their sacks. Something rises in her chest that she has not felt in her whole life. She drops her sack too. She walks out of the field.
PunchlineHer freedom did not begin that day. It had been true for two and a half years. But that was the day she stepped into it.
Child of God, you are free. Your freedom was accomplished at the cross. You have been redeemed from under the law, adopted as a son, given the Spirit of the Son, and made a joint-heir with Christ. The guardian’s assignment is over. The bondwoman has been cast out. The Son has made you free indeed.
“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage” (Galatians 5:1). Drop the sack. Walk out of the field. Go home to your Father’s house as a son.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- In what ways have you been living like the heir in Galatians 4:1-3, who “differeth nothing from a servant”?
- Which of the slave habits described here do you most recognise in yourself: expecting punishment, fearing initiative, feeling guilty about blessing, serving from fear, or never quite resting?
- What does Paul mean by “cast out the bondwoman”? Is there a performance-based way of relating to God that you need to refuse?
- How does the picture of the servant with the pierced ear in Exodus 21 change your understanding of serving God?
This Week
Read Galatians 3:23-4:7 and 4:21-5:1 on two separate days, slowly and aloud. Then take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. On one side, write “How a slave relates to God.” On the other, write “How a son relates to God.” Fill in both columns from the passages and from this teaching. Keep the sheet in your Bible, and when you notice yourself living from the left-hand column, read the right-hand column aloud as a Galveston announcement to your own heart.
A Prayer
Father, thank You that You sent Your Son to redeem me, and Your Spirit to make me Your son. I hear the announcement today: I am free. Forgive me for the years I have lived in the cotton field after You had already set me free. I cast out every way of relating to You that is based on fear, performance and slavery. I receive the Spirit of adoption, and I cry, Abba, Father. Teach me to serve You not as a slave but as a son who loves You, with my ear pierced at Your door by my own glad choice. I will stand fast in the liberty with which Christ has made me free. Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.