This letter is from Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, chosen by God to be an apostle and sent out to preach his Good News.

(Rom 1:1) Translation: NLT

To start the history changing Letter to the Romans, why does the Apostle Paul introduce himself as a slave of Christ Jesus?

When I think of slaves, this is the image I get: If you ever watched Sparticus, a film on Roman slavery, you get a glimpse of the sort of life slaves were forced to lead. Or if you studied American history, you find an even crueller meaning of the word. And this was very much the kind of image the Romans in the Church in Rome got when they received Paul’s letter.

So these are hard words to swallow today: Are we to re-introduce the cruel practice of slavery to the church?

To understand his introduction to the letter to the Romans, we have to look carefully at the implications of the word he uses and what it could mean for us who follow the Lord today.

The difference between Paul’s ‘slavery’ and our understanding of ‘slavery’ can be found later, where Paul explains in the letter that we are slaves to whomever we obey. If we obey our sinful callings, then we are slaves to sin, and if we obey the Lord, we are slaves to Him (Rom 6:16). If you look carefully at what the Apostle says, we have a choice to whom we are slaves to.

This is not the case for slaves who were not able to choose their masters.

Paul emphasises this point here, which often gets lost in preconceptions: We have a choice of whom we are slaves to, and we get that choice through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The Lord does not take our free will from us! He does not enslave us like sin does. In our prayers, we should never lose sight of this love, this great love that Jesus Christ showed us on the cross, in that he saved us from sin.

Should we not also remember what it means to choose Jesus Christ? If we look at chapter Rom 6:22, we see that we don’t serve to no end. But rather, we who serve our Lord Jesus to result in holiness and eternal life. If there was ever a result worth serving for, wouldn’t this be it?