In 1774, a man called Nathan Niles wrote this: "By neglecting to embrace the Gospel we convert civil liberty, which is in itself a delicious kind of food, into a slow poison." That's a very dramatic statement! Here we have this civil liberty, this is what America is all about! It's the land of the free; it's the home of the brave! That is our civil liberty! It's a delicious food, but it is possible for the delicious food of civil liberty to degenerate into slow poison. That is a chilling thought! I would submit to you it is something that needs to be very, very intentionally confronted in these days. Freedom has its price, and we forget it at our peril.

Now with that in mind we are going to look in Peter's second epistle, and the second chapter. In this particular chapter, Peter is addressing a serious issue. He says, "that historically, as far as the Children of Israel were concerned, they always had false prophets." There was a succession of false prophets. If you had a true prophet, you could be sure somewhere along the line, there would be a false prophet, but he says, "In our days, we have false teachers." He goes on to have some pretty straightforward things to say about the false teachers of his day. Then he projects, and he suggests that the Church should always be alert to the possibility that there are people who will be teaching things that are fundamentally false, and this is how he describes them in verse 17:

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These men — false teachers that we have to be on our guard against — are springs without water and mists driven by a storm. Blackest darkness is reserved for them. For they mouth empty, boastful words and, by appealing to the lustful desires of sinful human nature, they entice people who are just escaping from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity — for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.

"A man is a slave to whatever masters him!" Now, is it possible then, that you can live in an arena of freedom, and living in an arena of freedom not even to realize that you're actually in bondage? Well, let me give you an example that old Nathan Niles, whom I quoted earlier, once gave. He said, "It's a very strange man who sits in a prison cell and boasts about the fact that he is free from having responsibility of having to go out to work." Now it is true that he is free from the responsibility of having to go out to work, but is he so excited about his freedom that he can't see his bondage?

He's sitting in a prison cell. there's a fundamental incongruity about this. Is it possible that in the midst of our hard earned civil freedoms, that we could be living in bondage and not even be aware of it? And the answer is an emphatic "YES!" In fact, perhaps the thing that ought to concern us deeply is that in "this land of the free and the home of the brave," so many are living in bondage and don't even know it. Now how could this happen? Well, it can happen for the very simple reason that what is so often called "freedom" is in reality bondage.