Freedom is a wonderful ideal. But in reality, none of us lives a life that is totally free. We all have restrictions in life. Some of these restrictions arise from good things. The concrete circumstances of our life—our relationships, our family, our work, our commitments, our upbringing, our national status, and more, might all be good, but they also place real constraints on us. For example, most of us must work to earn a living; few of us can spend all day, every day, doing exactly what we want. And for some people, economic constraints are particularly pressing and severe. For some, life is so strongly controlled by economic constraints and obligations that the ideal of freedom is simply a pipe dream. In Ephesians 6:5–8, Paul is writing to people in this kind of situation. He’s talking to “slaves”. But we need to be careful here. For those of us who live in the modern Western world, the word “slaves” conjures up particular images. The word “slave” today is commonly associated with the transatlantic slave trade from the 16th-early 19th centuries, during which traders captured people from Africa and sold them as slaves to the Americas and the British Empire. Thankfully, this trade was legally abolished in the early 19th century, due to the efforts of many—especially Evangelical Christians in England such as Hannah More and William Wilberforce. Today, slavery is still universally illegal. Yet tragically, this illegal slavery continues to be a huge problem in our world. The wickedness of the modern criminal slave trade, especially the sex-slave trade, is widespread even in modern Western countries. The International Justice Mission, a Christian organisation that is a leader in this field, currently works very hard against slavery, and is worth supporting. The modern criminal slave trade is supported by the pornography industry (and by the way, please realise that if you are using pornography, you are actively supporting some of the most vicious criminal slavery, abuse and human misery that has existed in history. It’s not true that it doesn’t hurt anybody). However, the slavery Paul is referring to here was broader and more varied than either the transatlantic slave trade or the modern criminal slave trade. “Slaves” in the ancient Roman Empire were very common, because state-endorsed slavery was a fundamental building block in the Empire’s economic and social fabric. As a result, “slaves” were everywhere, and they lived in a wide variety of conditions. Some slaves were treated terribly; others were looked after very well and had quite good prospects in life. And slavery was not necessarily permanent: slaves could be freed or could buy their freedom. But of course, not everyone got this opportunity. So slavery was a widespread and varied phenomenon. Still, there was a common factor to all slavery: state-endorsed restriction of economic and personal freedom. A slave was someone who was legally tied to the household of a master, and so was not free to live where and how he or she wanted to live. These “slaves” are the kind of people Paul is addressing here, when he says: Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, with whole-hearted sincerity, as obeying Christ, not just serving to be seen, as people-pleasers, but as slaves of Christ doing God’s will from within, serving with a good attitude, as rendering service to the Lord and not human beings, recognising that for each one of us, whatever good we have done,