You may still be in bondage, but God sees you as His son. He sees you according to destiny. He sees you according to His call on your life. You may be struggling and have all kinds of problems, pressures; you may not even be saved, but God sees you through the eyes of His destiny, says My Son and He calls you to move out of slavery and into sonship.
I want you to open your Bible with me in John 15. I want to pick up where I was last week. How many felt challenged last week? That's good isn't it? Well I'm being challenged too, so mostly I'm preaching to myself. You just get to hear it, that's all. [Laughs] You can be like listening in, but God's speaking to me in a lot of areas at the moment and it's good to be part of it. So let's have a look in John 15 and we want to ask the question today whether you're a slave or a son, a slave or a son - and we're going to pick up from John, Chapter 15, Jesus' words. There they are in Verse 15; "No longer do I call you servants." That word is [doulos 00.00.45] or slave, someone who just does what someone else asks them to do or tells them to do without any understanding at all - He said for a servant doesn't know what his master is doing. There's no revelation. It's just do what you're told. It's an issue of obedience - but I call you friends, for all things I've heard from My Father I've made known to you.
So you didn't choose Me but I chose you. Amen, God chose you. That's a good thing to know, you got chosen. You didn't turn up by accident. You thought you got here by accident or you came because your parents made you or something like that, but actually God chose you - and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and your fruit should remain, whatever you ask the Father in My name He may give you. So Jesus is talking to His disciples in this and He is lifting their status. Now through the Bible people had not known God as a Father. People had known God in many ways, in fact continually through the Bible it's a revelation of what God is like and so various people in the Bible, God revealed Himself by His many different names and His names represented what He's like.
God is so big it's hard to put Him in words, so He reveals Himself in a whole number of different ways and when Jesus came into the earth, Jesus brought the ultimate revelation of who God is. God is Father and so Jesus came to represent the Fatherhood of God and He's now speaking to his disciples who'd only known what it is to live like a slave under the laws of the old commandment, under the laws of the old covenant, in a realm of obedience; do this, you're blessed. Don't do that, you're cursed, so they lived under laws. They lived under laws but the laws were to bring them to a time when they'd come to know God in an intimate relationship, so Jesus says I no longer call you servant slaves, people just called to be obedient, but I bring you into a new realm, friendship, relationship and friendship. That's God's heart for you and me is that we move from being a slave to keeping laws; do this, don't do that, must do this, mustn't do that, ought to do this, ought not to do that. God wants us to move from that mentality into the mentality, the freedom, the liberty of being a child of God. It's fantastic to be a child of God.
Every morning I have one of my grand daughters just comes, throws open the bedroom door, big grin and comes and leaps on the bed and wants just to have a hug. Now no one else can do that. She can do that because she's family. Family have privileges. Family have access - so God's desire is that we become a family of kings. In 1 Peter 2:9 we saw that you are a royal priesthood so when you and I give our life to Jesus Christ, Jesus paid the penalty for us on the cross. He took the penalty of every broken law and then when you and I receive Him His spirit enters our heart, DNA of God gets into us, kingly royal DNA gets in us. We become changed on the inside and God wants us to come out of a slave mentality and into a friendship relationship, being a family of kings representing Him on the earth. Jesus is called the King of Kings, so that's the things we saw last week.
Now I want to take it a bit further this week. Let's have a look in Exodus, Chapter 4. In Exodus, Chapter 4, we're looking at the Old Testament. We're looking at God's plan for Israel, so at the beginning God began to work through a man and a woman, then He worked through various people, then finally He begins to reveal He wants to work through a nation, a nation called Israel. Ultimately it'll be through the church, but this is what God spoke to Moses in Verse 22. He said I want you to go to Pharaoh. Pharaoh was the ruler of Egypt and held all the people of God in bondage. They'd been in bondage for 400 years of slavery, so notice He's talking about the end of slavery. This is what God's got in mind; Israel's had 400 years of hard slavery. They've been under a culture of taskmasters, under hard and bitter bondage for 400 years, not a single miracle. Four hundred years, not a single prophetic word; 400 years, not a glimmer of hope; 400 years, building pyramids, serving the Egyptians, their lives made very hard and very bitter. It tells us in Exodus 1, it tells us that they made their lives hard and bitter with the bondage that they put on them.