Psalm 116:16 O LORD, truly I am thy servant; I am thy servant, and the son of thine handmaid: thou hast loosed my bonds.
This unnamed author declares that he is the servant of The Lord. He not only declares, “I am Thy servant”, but he emphasizes it with the words, “truly I am thy servant”. He ends this verse by telling us that he is a servant whose bonds The Lord has loosed.
The Hebrew Greek Study bible tells us that the Hebrew word for bonds is a masculine noun indicating a band, a chain, a fetter. It is used mostly in a figurative sense: the freedom from bonds given to the wild animals. God freed whatever it was that trapped the psalmist and held him in bondage. Jesus Christ said, “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36), and in that context He was speaking to religious individuals who were trapped by traditions and mere forms of godliness. The apostle Paul once asked this question: “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Romans 7:24) In that context, he was writing about the trap of his fleshly nature. Paul then declared the answer to his own question. “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.” (v. 25)
The only One Who can set us free from the traps of manmade traditions, powerless forms of godliness, and the power of the flesh is Jesus Christ. Thus, until an individual is set free by Jesus Christ, he or she is a servant of someone or something other than The Lord Jesus. There is no room for neutrality. Every individual has a master to whom he or she is a servant. Jesus taught in Matthew 6:24, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”
So to the writer and reader of this devotional, the question must be asked and answered: Whose servant are you? Psalm 123:2 says, “Behold, as the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their masters, and as the eyes of a maiden unto the hand of her mistress; so our eyes wait upon the LORD our God, until that he have mercy upon us.” May we look to The Master Himself this morning and allow His mighty mercy to set us free from the traditions and fleshly traps that bind us, and in doing so, to enable us to walk in the freedom and power of His Spirit today.
Can you say with the Psalmist, “truly I am Thy servant”? Selah
