I. The fact that a man like Paul, brought up as he was with such a brain and such a heart, turned the wrong way at first, should be capable of burning with such enthusiasm for a man of whose history he knew very little that was real or true until he saw Him in heavenly glory, that after that he should live to be the rejoicing slave of Jesus Christ, is it a wonder that such a fact should weigh with me ten times more than the denial of the highest intellect of this world who gives me, by the very terms that he uses, the conviction that he knows nothing about what I believe? He talks as if he did, but he knows nothing about it. St. Paul knew the Lord Christ; and therefore, heart and soul, mind, body, and brain, he belonged to Jesus Christ, even as His born slave.
II. Let us try to understand what is meant by a slavery which is a liberty. There is no liberty but in doing right. There is no freedom but in living out of the deeps of our nature not out of the surface. We are the born slaves of Christ. But then, He is liberty Himself, and all His desire is that we should be such noble, true, right creatures that we never can possibly do or think a thing that shall bind even a thread round our spirits and make us feel as if we were tied anywhere. He wants us to be free not as the winds, not to be free as the man who owns no law, but to be free by being law, by being right, by being truth. St. Paul spent his whole life, all his thoughts, all his energies, simply to obey his Lord and Master, and so he was the one free man not the only free man: there were some more amongst the apostles; and by his preaching here and there, there started up free men, or, at least, men who were beginning to grow free by beginning to be the slaves of Christ.
G. Macdonald, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxvi., p. 108.
References: Romans 1:1. G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines,p. 254; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. i., p. 75; H. E. Lewis, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxi., p. 220. Romans 1:1-4. A. M. Fairbairn, The City of God,p. 215.Romans 1:1-7. Ibid.,pp. 41-9; Expositor,1st series, vol. ix., p. 105; vol. xi., pp. 309, 458; Homilist,3rd series, vol. vi., p. 108; J. Vaughan, Sermons,6th series, p. 37; W. B. Pope, Sermons,p. 175; W. J. Knox-Little, The Mystery of the Passion,p. 123.Romans 1:2. Fletcher, Thursday Penny Pulpit,vol. vi., p. 1.Romans 1:2-5. Preacher's Monthly,vol. ii., p. 253.Romans 1:3; Romans 1:4. Expositor,1st series, vol. x., p. 149.