But If You Can
1 Corinthians 7:21 - “Were you a bondservant when called? Do not be concerned about it. (But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity.)”
Right around the time Paul was writing to Corinth, a boy was born into slavery in the Phrygian city of Hierapolis and eventually taken to Rome. His owner was a man named Epaphroditus, himself a former slave who had risen to become an important administrator in the court of Nero. The boy was permitted, remarkably, to study philosophy while still enslaved. He also walked with a damaged leg, one ancient account claiming his master twisted it until it broke.
His name was Epictetus, and he became one of the most respected teachers in the Roman world. And perhaps it’s no accident that a former slave became so consumed with the question of what it means to be truly free. His teaching began with a distinction: some things are up to us, and others are not. Our circumstances, bodies, possessions, reputations, and social positions can all be controlled by forces outside us. But our judgments, choices, and responses belong to us. So freedom begins when we stop allowing what we cannot control to rule what we can.
Paul is writing to people under that same empire and inside that same brutal institution. And his words sound like they could have come from Epictetus himself: Were you a bondservant when God called you? Do not be concerned about it. In other words, your outward condition doesn’t determine who you are. But then comes the parenthesis: “If you can gain your freedom, take the opportunity.”
Paul is telling enslaved people that slavery cannot keep Christ from claiming them, but neither must they refuse freedom if freedom comes. Epictetus taught that the enslaved man could possess an inward freedom no master could reach. Paul goes further: “The one who was called in the Lord as a bondservant is a freedman of the Lord.” Contentment in the Christian sense has never meant refusing to improve your situation. Take the better job. Pursue the degree. Get out from under the debt. Apply for the transfer. God is not more glorified by you staying stuck than by you walking through a door He opened.
Which raises the real question: what actually makes contentment possible? For Epictetus it was a kind of managed detachment, a wall built carefully around the heart so nothing outside it could reach in and wound him. But Paul's contentment isn’t detachment, but trust. He can hold his circumstances loosely because they were handed to him by a Father who loves him, which means he can stay without despair and go without anxiety.
And the deepest reason a Christian can be free is because Jesus didn’t hold Himself at a safe distance from a painful world; He came all the way into it, took the form of a servant, and went to a cross. He entered the very thing Epictetus taught men to detach from. Because He did, we are already free in the place that matters most, whatever our address or job title says about us. Free people can stay in hard ground without bitterness, and free people can walk through open doors without fear, because their freedom was never in the circumstance to begin with.
Today: Do two things. Name one thing in your situation you actually can change, and take a single concrete step toward it this week: an email, a phone call, a conversation. Then name one thing you cannot change, and hand it to God out loud.
Prayer: “Lord, give me wisdom to know what I can change and courage to leave the rest with You. Keep me content and keep me from believing I would finally be happy somewhere else. I find my greatest joy in Your presence, Jesus. Amen.”
-PK