Slaves or Heirs? // Rev. Matt Kennedy // Apr 26 2026

Some decades ago, a sociologist suggested that one of the major sources of increasing depression in our world comes from the pressures we put on ourselves to create and manage an image or an "identity." He called it, "the weariness of self." The effort to fit in, stand out, or rise above can be exhausting. We have phrases in our parlance that capture this (eg "we're slaves to fashion").Biblical wisdom points us a different direction. Paul's letter to the Galatians includes warnings of a "slavery" not enforced by a master's whip, but by our own obsession with performance standards and identity markers. He tells us the gospel is not a kind of slavery, but it is an adoption (Galatians 4:4-7). Your identity is not something you must create, it is something given to you by Christ. To truly live a life of goodness and to truly know the joy of salvation, our job isn't to distinguish ourselves with behavior, signals, or performative work. Rather, all who are baptised in Christ are something more than our race, sex, or class... we are children of God (3:26-27).