Neither slave nor free
The Spirit breaks the barriers
It began in a humble mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906, and the revival that broke out there startled the watching world. Part of it was the sheer fervor, the prayer and the expectancy and the sense that God had drawn unusually near. But what truly scandalized the onlookers was who was in the room together. This was an age of rigid lines, where the color line ran through nearly every public space as if it were a law of nature. Inside that mission the line seemed to dissolve. Black and white worshiped side by side under the leadership of William Seymour, a black preacher; rich and poor knelt together; men and women sought God in the same crowded room. Observers marveled that the wall the whole society took for granted had, for a time, washed away. The break here was God's own, not a program anyone designed. The Spirit was poured out straight across the barriers the culture held most sacred, enacting in a storefront what Paul had written long before: that in Christ there is neither slave nor free.
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
— Paul, to the Galatians — Galatians 3:28 (WEB)
“For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether bond or free.”
This is Disconnect as the Spirit's own work, breaking down what we built up. The phase here is not a leaving you choose but a barrier God dissolves, the dividing walls a culture calls sacred coming down when the Spirit truly falls. It asks you to let Him break the lines you have been defending.
There are walls inside you that you did not so much choose as inherit, lines your culture taught you to read as simply the way things are. A prejudice you never examined. A division you assumed was natural. A category of person you keep at a quiet distance without ever having decided to. But God does not respect those lines; He pours Himself out precisely across the boundaries we are most sure of, and when His Spirit genuinely moves, the first casualties are often the divisions we had baptized as normal. So the question this break presses on you is uncomfortable and personal.
Which line are you still defending as natural that the Spirit means to wash away? It is easy to admire a barrier that fell long ago. It is easy to celebrate a hundred-year-old revival that crossed somebody else's color line. It is harder to let the same Spirit cross the ones still running through your own heart. But that is where the break wants to go: not into history, but into you.
Over and over the Spirit has broken the Church open across lines it had treated as permanent, whether racial, social, or national. The outpouring on Azusa Street in 1906 startled onlookers less by its fervor than by who knelt together in the room, in an age when the color line ran through nearly every public space as though it were a law of nature. For a time that wall washed away, and people saw enacted what Paul had written: in one Spirit we are all baptized into one body, neither slave nor free. When the Spirit truly falls upon the Church, the dividing walls a culture calls sacred tend to come down. Before a watching world, a Body still sorted by the world's categories has not yet let the one Spirit baptize it into the one Church it already is in Christ.
What cannot be shaken is the one body the Spirit makes, where there is neither slave nor free. Cultures will keep raising new walls and calling them natural; revivals rise and recede. But the unity God pours out across every barrier is His own work, and it remains long after the divisions are shaken down.
- Which division have I assumed is simply natural, when the Spirit may be calling it a wall to break?
- Where do I keep a kind of person at a quiet distance without ever having decided to?
- Am I willing to let the Spirit cross the lines still running through my own heart, not just admire when He crossed someone else's?
Lord, I have inherited walls I never examined and called them natural. Pour out Your Spirit across the lines still running through me. Break the divisions I have defended, and baptize me into the one body where there is neither slave nor free. Amen.