than their heart-commitment to God. So he came straight to the point and defined their problem in terms of the related themes of sin, sonship and adoption. What makes someone a slave? Sin does! The bottom line is that ‘Whoever commits sin is a slave of sin’ (cf. Rom. 6:16). Jesus’ expression, ‘commits sin’, refers to the continuing, committed practice of unrenewed human nature, the point being that freedom is not secured by an external ecclesiastical connection, but by the work of God