Everyone is a slave in the spiritual sense. We are either slaves to sin, which is our natural state, or we are slaves to Christ. The writers of the New Testament willingly declared their status as slaves of Christ. Paul opens his letter to the Romans by referring to himself as a “slave of Jesus Christ” (Romans 1:1) and his letter to Titus by calling himself a “slave of God” (Titus 1:1). James opens his epistle the same way, “James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ” (James 1:1). Most translations say “servant” or “bond-servant” in these passages, but the Greek word doulas means, literally, “slave.”