Lordship

What does it mean for Jesus to be Lord in your life?


That is the question we basically tackled this week in lectures. Jesus has two aspects of his character. He is Saviour and he is Lord. Is it possible for Jesus to be Saviour without being Lord, and for him to be Lord without being Saviour? Is it possible for a chocolate chip cookie to be a cookie without the chocolate chips? No! I believe that the salvation Jesus provides MUST be accompanied by him being Lord in our life. So does that mean one is more important than the other? Let's use another analogy... on a one dollar coin, is the side with the queen on it more important than the side with the loon? Of course not... just as Jesus being Saviour is EQUALLY as important as him being Lord. So, with all this said, for Jesus to really be our Saviour, he has to be our Lord too. Interestingly enough though, the Bible does put more emphasis on his Lordship. He is called Lord over 7000 times in the Bible... and called Saviour much less. Back to the original question:


What does it mean for Jesus to be Lord in your life?


It means obedience. It means that no matter what Jesus tells you to do, you go right out and you DO it... as long as it is according to his character. Now, maybe we say, "What if we think God tells us something that might not seem right, or something that might not be possible, or something that you will NEVER do," but think about that for a second. Is it aligning with the nature of God if he tells us something that hurts us? Absolutely not. God created us, he loves us, he doesn't want anything bad to happen to anybody in this entire world, and his heart breaks for it. The other day, we were talking about sex slavery... people who will pay 75 cents to have sex with a little girl of 4 or 5. That is disgusting... it is horrendous... yet it exists. Does God like that? No. Does God allow that? I believe God has given us free will.... he chose to partner with us. In a blink of an eye, God could wipe out all evil, so why doesn't he? I believe it is because he desires a partnership. He wants us to call him LORD. So, let's look back at obedience. God isn't going to tell you to do something you can't do. He won't tell you to fly to the moon if you don't have a spaceship... What he tells you might bring people against you, it might anger people, your family may or may not support you, your friends may or may not support you.... heck, you could be COMPLETELY alone... but if you are obeying God, than the creator of the universe is happy. He is happy that you surrendered everything to him.


It is like King David. As a young man, he was pretty close to Saul. And do you know what Saul did? He threw spears at him, he tried to kill him. David was by our standard "in the right". David was the man that was obedient to God, but what did David do? He left. He ended up being pretty nearly alone for many years... because he believed in responding in the opposite Spirit, he believed in obedience, and he believed in surrender. This brings us to what else Lordship is. Lordship is surrender. Lordship is giving up those things that we believe we deserve. News flash: We don't deserve anything. If God wanted, all we deserve is death. "The wage of sin is death," Paul writes. Everything we get, EVERYTHING, is a gift. So what "rights" are we called to surrender? We are called to surrender our possessions, our desires, our fears, our food, our clothing, our comfort, our relationships (friendships and intimate relationships), our right to live where we want, our career, our reputation., our FUTURE and our calling, our abilities and talents, our appearance, our right to be right, our Past, and doing the things the way we want. We are called to surrender all of these to Jesus. We are called to put them at the foot of the cross. No problem right? We only have to surrender one thing... EVERYTHING. So, not easy? Very right, but that doesn't mean we don't do it.


Lordship is also trust. We obey, we surrender and we trust. Would we surrender everything if we didn't trust? Absolutely not. Has God done anything that has ever made you mistrust him? Now really think about this... if something pops into your head, was it REALLY God, or was it a result of human free will, was it a result of... others... was it a result of Satan? I do believe that God does nothing to merit our mistrust, so why do we lack the trust? I have no idea. I lack trust. I don't know why, but I am working on it with God, and working on a little bit at a time.


Lordship is such a huge thing, and there are so many more things I can talk about, but I will leave this post with a thought:


If God isn't Lord over all - and I mean absolutely everything, every fiber of your being directed towards God - he isn't Lord at all.