Bible Lesson 87

LORDSHIP

John 13:13

You call me Teacher and Lord, and you say well, for so I am.

The term ‘Lord’ signifies one having power or authority, and would point to one who is Master over others, or God. If you are reading this Bible lesson, you have a Lord that is real, and one that is perceived. Most of us like to think that we are lords of our own lives but if we are honest we all operate with all kinds of lords. Husbands are lords over wives and wives lords over the husband, Almost everyone has a boss and that is their lord, at least in their work. Further than that many have drugs as their master, some have alcohol, others sex or pornography, and on and on.

For those who are self-employed, the self can be a very demanding lord. Regardless of what kind of life you live you either have some form of organization with someone responsible to lead; or else you will not be in business for very long. Americans have always been known as independent types who, for the most part, thought to have no lord, at least not a fleshly lord.
Christians have always ascribed to having God as our Lord, but in this present society we have seemed to be willing to put ourselves, our children and all that we hold dear, under the lordship of a political party that promises ‘all things to all men’; but has no power to provide anything except promises. I have come to the point that I do not trust people who want to supplant God in my life, how about you.

I know that many do not bow to the Lordship of Christ, but that is only a temporary thing that can and will occur only in anyone’s life as they live here on the earth; because there is coming a time, and it may be closer than we think, that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:9-11). Everyone, without exception, will see and recognize that Jesus Christ is Lord over everyone and everything on the earth and in heaven; and those who do not receive Him as Lord while they live here on the earth will have an eternity in torment and flames to bow and confess that ‘He is Lord.’

That is a sad state of affairs, but that will happen to many people due mainly to the fact that we live in a world that allows the devil to distract our hearts and minds from the real important things and we do not hear a lot of specific preaching of the gospel. There are a lot of facts about God but not a lot of knowledge that is passed along because, for the most part, preachers and pastors in our day are afraid to preach the truth as the Bible reveals it. Be that as it may, you can make up your mind right now and right here, that you will either seek Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior or you will spend your time-bending you knees and confessing that Jesus Christ is Lord of all as you suffer for eternity in hell.

I know that many do not bow to the Lordship of Christ, but that is only a temporary thing that can and will occur only in anyone’s life as they live here on the earth; because there is coming a time, and it may be closer than we think, that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:9-11).

Everyone, without exception, will see and recognize that Jesus Christ is Lord over everyone and everything on the earth and in heaven; and those who do not receive Him as Lord while they live here on the earth will have an eternity in torment and flames to bow and confess that ‘He is Lord.’

That is a sad state of affairs, but that will happen to many people due mainly to the fact that we live in a world that allows the devil to distract our hearts and minds from the real important things and we do not hear a lot of specific preaching of the gospel. There are a lot of facts about God but not a lot of knowledge that is passed along because, for the most part, preachers and pastors in our day are afraid to preach the truth as the Bible reveals it.

Be that as it may, you can make up your mind right now and right here, that you will either seek Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior or you will spend your time-bending you knees and confessing that Jesus Christ is Lord of all as you suffer for eternity in hell. With all of that in mind, I would ask that you set aside some time that you could examine your own life to see just how many ‘lords’ you have in your life. Our world today has so much to occupy its time’.and most of it does not amount to anything at all, but it keeps us from considering our state and our well-being.

Please allow me to urge you to think seriously about the fact that your life is a life that has an expiration date. You and I are going to die and whether we have ever thought much about it, death and the grave are not the ends of life. We will everyone have an eternity to spend and there are only two destinations listed in the Holy inerrant Word of God, the Bible for anyone, and they are heaven and hell. Where will you spend yours’

With all of that in mind, I would ask that you set aside some time that you could examine your own life to see just how many ‘lords’ you have in your life. Our world today has so much to occupy its time’.and most of it does not amount to anything at all, but it keeps us from considering our state and our well-being.

Please allow me to urge you to think seriously about the fact that your life is a life that has an expiration date. You and I are going to die and whether we have ever thought much about it, death and the grave are not the ends of life. We will everyone have an eternity to spend and there are only two destinations listed in the Holy inerrant Word of God, the Bible for anyone, and they are heaven and hell. Where will you spend yours’

It depends in large part on how you understand the Lordship teachings (doctrine) of the Bible. What we have to understand about Lordship is that it is a prime element in our salvation. Sadly, we have begun to attempt to divide Christ, and by that, I mean that we want to distinguish between Christ as ‘Savior’ and Christ as ‘Lord’. Certainly, Christ is the Savior of mankind, and we are told in Acts 4:12, ‘Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.’

We are saved by grace alone, through Faith alone, in Christ alone! Yet, all too often we hear the refrain, ‘Do we have to make Christ our Lord as a condition of salvation” That kind of question does not qualify as a Biblical question because the Bible provides us with much information to prove that Christ will be Lord of All or Christ will not be Lord at all. In the first place, it is almost heresy to ask about us ‘Making Christ anything’.

We cannot and do not ‘Make’ Christ anything because Christ is God and we have exactly no power over God. Christ is Lord of all because as we are told in John 1:3, ‘All things were made through Him, and without Him, nothing was made that was made’: and in Colossians 1:15-17 we read ‘He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers.

All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him, all things consist’. Then in Hebrews 1:3, we are told, ‘Who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.’

With knowing from the Word of God all of that, I ask you ‘what can you make Jesus Christ: or what can you make Him do’ Can you make Jesus Christ Lord of your life’ Absolutely not, again I say that you can not make Christ anything or make Christ do anything! Christ ‘is’ Lord over all because He created it all. Now what you can do is to make yourself something or make yourself do some things.

You can ignore the Amazing Grace of God and make yourself a sure inheritor of hell for eternity or you can receive the gift of God, the blood of Christ to forgive your sin and you then become a child of God and inherit heaven. In doing that you simply understand that Christ became your Lord before He saved you.

Let’s look at Romans 10:9-10 and think about what it says to everyone who reads it, ‘That if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth, confession is made unto salvation’.

That is clear but let’s just go over it to make sure that you understand what God is saying to us all. Understand now, the way of salvation is through faith in Jesus Christ and His work on the cross to redeem you from sin. Verse 9 of Romans chapter 10 begins with’..’Confessing something, or rather someone, and that someone is Jesus Christ and we confess with our mouth that we are dying to self and bowing down to the Lordship of Christ in our lives.

Now, we cannot outsmart God, so you can forget about simply saying that you have done that, and believing you are now saved. It doesn’t work like that and the Word of God, the Bible makes it evident. What verse 9 of Romans chapter 10 means is that the person who truly confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord of their life, is that Christ is, without reservation, hesitation or equivocation Jesus Christ is their sovereign, their Master, the Lord of their life.

Now if you know the Bible at all you know that there is a lot of things that are included in that confession. That confession can only be made by those who have been called, justified, sanctified, and glorified by God in true salvation.

In confessing Jesus Christ as Lord, the person who is saved ‘believes in His heart, not simply in his head but in his innermost person, that God the Father raised Jesus Christ from the dead, and that we who know Him in the forgiveness can shout’.’ He is risen’! We can also proudly confess that Jesus Christ is Lord of our lives, and we live as if He were Lord. We confess; because we know that we know that we know, and we agree with God the Father when He declares that Jesus as Savior and Lord (Romans 10, verse 9).

John the Baptist preached in the wilderness that He was called to preach, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make His paths straight’ He was Lord to His disciples except for Judas who was the son of perdition and after the resurrection, the angels said to those who came to the grave, ‘Come and see the place where the Lord lay.’ (Matthew 3:3; Matthew 28:6). He was the Lord of all when he lay in the manger, and He is Lord of all today, as He sits at the right hand of the Father, in heaven.

We seem to have lost the knowledge of just how august and majestic and great our God is. Why else would anyone ever seem to take offense at the idea that the very God of heaven, is our Lord, our Sovereign, and we as His creatures owe Him the duty of loving service. Perhaps it is because we have not been taught about God but rather we have enjoyed most of our teaching being about how great we are and how we need to have our felt needs met without regard for the worship of God.

We spoke before about our propensity to say things like, ‘I made Jesus Christ Lord of my life’, or we tell others that ‘they should make Christ Lord of their lives’. We also said before, and I repeat ‘. We don’t make Christ anything, God the Father has made Him both ‘Lord and Christ’ (Acts 2:36). He is Lord of All (Romans 14:9; Philippians 2:11). We need to practice saying that to ourselves until it becomes our way of thinking’..we don’t make Christ anything and we don’t cause Christ to do anything’ He is Lord and what we are to do is to prove that we believe that by bowing to His sovereignty and obeying Him as we love and serve Him.

Is Jesus Christ your Lord and Savior’ Do you love Him more than you love anyone or anything on this earth or in heaven or hell’ Are you obeying all that you know He would have you to do’ If you can truthfully answer yes to all of those questions, then Jesus is your Lord and Savior. Otherwise, He will be your judge on that day and you will hear Him say’.’Depart from me you worker of iniquity, I never knew you’.

Jesus Christ makes no bones about the fact that He is the Lord of those who will inherit heaven; because He requires that those who call Him Lord, must do the will of His Father which is in heaven, to prove that they are fit for heaven (Matthew 7:21-23). It is not that we make Jesus our Savior and later make Him our Lord. No indeed, we receive Him as Lord before we are saved, that why Romans 10:9-10 tells us that we must confess with our mouth the Lord Jesus Christ”.and that is first and foremost, and then we are told to believe in our heart that God has raised Him from the dead’.and we would be saved.

First, confess with our mouth and that is not simply saying that Jesus Christ is our Lord but knowing who Christ is and what He demands from those who come to Him and saying it with every fiber of our being and meaning it regardless of what happens to us. In the book of Matthew, chapter eight and verses 18-22, we find our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as He states how our actions (if we are saved) will prove that He is Lord.

In those verses, Jesus is dealing with people who have been following him (disciples or seeming to be disciples) and one of them says to Jesus, ‘Teacher, I will follow You wherever You go’. And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head’. Then another of His disciples said to Him, ‘Lord, let me first go and bury my father.’

But Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.’ That sounds hard to us in our time when practically everyone is interested in self, and for your information, we are the most selfish people to ever inhabit the earth; however, Jesus made it clear that being a true Christian comes only to those who are radically changed by God and who have bowed their knee and confessed that whatever their Lord requires ‘.they will do! Jesus was saying to these people, ‘If you would be My disciple you must be willing to suffer with me and to love me more than you love, even a dead father’!

In reading Matthew 8:18-22, it looks as if these people were Disciples of Christ in name only. They wanted to know more about Jesus and to be able to witness His miracles and benefit from His feedings but there were ‘other’ things that were more pressing. In other words, Jesus would be their Lord unless there was something else that demanded their time. We have nurtured that kind of discipleship in the visible churches of our day.

We have changed God’s rules and we decided how far to go with Lordship. That mindset will cause a lot of people to spend their eternal lives in hell. Jesus spoke in Luke chapter 6 and verse 46 and put the spotlight on what it means to have Him as Lord, and in that verse, Jesus asked those who said that they were disciples of His, ‘But why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord’, and do not the things which I say” I don’t know about anybody else but I do know that there are many places (churches) that seem to think that they can worship God in their spare time and with their pocket change. Hear me well now, that will not work, in true salvation, we receive, acknowledge, and prove that Christ is our Lord and Savior or we are not children of God (John 1:12).

If we know God and Jesus Christ and what They have done for us, to redeem us from sin and death and hell, we have to know that our allegiance to Christ has to be driven for our love for Him, who He is and what He has done for us even while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:6).

If anyone understands who they were and what their conditions were as fallen human beings, and then know what we can know about God and the fact that He sent His Son Jesus Christ from heaven to this sin spoiled world to live among us and reveal Himself better to us, the creature, and finally to die the most agonizing death imaginable so that those who would believe and submit to His Lordship in their lives would be saved, then love blossoms and we truly know God through faith in His Son Jesus Christ. Loving Christ and submitting to His Lordship carries with it a demanding package; because Jesus says in Matthew 22:35-40, that that kind of love will cause us to obey all of the commandments that He has left in His Word the Bible.

If we love Christ as the Bible tells us that we must love Him, then we are submissive to His Lordship and whatever He has commanded that we will do.

I heard a good preacher here the other day dealing with the passage of Scripture in Luke chapter seven, verses 36-50, concerning Jesus at the supper at a Pharisee’s house, and a woman came and stood at Jesus’ feet and cried to the point that she wet the feet of Jesus and then she began to dry His feet with her hair, as she kissed the feet of Jesus and then she anointed the feet of Jesus with fragrant oil.

Matthew chapter seven and verse seven tells us that the fragrant oil was very costly and that it was contained in an alabaster flask. This was the most expensive and treasured thing that this woman had, yet she poured it on the feet of Jesus because she had come to receive Him as her Lord and Savior.

Apparently, she did not have a good reputation in her community because the Pharisee tells us in Luke chapter six, that if Jesus were a true Prophet, He should have known this woman was a sinner, and would not have allowed her to touch him. See this Pharisee, a leader in the church of that day did not realize that Jesus came to save sinners, at least sinners who could love like this woman, who showed that she loved Jesus and that He was Lord of her life, by expending all that she had (tears, confession, and her treasure) on Him.

I want you to consider for a moment with me about that woman and about that alabaster flash of expensive fragrance. Let’s bring this account forward to us and our day. Just suppose that the only treasure that we had was contained in our ‘alabaster box’ and we were standing at Jesus’ feet.

Would we be willing to break open our box and allow the world to see what we treasured’ What would be in your’s and what would be in mine’ Would our alabaster box contain our pride, or our profession, or our possession and our prejudices’ Would we be willing to break open our flask in front of everyone who knows us and pour it all out at the feet of Jesus’ How do you answer that question’

If you have anyone or anything in this world that you hold more dear than Jesus Christ, then you do not have Him as your Lord: and if you don’t have Him as Lord then you don’t have a savior! Note as you read Luke chapter seven, that the Pharisee did not love Jesus enough, because He had not offered Him the customary courtesy of water to wash His feet, nor the kiss of welcome, and no anointing oil; however this woman who was a known sinner had offered all of that to Her Lord Jesus Christ.

The bottom line is that the Pharisee remained a sinner’..while the woman was told by the Savior, that her sins were forgiven that her faith had saved her and that she could go in peace. She had willingly bent her knees and gave up everything that had any meaning to her in favor of Jesus Christ, and He had made Himself the Lord of her life. What about you and me’ Have we loved Christ that much, or have we wanted to hold back some small alabaster box of sin that will stand between us and heaven on that day’

Luke chapter 14 beginning at verse 25 and running through that chapter is a good place for us to see what is required in our salvation. These verses of scripture are not often heard in our churches; because they might make some lost sinner feel bad about himself; nevertheless, these are words that were spoken by the One and Only Savior.

Perhaps we ought to read and hear what Jesus has to say to us today as we read beginning at verse 25 of Luke chapter 14. Verse 25 tells us that there was a great multitude following Him and Jesus turned and said to them, ‘If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, ‘he cannot be My disciple.’

Notice, Jesus did not say that unless you loved Him supremely, unless you bowed to His Lordship in your life’.that you may not become His disciple, or that you probably might not become His disciple, instead He closed the door and said unless you loved Him more than you love anyone, including your own life, you could not be His disciple.

Did Jesus demonstrate that same level of commitment to His Father God’ He certainly did, if you will remember the account in of Jesus as He spoke to a multitude there in Matthew chapter 12, verses 46-50, and Mary, His mother, and His brothers sought to speak with him.

When He was told that His mother and His brothers wanted to speak to Him, He said, ‘Who is My mother and who are my brothers” He motioned toward those who were His disciples and indicated that they were His mother and His brothers; because they were doing the will of His Father which was in heaven.

Understand now, Luke 14:26 does not mean that we are not to love our families but what it does mean is that because of our great love for Christ, our love for our family would look like hate.

What we have to remember is that we do not get to ‘make up’ the rules about salvation, God has already laid down those rules and they are as Psalms 119:89 reminds us, it is settled forever in heaven. We want to negotiate and compartmentalize our salvation to include some of what God has said, but including much of what we want to do or think or say, and that is outrageous. Jesus tells us clearly in Matthew 12:30 that there is no middle ground with Christ.

We are either for Him or against Him. The Bible declares to us that Jesus is Lord, He is Lord in Judgment, Lord of the Sabbath, Lord over the Church, Lord over all (Acts 10:36; Ephesians 5:23; 2nd Timothy 4:1; Mark 2:28).

The Greek word for Lord in the New Testament is Kurios, and it means Lord. It is used to define Christ, and speaks of Christ as Lord some 747 times, in the New Testament. If we know Christ in salvation, we know Him in many different offices, among them we know that Jesus is God, Jesus is Sovereign, Jesus is Savior, and for those who are truly saved, Jesus is Lord!

Until next time,

may God bless and keep you

This is Bro. Bob