THE BEAUTY OF HIS LORDSHIP
Today we finish our series on “the beauty of the Lord.” We’ve looked at Christ from the perspective of his humanity, his wisdom, his mission, and his deity. And I am keenly aware of how utterly inadequate all of this has been when it comes to actually capturing Christ’s beauty. But ultimately, he is not really known through hearing a sermon or developing a particular theology, but through a faith that seeks to follow him in the struggles of everyday life, which is why today I want to conclude with the beauty of Christ’s lordship.
The phrases, “Jesus is Lord” or “the Lord Jesus Christ,” are two of the most common expressions in the New Testament. The single word “Lord” became a virtual synonym for Jesus. But what does it mean when we say Jesus is Lord? Does it mean he’s the “boss?” Is it a reference to his deity? Is it an expression of worship, or does it impact how we actually live?
When we look at the many ways the phrase is used in the New Testament, we discover that it captures all of this and more. Yes, there are many other titles for Jesus in scripture—he is the lamb of God, the Messiah, the Good Shepherd, the King, the light of the world, the Word make flesh, the Son of God, “the way, the truth, and the life,” the Alpha and Omega, and many other things. But when the apostles began composing their letters to young churches, they most often summarized it all with the single word “Lord.” Why?
When we remember that Jesus’ original followers were all Jewish and that the only scriptures they had were the Old Testament writings, we can begin to understand the profound connotations that came with the word “Lord.” In our English translations of the Old Testament, the word “Lord” is used hundreds of times as a title for God. When the letters are lowercase, they merely translate the Hebrew word “adonai,” which means “master,” and which could be a title for a person as well as for God. But when our English bibles put the word LORD in all caps, it is actually translating the Hebrew word “Yaweh,” which was the sacred, personal name of God.
By the time of Christ, most Jews couldn’t read Hebrew but relied on a Greek version of the Old Testament, which translated both of these Hebrew words with “Kyrios,” which in English is Lord. Consequently, it became the most common title for Jesus because it carried within it both the reality of his deity, as well as his role as our master. In other words, “Jesus as Lord” was a call to both worship and obedience.
Which is why understanding his Lordship is so important today. It seems to me that with many Christians, “Jesus as Lord” has been replaced by “Jesus my companion.” He has been recast into a pleasant but largely innocuous friend who is there to cheer us on or to offer us some modest advice. And should we choose to ignore his advice, well that’s okay, because we also see Jesus as a very long-suffering and non-judgmental friend. I hope that if you’ve learned anything from me over these last five weeks, it’s that such a view is a million miles away from the Christ we actually confront in the gospels.
Which is why Jesus himself took this title “Lord” so seriously. As he asked the crowds on one occasion, “Why do you call me Lord, and do not do what I say?” Or in the upper room on the night he was betrayed, after washing the disciples’ feet he tells them, “You call me teacher and Lord, and rightly so, for that is what I am.” Yes, later on that same night he tells his disciples that he does not view them as servants but as his friends, which is a crucial dimension of the Lordship of Christ. But we often forget that in that same passage he explains to them what he means by our becoming his friend, when he says: “You are my friends if you do what I command.”
In other words, by becoming our friend, Jesus does not stop being our Lord. Rather, he is a Lord who wants to be in a relationship with us that is not based on fear or an obligatory sense of duty, but on a deep, mutual, and voluntary love—and yet a love that recognizes the vast difference between Christ and ourselves, that ours is not a friendship of equals but one of a Master offering us a privileged status.
A half dozen times in that upper room Jesus tells his disciples, “If you love me, you will obey my commandments.” This means that warm feelings about Jesus or a distant admiration ultimately mean nothing. It is our obedience that counts. One of the most sobering warnings ever uttered by Christ comes at the end of the “Sermon on the Mount,” when he says:
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!”
This is serious stuff. According to Jesus there are apparently a lot of people who have no problem calling Jesus their Lord, and yet who are not particularly interested in actually doing the will of his Father. Instead, they talk a good talk. They may even have profound theological insights and do spectacular things in Christ’s name, but in reality they have no vital connection to Jesus at all. They think they know Christ, but he clearly doesn’t know them.
You see, the Lordship of Christ is ultimately not about what we profess or some periodic gesture we may make. It’s not some vague, sentimental allegiance to Christ. It’s not about being connected to a church, or being engaged in charitable activities, or trying to be a good person. For Christ to be Lord, we must come to the end of ourselves—to wake up to the fact that we are blind, broken, and helpless apart from God. We have to come to a place where knowing God—which includes becoming like him—is the single most important desire in our life. All our values and perspectives and goals are now shaped by him.
It sometimes comes as a shock when people finally wake up to what the Lordship of Christ is really all about. Suddenly God doesn’t exist to do my bidding or to simply make life pleasant for me. God ceases to be a means to some other end (be it happiness or whatever), but he becomes an end in himself.
Suddenly we understand why Jesus kept telling people that becoming a follower of his involves a kind of dying—dying to our ego, our plans, our desires. Or to use a favorite metaphor of Jesus’, becoming his follower is to take up a cross and to begin a march upstream against the very currents we live in. But if his Lordship requires a dying, it also guarantees a resurrection that begins now, a resurrection to a whole new way of life—a life of deep peace and rest and renewal. To submit to Jesus as Lord is to allow him to make us into something new, something like him, something that begins on the inside, but shapes our outward life too.
And once we awaken to this basic reality, then so many of the difficult sayings of Jesus make perfect sense. When he tells us to take sin so seriously that if our right hand should cause us to sin it’s better to cut it off than to be cast into hell, we can hear these words as coming not from some cruel, controlling, and life-denying despot, but from a Lord who understands better than we do the crippling effects of our sin. He is a Lord who loves us too much to simply look the other way.
This also explains why the discipline of the Lord is such a big topic in the New Testament. Part of Jesus’ beauty is the utter seriousness with which he loves us. In fact, his discipline is love, or as the epistle to the Hebrews puts it:
My children, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his child. …God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.
What all of this implies is that following Christ as Lord does not mean our lives will always be pleasant and easy. Not by a long shot. But this is precisely where “Jesus as Lord” can also be such a great comfort, for the scriptures declare, and his resurrection confirmed, that Jesus is not only Lord over those who turn to him, but he is actually Lord over all creation, including those forces of evil that at times seem to dominate our world. Jesus as Lord means that we can find shelter in the storms of life within his protective arms. Think of all those times in the gospels when the disciples became alarmed about something, and then suddenly they heard Jesus saying, “Don’t be afraid.”
As he assured his disciples just before his ascension, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” Christ is Lord and King over all the nations, even the ones who most flaunt his authority. This ought to be our hope and strength in those times when it seems evil is triumphant. As he told his disciples just before his own trial by fire: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome this world.”
So, how do we actually maintain this lordship of Christ in our lives? I would like to close today by offering you three ways through the use of three different prepositions. First, we need to learn how to live transparently before Christ. Ask yourself: Does Christ have any kind of presence in your conscious thoughts as you go about your day? Have you ever stopped in the middle of your day and simply said, “Lord, this is what I am feeling or thinking or struggling with right now”? Is self-examination and confession to God a regular part of your life? And if you do stop and simply try to be with God in silence and prayer, do you go the next step and actually give him the space to point out things going on in your life that perhaps you have conveniently overlooked? Do you find yourself growing ever more sensitive to the Holy Spirit’s promptings, whether it be a sense of what you ought to be doing, as well as what you ought to stop doing?
Without asking such questions, the image we have of ourselves may become a sham. For Christ to be Lord, we need to allow him to reveal who we really are and what he wants us to become. In human relationships, people who are completely closed or private are often people without a lot of close friends. If we want to be in close fellowship with God, we need to be ruthlessly transparent before him.
Second, not only must we live before Christ, we must learn to live obediently under him. I run into a lot of people today who prefer to stand over Christ, who are forever cherry-picking the New Testament for what they prefer to believe about him. Too many people keep the real Jesus at a distance. They prefer a vague role model, someone to admire from afar as you might admire a painting. They like all this Christian jargon about being loving and kind, but they prefer not to drill too deeply into what Jesus actually taught. He ceases to be their Lord and instead becomes a kind of spiritual backdrop.
Third, not only do we live before and under Christ, but his Lordship means living dependently in him or by him. Jesus once told his disciples: “Apart from me, you can do nothing.” Is this a reality in your life? Are you a self-confident person or a Christ-confident person? Do you find yourself turning to him when you make significant decisions, leaning on him when you are struggling, staying close to him when everything is going great and you are tempted to think you’ve got things under control? His Lordship means continually seeking to keep him in our conscious reality through all the means of grace God has provided: in prayer, scripture, worship, and fellowship.
Christian fellowship, in particular, is often the last thing we think of when we talk about Jesus as Lord, which is really tragic. Why is it that in the upper room, when Jesus is so intent on giving his disciples some critically important things to remember in his absence, that he gives the “new” commandment to love one another even as Christ loves us? Jesus didn’t come just to save individuals but a people whom he called his flock, his church, his bride. Christ can never be fully known unless we are deeply connected to other believers because other believers can display dimensions of Christ that we lack. They can also become a means for Christ to speak to us and hold us accountable. To have Christian friends is to be part of a bigger whole whose sum is greater than its parts. Mature Christian friends (and I emphasize that word “mature”) are among the greatest gifts God ever gives us.
Finally, let me say once again that Jesus as Lord means that I have discovered he is not a means to some other end in life, but Jesus in himself is the end, the goal, the fullness of life. To know him—to walk daily with him in the ebb and flow our ordinary days—is to find deep joy, peace, safety and wisdom; He is the way, the truth, and the life. Even in heaven he will be our window into the mystery of God, our means of being joined to God’s very life. In him and through him we will find everything we need. God in his essence will always be beyond our understanding, but in Jesus “the Lord God” is made visible, knowable, someone who has walked in our shoes.
So no matter who you are or where you are on this journey of knowing and following Christ, always remember that no matter how severe or difficult the road may get, Christ is right there in the midst of it, inviting you, shaping you, healing you, and drawing you to himself. Even in his discipline, his motive is always love. And over time, you will discover that the Lordship of Christ is your only place of real safety, peace, and rest. As he put it to the crowds that followed him:
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Amen