I’ve always heard that I needed to make Jesus my Lord and Savior.  For the longest time, I had no issues with the Savior part of that because I had a strong desire to be saved from the consequences of my sins.  Making Jesus Lord was a different story because we live in a culture that treasures freedom and independence.  We don’t want anyone to be Lord over us.  What is really difficult is to say that Jesus is Lord of our lives and really mean it and live it. Not just say it as a Christian slogan.

Phillipians 2:9-11 says, “Therefore God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, and at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, or those who in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Romans 10:9 says, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved”

The term LORD is the term most used in the New Testament to identify Jesus — over 600 times it declares that Jesus is Lord. The term Savior refers to Jesus only about 25 times in the New Testament. In the Bible the word  “KURIOS”  is the Greek word translated to “Lord” and that word meant master, possessor, supreme authority, king or owner.

This means that if Jesus is Lord, that means he is our boss.  When your boss tells you to do something, you do it.  Francis Chan has a cool video where he talks about telling his daughter to go clean her room and she gives the response that we typically give when Jesus tells us to do something.  You can check out the video here:   http://vimeo.com/69175025.  The thing is, when God tells us to do something, he expects us to do what he says.

In a book by David Platt called Radical, Platt points out that it is easy for American Christians to forget how Jesus said his followers would actually live, what their lifestyle would actually look like.  They would, he said, leave behind security, money, convenience, even family for him.  They would abandon everything for the gospel.  They would take up their crosses daily.  This is what making Jesus Lord of our lives means.

Platt points out that Mathew 28:19-20 says, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”  We take Jesus’ command in Matthew 28 to make disciples of all nations, and we say, “That means other people”.  By the way, I’ve done that for years.  My wife’s sister, Vanessa, has been a missionary for 13 years all over the world including 6 in Uganda with an organization she and a couple of others from seminary helped to create called Fount of Mercy.  I always thought that to do what God says in Matthew 28 to Go and make disciples of all nations was “her deal” and God didn’t call me to that.

But I was more than happy to look at Jesus’ command in Matthew 11:28, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest”, and say, “Now that means me.”  We take Acts 1:8 that the Spirit will lead us to the ends of the earth, and we say, “that means some people, that means people like Vanessa”, but we take Jesus’ promise in John 10:10 that we will have abundant life and we say, “that means me”.  You see, in the process, we have unbiblically drawn a line of distinction, assigning the obligations of Christianity to a few while keeping the privileges of Christianity for all of us.

I began to understand that Acts 1:8 and Matthew 28 are not suggestions, but commands.   I understood that the real message of biblical Christianity is “God loves me so that I might make Him-His ways, His salvation, His glory, and His greatness-known among all nations.

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