Jesus: Savior But Not Lord?

Romans 12: 1, 2 “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is–His good, pleasing and perfect will.”

We need to dust off our Bibles and read it (and not just books about it) to find out what God wants from us…how He wants us, His people, to live…how He wants His people to worship Him…we need to pray that He will show us our lives from His perspective…we need to know what is on His heart…and seek to know what is pleasing to Him…and learn to lay aside everything that isn’t pleasing to Him….

We need to understand why Jesus came to live on this earth when He could have stayed in heaven…and why He chose to die for us. We absolutely have to understand that we owe Him nothing less than our very selves. We need to ask God to let us see sin as He sees sin…and help us to hate sin as He hates sin. Our hearts should break that, despite our best efforts, our righteousness is as nothing but filthy rags before an Almighty God…we should despise the fact that we are, and always will be, sinners. Yet, we must learn to strive to obey Him completely…without hesitation…and without reservation…
even when we don’t understand… even when it’s uncomfortable. We need to love our God with all of our heart…all of our soul…all of our strength…and all of our mind.

We must do away with empty words and phrases that now make up our evangelical landscape like so many bombs waiting to go off… phrases like…“Christian liberty,” “God doesn’t care how we live…or worship…or dress… as long as we love Him”…“it matters what is in your heart, not what you do”…“carnal Christian.” Our preachers need to preach repentance…obedience…and holiness. They need to remind us that there is a hell and that many, many people are going to it…and one of them could be me. We must quit emphasizing God’s grace to the point that it becomes “cheap grace”…with a “you can do anything and get away with it” attitude.

We need to get in the Bible and start questioning our doctrine against what God says because a lot of what is taught in our churches is not biblical…like eternal security for those who have “accepted Jesus as Savior” even when they continue walking a sinner’s road…“the sinner’s prayer”…easy believe-ism…like emphasizing faith apart from works, or the other way around, when it actually takes both…there is more, much, much more, but, we’re either too ignorant or too lazy to care…we could all research it and find out if we wanted to…but we don’t…not really.

But we should care…we need to care…because we had better believe that Jesus cares…about all of this…we had better repent…of willfulness…of rebellion against Almighty God…of carnality…of spiritual laziness…of engaging in a sinful love-affair with the world…of lying to Him…of saying with our words that we love Him and then proving with our lives of disobedience that we don’t…we had better repent of wanting a Savior Who will save us from the fires of hell and not a Lord Who reigns over our lives…for if we want one without the other we will get neither….