Let us turn together to St. Paul's letter
to the Philippians, and I would like to
look at a statement that you'll find in
verse 11 in chapter 2.
St. Paul's letter to the Philippians, chapter 2,
and the statement that you will find in
verse 11.
Jesus Christ is Lord.
You can never be asked to concede to
Jesus Christ any gift or any honor that
is not his rightful due, because he is
Lord.
God has made him Lord, and he has
the right to everything that we are or
ever will be, to everything that we have
or ever shall have.
Jesus Christ is Lord.
That this far-reaching fact is hardly understood
by many who take upon them the name
of Jesus, and perhaps barely understood by any,
is pretty evident from the mode of living
that characterizes most Christian people today.
And so I take it that it's a
matter of urgency that we should give some
attention to consider this question, what really does
the New Testament mean when it speaks of
the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and when without
equivocation at all it tells us that we
are the subject of one who has absolute
rule over us and the right to everything
that we are.
Now the first thing that I would like
us to do tonight is to consider very
briefly something of the claim that is implicit
in this statement.
What does the New Testament mean when it
says concerning Jesus Christ that he is Lord.
Jesus Christ is Lord.
What does that mean?
I believe that if only we could appreciate
something of the momentous significance of bringing together
the name Jesus and the title Christ and
the title Lord, we should have a far
better notion of the nature of apostolic Christianity
on the one hand, and of the demands
of Christian discipleship on the other.
Come with me then for a moment and
let's consider what really is implied in this
claim.
Jesus Christ is Lord.
First of all think of that last all
-important term Lord.
What does it really mean?
Clearly we all and often use it, but
how often with adequate understanding.
Among the many ingredients that go to the
making of its complex and far-reaching significance,
let me now mention three that are very
primal.
The designation Lord applies in the first place
to someone who is vested with authority.
Now this is the first important ingredient in
the meaning of the term.
Sometimes it is the authority given to a
parent over his child.
Sometimes the authority of the owner of something
over that which he possesses.
At other times the authority that a commander
has over his troops.
But it is a legitimate authority, proper authority,
constituted authority.
It is real authority.
The Lord is always someone who has authority.
The second strand that goes to the meaning
of the term Lord takes us a little
step further.
The one who is Lord is also sovereign.
Sovereign Lord.
Perhaps it lights up the significance of the
term when we remember that this was the
common designation for the Roman Emperor.
He was Lord.
And in at least one place in the
New Testament, in Acts 25 and 26, Christos
refers to the Emperor as my Lord.
So we have two ingredients.
One, he who is Lord has authority.
He who is Lord has sovereign authority.
But there is one other.
The same term Lord also denotes deity.
It was the designation current in New Testament
times for all the deities in the Eastern
world, but more especially as far as we
are concerned, it is the New Testament equivalent
for the Old Testament Jehovah.
Now what then is the meaning of the
term Lord?
He who is Lord has authority, sovereign authority,
divine authority.
When we come to the word Christ, we
are all aware that the Christ of the
Bible is the Anointed One, the long foretold
person of whom we read in the Old
Testament, the promised Deliverer of God, who was
going to come in the fullness of the
time, and who would be singularly and uniquely
anointed to be the Savior of men.
Now when we say that the Christ is
Lord, I suppose that would mean with the
approval of all of us.
But when we come to say Jesus is
Christ, and Jesus Christ is Lord, we move
into a distinctively Christian sphere.
We leave our Jewish friends behind.
The Jew will not confess that Jesus is
Christ.
In that confession he moves from the Jewish
situation into the Christian.
But when we go further and say that
Jesus is not only the Christ, but Jesus
Christ is Lord, we have moved into an
exclusively Christian territory.
We've left the Jew behind.
We've left the worshipper of the emperor behind.
We've left the pagan behind.
We've left everyone behind.
We are in the Christian Upholstery, and in
Christian territory.
But this is the Christian claim.
It is that Jesus, the historical man of
Galilee and of Nazareth, was the Christ and
is Lord.
He has absolute authority given to him.
His is a sovereignty that knows no bounds,
and he is Lord of all.
Let us be quite clear about this then.
Scripture affirms that Jesus the Christ is Lord
of all, Lord of nature, Lord of creation,
Lord of time, Lord of eternity, Lord of
life, Lord of death, Lord of humankind, Lord
of demons, Lord of principalities and powers, Lord
of yesterday, Lord of tomorrow, Lord of Lord
and King of Kings, Lord of all.
And this is our Savior.
My good friends, it is only because Jesus
Christ is Lord that he can be my
Savior and yours.
Because he is Lord, he has a quality
as prophet.
Because he is Lord, his death has a
significance all of its own.
Because he is Lord, the future is in
his hands.
Because he is Lord, I can trust him
in this life and in the next.
And this is our Savior.
Now then, the claim that is insisted here
is clear to us.
Jesus Christ is Lord.
Now the next thing I want us to
look at is the challenge that is involved
in this fact.
The fact is fact.
Whether we accept it or not, whether we
yield to it or not, the fact remains.
We cannot change the fact.
My good friends, you can't make Jesus Lord.
He is Lord.
God has made him Lord.
The only thing you and I can do
is to concede to him his crown right.
But he is Lord.
I may kick against the bricks.
I may disbelieve.
I may rebel.
But his lordship remains and one day I
shall know that he is Lord and shall
have to bend the knee, if not willingly
then unwillingly.
Now let's look at some of the implications
of this.
Can I begin by saying that it is
a necessary aspect of Christian experience to acknowledge
the lordship of Jesus Christ.
By that we mean this.
You can't be a Christian without confessing that
Jesus is Lord.
The apostle Paul is quite clear about this.
If you confess with your lips that Jesus
is Lord and of course believe in your
hearts that God raised him from the dead,
you shall be saved.
That's the gospel.
Nothing could be clearer than that.
Confess with the lips and believe in the
heart.
Children, if you're a Christian, this is involved
in your profession.
It's not an addition.
Of course you may have made a profession
without fully appreciating all that was involved in
this.
That's a different matter.
But the fact of the matter is this.
Involved in becoming a Christian is the acknowledgement
that Jesus is Lord.
All right then.
What does that mean?
Shall we start here?
It's not enough merely to concede the title
to him.
I shall brush over that as simply as
this.
Jesus said to some people of his day
and age, he said, Why do you call
me Lord, Lord?
And do not the things which I tell
you.
It's not enough for you and for me
and Keswick tonight to take our hats off
and to say, well now yes, we'll acknowledge
him as Lord.
It's not enough to concede to him the
designation and the title of Lordship.
He asked for something more than that.
What has he asked for?
Now let me try to bring two or
three of the major factors into perspective against
the larger background of the New Testament.
What does Jesus Christ as Lord require of
me?
And I want to say three things.
One, the proper acknowledgement of the Lordship of
Jesus Christ requires us to make to him
the sacrifice of our entire souls.
The Apostle Paul put this in two ways
in his epistle to the Romans.
In Romans chapter 6 and verse 13 he
did thus, to quote, Yield your soul to
God.
In the very familiar words of chapter 12
and verse 1, he puts it in this
way, I beseech you therefore brethren by the
mercies of God that you present your body,
a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God
which is your reasonable service.
Your souls in Romans 6 and 13, your
bodies in Romans 12 and verse 1.
Now you can only present God with your
whole soul when you present him with your
body.
This is something that has gripped me in
recent days and something which I think one
has come to begin to understand perhaps as
never before.
It is impossible for you to give yourself
to God without giving him your body as
a living sacrifice.
Let me illustrate, or rather let me try
to explain it in this way.
The body is the gateway whereby all the
outside influences of the world can and can
only come in and influence the man within.
We often talk about the world, we've had
those preaching from the Rostrum today and yesterday
about the world.
Now the only way in which the world
from outside can come in and influence my
heart and my mind and the man within
it via the body, the eye gate, the
ear gate, and in other ways.
So that, you see, if I have handed
over my entire body to the Lord, the
world from outside cannot come in and encroach
upon the reserves of the inner man.
Eyes, for example, part of the body, eyes
that have been presented to the Lord as
a living sacrifice are not available to receive
the impressions of the world from pictures and
literature that is pornographic and so forth.
Eyes that have been presented are not available
to receive impressions that are ignoble and sinful
and communicate them to the man within.
The same goes for the lips, for the
mouth, for the ears.
So that if I have given my whole
body to the Lord, the world outside cannot
really and radically influence the man within.
There's another side to this.
If I have really given my body to
the Lord, the old nature within me can't
express itself as otherwise it might.
How does the old nature in you and
in me want to express itself?
It wants the hands, and it wants the
use of the lips and of the eyes
and so forth.
It must have the body.
But, you see, if I have handed over
my body as a living sacrifice, then when
the impulses of the old carnal nature arise,
the hands are not available for the old
nature, they are in the grip of the
Lord.
So for the eyes, so for the ears,
so for every faculty, so for the whole
body that has been handed over.
Now, my good friend, do you see what
this means?
If thus I have handed over the whole
and the entire body as a living sacrifice
to my Lord, the world cannot come in
and the old nature cannot express itself.
I am holy the Lord.
If my body is His, then I am
His.
The world has lost its way of entrance.
The old nature has lost its mode of
expression.
I am His.
Oh, happy boy.
So then, the proper acknowledgment of the Lordship
of Jesus Christ in the first place requires
of me that I make a sacrifice of
the whole.
Have you done that?
Oh, I know there are vested interests here,
and the world outside and the flesh within,
marshaled by the devil himself, will wage a
war.
Who of us that doesn't know something about
this, when it comes to the point and
we know what our duty is, something in
us and something outside of us, holds us
back.
But here is the demand of him who
has authority and sovereignty, purchased with blood, and
who is our divine Lord, who says, yield
me your soul, your body.
Secondly, the only adequate acknowledgment of Jesus Christ
as Lord requires in the second place that
we offer to him the service of the
pious.
As Paul puts it in Romans 6, 13,
do not yield your members to sin as
instruments of wickedness, but yield yourselves to God
and your members as instruments of righteousness.
Jesus Christ, whom we acknowledge to be Lord,
is involved in the outworking of a plan,
of a complex program that spans all the
ages of time.
And whether we are to understand the term
translated instruments, to refer to weapons of war
or simple instruments, the fact and the truth
enshrined here is pretty clear.
Our Lord, who has a program and a
plan, would have all the members of our
bodies, all the faculties and all the energies
and everything that is latent in my life,
he would have these things as his instruments.
And this is the claim of the Lord
Jesus Christ upon his people.
It's the claim to have all that is
in our possession, every member of the body,
every faculty, every endowment of ours, as the
instruments of war.
Now my friends, I don't know whether this
will pass muster with the theologians behind me
or the theologians in front of me, to
imitate Canon Craig, but I believe that there
is a kind of sanctified heresy abroad today
that is in practice a denial of this
sovereign prerogative of our Lord.
It may well turn out that this deadly
heresy which is rampant in evangelical circles and
not unknown in conventions such as this, will
eventually have robbed the Savior of as much
of his rightful dues as the blatant unbiblical
notions of some wildly liberal theologians.
What is this heresy?
It is this, that you can put a
full stop after Romans 12 and 1, and
that when men have come and have given
their all, their entire selves, their bodies, on
the altar as it were, that is the
terminus of God's requirement.
It's a lie.
There is a plain lie, but it has
been so very widely disseminated, that there are
multitudes of people in our land tonight, and
perhaps sitting in this convention, who will tell
you quite unashamedly that they are dedicated, they're
consecrated, they've been to a consecration meeting, they've
signed a card, or they've put up their
hand, or they've promised to do this and
do that.
They're consecrated.
My friend, listen, they've yet to lift a
little finger in the service of the Lord
to whom they claim to belong.
And they live a lie, because the sacrifice
of the whole must be accompanied by the
service of the past.
God does not ask for a dead sacrifice,
but a living sacrifice.
Let me put it this way.
When you have seen that the crown rights
of the Redeemer require of you, that you
should place yourself on the altar in terms
of Romans 12 and 1, and you come
to the point of yielding yourself in that
way, my friends, you've not really done anything
yet.
Not a thing.
Only given your Lord a promissory note.
That's all.
Don't imagine when you leave the altar and
leave yourself there, as it were, and you
say to the Lord, Lord, here I am,
every bit of me, all of me, don't
imagine that you've done anything.
You've done nothing, my friend.
You've put a promissory note in his hand.
Now you must go out and say, Lord,
what wilt thou have me to do?
Here are my hands.
And the hands must begin to move, and
the lips must begin to move, and the
life must begin to work.
You see, it is not right to put
a full stop after the experience of Romans
12 and 1.
We must go on and offer the service
of the parts.
Otherwise we live a lie, and as those
living in Malachi's day will rob God of
what is his.
Lastly, the one whom you, Christian, acknowledge to
the Lord has made it known that he
requires even more than the sacrifice of the
whole and the service of the part.
He requires what I can only speak of
tonight as the spending of the life within.
Can I summarize this?
Because my time is gone.
Jesus Christ does not ask of us a
kind of mechanical doing of certain things, merely
for the sake of saying that we have
done what was required of us, as the
Pharisees so often did.
They were past masters at the art of
doing the right thing, but their hearts were
not in it, so that Jesus Christ called
them actors, people's rights, actors.
And it is very possible for us to
preach the gospel, but the heart is not
in it.
The soul is not in it.
There is no giving of self.
So can we sing, and so can we
serve.
But the service that the Lord Jesus Christ
requires is one in which all the pent
-up energies of the soul, all the heart
and all the mind and all the soul,
and all the spirit, is given in sacrifice
and given up to God and for men
in the service I yield.
Oh, it's a sad spectacle, I say to
you, that there are many who could pretend
to be serving their Lord Jesus Christ, and
yet the pent-up energies of their soul
are kept in check for the field of
sport, or the stage, or business.
But there is no else in here.
There is no giving of the heart and
of the soul in the service of the
Lord.
And like the people in Maritimes Day, they
go about groaning and moaning, it's a weary
thing to serve the Lord.
They do what is required of them, but
they're not spending the life for Him.
My friend, that was not the service that
Jesus rendered.
Long before He gave His life in death,
He was pouring out His whole unto death.
And the apostles caught a glimpse of it.
Paul is constantly speaking of pouring out Himself,
dying daily, giving Himself to death, and even
in truth and in terms of spending Him,
and this is about being spent.
Are you trying to serve the Lord, my
friend, by keeping yourself intact?
Or are you giving yourself?
The sacrifice of the whole, the service of
the heart, the spending of the soul.
Can I end with this?
There is an old Chinese legend which speaks
of a potter who spent all his life
unsuccessfully to get a certain stint into his
pottery, and he failed.
Brokenhearted one day, he was putting some earthenware
into the oven, and when he had put
them in, he suddenly realized that he was
not able to achieve his life's ambition, and
he hurled his body into the oven.
And of course, you know what happened.
He was burned to ashes.
But the folks that were taking out the
vases at the end of the day, they
were aghast when they saw that the very
thing for which their master had labored all
his life was now in the broken bits
of earthenware and the few whole ones that
were taken out.
That he had failed to do in his
life, he was unable to do when he
put himself into the oven.
If your service is like that, my friend,
I want to tell you that when you
recognize that Jesus Christ is Lord, and concede
to him his lordship and his crowned rights,
you'll have a new hue, a new glory
to your service that will be to the
praise of his name and the blessing of
man.
So may it be.
As things are, hymn, that Father Reverend John
Tuft brings to us, the closing message, number
478.