Jesus is Lord

The scripture referred to is Romans 10:8b-13.


Did you know that you can get Kindle books even if you don't have a Kindle? You can buy and read them on your PC or laptop or notebook via the Cloud or on the Kindle app on your smart phone or tablet. The reason I mention this is that right now C. S. Lewis' American publisher Harper Collins has been offering a terrific sale on most of his books for E reader devices. I have downloaded his space trilogy, Mere Christianity, and the Screwtape Letters (with video and audio clips that can be played on the iPhone). I know this sounds like a commercial but bear with me. I have reread these books many times over the last 40 plus years and I am enjoying them again in a format I can bring with me everywhere. It has been a while since I read Mere Christianity and I still find it a wonderful introduction to Christian belief and behavior. And I love the way Lewis tries to set things out in a way that almost all Christians can agree on. For instance he points out that Christians agree that Jesus died for our sins. Where we tend to disagree is on our different explanations of how exactly his death saved us. Was it a ransom paid to the devil to liberate us from his rule, a prominent theory in the early church? Was it because God, the person offended by our sins, is a person of infinite worth and therefore only an atonement of infinite worth would suffice, a popular medieval theory? Was it vicarious punishment? Was it an example of love? Lewis says the divergent explanations are to help us understand the facts of the faith but they aren't necessary to faith. An explanation of something is not the same as the thing itself. You don't have to understand the process of digestion to get the benefit from eating a meal or comprehend the workings of the internal combustion engine to use a car. Lewis' very sensible advice is if the explanation doesn't help you, drop it.

Why do Christians argue about various doctrines? Setting aside the fact that human beings can and will argue about anything (if you've ever had more than one child, or been on a committee, you know this to be true), I think at least part of our theological disagreements are about different explanations of the same phenomena. The Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Eastern Orthodox, Episcopal and other mainstream churches all recite the Apostles Creed. That's the most basic summary of the faith the church has come up with. Those are the essentials. So why do we have differences?

It is said that a man once approached the great Rabbi Hillel and asked him to teach him the whole of Judaism as the man stood on one foot. Hillel replied, "Love your neighbor as yourself. The rest is commentary." Very astute. And Christians, despite agreeing on the essentials, nevertheless argue because we interpret some of the things differently (Did God create by making living things appear magically or using a process like evolution?) or we practice them differently (Baptism by immersion or pouring? Infants or adults only?) or we emphasize different things (Faith and works: state their respective importance and relationship to each other in salvation.) It's not so much what we believe as how we believe it works that divides us.

In our passage in Romans, Paul seems to boil down the creed to a very basic assertion. "If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." Wow! Just 2 things? Confess that Jesus is Lord and believe that God resurrected him and you will be saved? That's it?

Essentially, yes. But Paul chose his words very carefully and what he wrote has a lot of implications. Enough to fill a sermon. Which is fortunate for me.

Let's unpack this verse. "If you confess…" The Greek word translated "confess" means "acknowledge" or "admit." It doesn't just mean to say the words but to publicly declare something that is a deep conviction. Just as you should consider seriously before you confess to a crime, so should you think hard before confessing that Jesus is Lord. This is not something tossed off the tongue casually. It commits you.

"…with your mouth..." As we said, this is a public declaration. When I officiate at a wedding I tell the couple that the wedding vows--to stick with the other person through thick and thin, to love them for the rest of your life--are simply what anyone in love has already resolved in their hearts. At the marriage ceremony, we simply dress these resolutions up in their Sunday best and ask you to say them aloud before God and man. If you truly do feel that way in your heart, the vows shouldn't be too hard to say. You ought to want to shout them from the rooftops. (Which, by the way, has become a Valentine's Day tradition in Japan. Reserved Japanese men get up in front of a crowd and shout out their love for their wives. Which most American men might have trouble doing.) And the same goes with declaring your allegiance to Jesus.

"…that Jesus…" It seems obvious that Jesus has to be a part of this but there are some so-called Christians that are more in love with Christian ethics or Christian liturgy or certain ideas in Christianity than they are Jesus. Or they reinvent Jesus in their image. They make him a Democrat, or a Republican, or a vegan, or a hunter, or a free market advocate, or a socialist, or a symbol of White Power, or an anti-Semite, or a new age sage who imposes no restrictions on what you are permitted to do as long as you are true to yourself. But the Jesus you commit to has to be the one we find in the Bible. He doesn't fit into any categories we create. He is sui generis, a category all his own. He is the Son of God, our Redeemer, our Judge, our Advocate, our High Priest, our Sacrifice, our Prophet, our life, our Savior, our King. And more. If the Jesus you follow agrees with you on all of your opinions, he is not the real one. He is an idol created in your image. The real Jesus will comfort you when you are afflicted but will afflict you when you become too comfortable with the way things are.

"…is Lord…" Lord means 2 things to us as it did to the people of Jesus' day. It means a person who has power over you, a person you must serve. We don't have the kind of aristocracy in this country that used to and still exists in other countries. Unless you've hobnobbed with some upperclass Brits, you've probably never met a person with the actual title of Lord. But through most of history societies were arranged in hierarchies. The majority of people were peasants or workers who did not own their land but worked for a knight, a duke, a count, an earl or someone other person who was their lord. They in turn had a king or an emperor they called lord. And, of course, if you were a slave, your master was your lord. Your earthly lord had a great deal of power over you and your life. If he gave you an order or decreed something be done, you had to obey it.

Declaring Jesus as your Lord means you obey him. The disciples, such as Paul, had no trouble calling themselves slaves of Christ. That's a more honest translation than the traditional "servant," because they were not hired but their lives were bought by his spilled blood. As are we.

Another Eastern custom might explain this. If someone saved your life, you were beholden to them for the rest of your life. Jesus saved us from the consequences of our sins. If he hadn't we would have continued to spiral away from God, the source of all goodness, becoming less and less creatures made to reflect God's image and more and more creatures wrapped up in ourselves, our injuries and our slights and our desires and our envies and our resentments and our prejudices and our rages, devolving into hellish, infinitely small and dense spiritual black holes, taking in everything, giving back nothing, not even light.

That's what he saved us from. But if we let Jesus in, we must become larger souls in order to accommodate his fullness. We become nodes of God's light and love, reflecting and transmitting more and more of his grace to others. Because he saves us and transforms us, we are his and he is our Lord.

But Lord meant something else to the Jews. To avoid violating the commandment of misusing God's name, they didn't even pronounce the divine name when it came up in scripture, saying instead Adonai or Lord in Hebrew. So calling Jesus Lord is also confessing his divinity. He is not just a good man or a prophet or a teacher whom God adopted and adapted for his own purpose. He is God, entering into his own creation as a creature, to do what we should do but that only he can do. He is the king walking among his people incognito, the prince become a pauper, the ultimate undercover boss. Which means when we are dealing with Jesus, we are dealing with God himself, not some middle manager, or representative, or lackey. It means that we were redeemed not by some lesser person ordered or asked to sacrifice himself for us but by God himself taking on the consequences of our sins out of his love for us. It means when we look at Jesus, we are seeing God Incarnate. We are seeing God's nature in action and hearing God's judgment and God's wisdom and experiencing God's mercy and God's power and God's self-sacrificial love.

"…and believe in your heart…" It's all very well to say something out loud but do you really believe it, deep down in your heart? The Greek word for "believe" means not merely lending credence to something but relying upon it, putting one's confidence in it. So this is not like telling your friend you believe him when he tells you he saw something weird, something that does not matter, something that will have no effect on your life.

This is like your child is eating something at the mall and chokes and collapses and some guy runs over and says he's an off duty EMT and he can't get the obstruction out of your child's mouth but he says he can do a tracheotomy with his pocket knife, he's done them before, but he needs your permission and you decide to believe him and say "yes." Biblical belief in God is not that he exists but that you trust him with your existence.

"…that God raised him from the dead…" Jesus' resurrection assumes his death. But every good person dies. Some even die unjustly as Jesus did. But if Jesus stayed dead, he would be just another martyr for a cause, like Gandhi, or Martin Luther King Jr., or Polycarp. The disciples were discouraged and despondent over Jesus' death. There would not be a Christian faith if not for the resurrection of Christ. It showed that Jesus wasn't just a good man wronged but that he was who he said he was: the Messiah, God's son, the Lord, the giver of life eternal. A lot was riding on Easter. Had he not risen, the fishermen would have returned to their boats, the women to their families, the tax collector to his hedonistic lifestyle. Had he not risen, no one would have bothered to write down his sayings or chronicle his healings or note his ignominious death. Had he not risen a zealous Pharisee would never have spread the good news of God's love and forgiveness throughout the Roman empire. If Christ had not risen, we would still be in our sins.

But because he rose, men and women abandoned their mundane lives and spread the word. Plague victims were nursed. Empires were changed. Hospitals were built. Schools were built. Monastery libraries preserved the classics. Languages were recorded. Cultures were discovered and described. Modern medicine was introduced into third world countries. Slaves were freed. Alcoholics and addicts were treated. All of these things were done in the name of the God of love who died for us and rose to give us his life.

"…you will be saved." Not just given a verdict of "not guilty" but given a new life in this world that will become eternal life in the next. Not just forgiven but given a purpose for our God-given talents. Not just freed from slavery to sin but freed to serve Christ by serving others.                      

When you say "Jesus is Lord" and believe that God raised him from the dead, you have assented to the essentials of the faith. The only thing left is to remember that, as it says in James, "faith without works is dead." If Jesus is our Lord, we must obey him. We must love God above all and love our neighbors as we do ourselves. As it says in 1 John, "let us not love with word or with tongue but in deed and truth." And with that, we have the essentials of Christian behavior.

There is a lot more to the faith. And I'm not saying don't ask questions or seek understanding. But, believe me, read enough good Christian writings, and you will find plenty of explanations to help you understand our faith better. But the explanation or interpretation that helps you might not help another Christian. And the explanation or interpretation that helps him might seem errant nonsense to you. Just don't confuse human attempts to understand the faith for the essentials of the faith itself. They are the heart of the message, the gospel, the good news that spread like wildfire across the globe. Jesus Christ, not Caesar, nor money, nor fame, nor pleasure, nor any other thing or person, is Lord. He died out of love for us; God raised him out of love for us. Living out a life of active love for him and for all those he died to redeem is the only proper response. Everything else is commentary.