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Jesus Is Lord

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Jesus is Lord. Those who claim to belong to Christ say it, we pray it, we sing it, but do we live it?  When we say, “Jesus is Lord,” we ought to be doing more than merely acknowledging He created the universe.  If He is Lord, then He has complete control of our lives (Colossians 1:15-18).  We are to sanctify the Lord, setting Him upon the throne of our hearts even when it is difficult to follow Him (1 Peter 3:15).

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I suppose that many of us in this contemporary age do not like being told what to do.  We want Jesus to be our Savior, but we are not so big on Him being our Lord.  We cannot have one without the other.  When following Him is easy, we’ll let Him have the chair, but we still want to sit on the throne when temptations come (Luke 8:13).  Some of us have believed the religious lie that we can practice selective obedience – where we choose when we will and will not obey.  This is no kind of obedience.  This is why the religious world lives in confusion because people adapt their own standards for their faith, morality, worship, and life rather than conforming to the words of the Master, the standard that will judge us all (John 12:48).  Many will follow God’s word when it fits in with their wishes, but they also seem to think that God has opened His throne to man’s feelings when following the word of God becomes too morally or socially challenging.  And yet, they rejoice in the promises of God all the while failing to heed His conditions for salvation.  They claim they love the Lord, but they do not listen to Him; love listens and obeys (Luke 6:46; John 14:15).  To merely listen to what the Lord says without obeying is to follow the foolish to destruction (Matthew 7:24-27).  How can we claim to know God and have His grace working in our lives if when it comes to His word we have stopped up ears (Matthew 13:15)?

Jesus says we are to obey all things that He has commanded (Matthew 28:20).  The church is not a democracy where everyone should think up ways that they feel would best express our religion and then decide what is to be done by majority vote.  The church is a monarchy; it is a kingdom established by the King of Kings (Matthew 16:18-19; 1 Timothy 6:14-15).  He has all authority (Matthew 28:18).  Christ is the head of the church (Colossians 1:18).  It is our duty as the body to precisely follow the lead of the head, not to act independently of Him (Colossians 2:19).

Many claim to know the Lord, but the only way to truly know if we know Him is to keep His commandments (1 John 2:3).  This will determine whether He knows us in the judgment (Matthew 7:21-23; 25:12).

-Mark Day

Is it Possible to Know God?

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Anyone who does not think correctly about God can never think right about the Bible and Jesus. Without God revealing Himself to mankind we cannot know Him. We cannot prove God by comparing Him to us. God is not made in the image of man. God is not a product of man’s creation but rather man is the product of God’s creative powers.

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God stands above man in every way in all things that pertain to both the physical and spiritual.  We stand as the created and He stands as the Creator. God stands as the standard of authority and we must submit to that authority to be right. He stands as the giver of all physical and spiritual blessings and we are the recipients. The psalmist declared of God, “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?” Psalm 8:3-4.

God is more than a projection of our mind. God is not the end product of a process of unaided reasoning. Man did not just create or mentally invent the concept of God and therefore he exists only in the minds of believers. In fact, philosophers, both theistic and infidel agree, that while the imagination may analyze, combine, compound, and modify ideas which are received through the senses, it cannot create any extra sensory ideas. Alexander Campbell in his debate with atheist Robert Owen made the argument for the existence of God:

  1. The idea of an Uncaused First Cause (God) had always been in the world. I.e. God is eternal.
  2. It did not originate through reason and could not through imagination.
  3. The concept of God must have come through communication between the Creator and the created.
  4. The conclusion therefore is man did not create or invent God in their own minds.

Man cannot find God on his own without communication. So, why has God communicated with man? One of the reasons God has communicated with humanity is otherwise no man could have ever known God nor of man’s lost condition. Man is ignorant of God and he is ignorant of his sin. Without God specific revelation to mankind, man could not have known God in the sense of understanding the spiritual matters that affect man and his salvation.

What was the purpose of Christ coming to this earth? To save sinners. See Luke 19:10; Romans 5:8. The purpose of Scriptures is to save, instruct, and equip us. See 2 Timothy 3:15-16. The Scripture is all sufficient, we have what we need. 1 Peter 1:3; Romans 1:16 (The remedy for man’s sin)

Man needs two things. Man that is ignorant of God and guilty of sin needs Revelation and Redemption. God both Speaks and Saves through His Word. He has revealed Himself to mankind in such a way whereby when we read the Scriptures we may understand what God’s will for man is. See Ephesians 3:3-4.

Is it possible to know God? YES! However, God cannot be known apart from His own revealing of Himself through the Scriptures. Man’s ignorance and guilt cannot be remedied without God’s revelation and redemption He has provided. Therefore, we can see the necessity of God revealing Himself to men in order for man to know Him and have the blessings of salvation.

 

-Jerry D. Sturgill