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.
Romans 10:9, English Standard Version
This may be the simplest expression of the Gospel in the entire Bible.
In this passage from Romans, the lordship of Jesus is the clear centerpiece. We learn from this verse that salvation hinges on two primary things: the outward confession of God and inward belief in Him.
These are two of the most important parts of a person’s connection to God and of what relationship with Jesus looks like.
You might have noticed that the mention of Jesus being our Savior is not present in this verse. This is not because Jesus isn’t our Savior, but because you cannot embrace Jesus as Savior without also embracing Jesus as Lord.
So, what does that first part meanโwhat does it mean for Jesus to be Lord?
That is the question we will begin to explore together here.
Table of Contents
Lordship
The word “lord” might bring to mind an image of an old British landowner or some other form of master from times long past. But really, for someone or something to be lord is pretty simple: it means that one thing is master of and has authority over another thing. In this case, it means that Jesus has authority over the Christian’s life.
Practically speaking, the lordship of Jesus can be expressed in four things: authority, repentance, submission, and love.
Authority
Authority is part of the nature of the word Lord itself in Greekยฒ, which is the language the New Testament was written in. So, examining the notion of Christ’s authority is important.
We must then ask the question, why does Jesus have the authority to be Lord and why would He want to?
We will explore together the details of Christ’s authority over time, but as we begin this journey, we can settle on a few things upfront.
First, Jesus has the authority to be Lord because He is the only one who could and did fulfill the words of prophecy (which are predictions of future events) from the Old Testament. You can think of the Old Testament as the story of God leading up to the climax of His story, the introduction of Jesus.
In the environment of first century Palestine, which is the name of the area in the Middle East where Israel and other territories and countries stand today, there were a number of people who claimed to be the Messiah. Unlike the others, however, Jesus was able to fulfill the messianic prophecies from hundreds and even thousands of years before that pointed to Him authentically being who He said He was.
These are things that could not have been accomplished through human will and effort alone. And the odds of one man fulfilling all of them are truly astronomical: Jesus being born of a virgin, silent as He was accused of wrongdoing and sin He hadn’t committed, and even the prediction that He would be crucified, centuries before the Romans had even invented such a means of torture and execution, are just a few examples of the prophecies He fulfilled.
Jesus also claimed that He was the only way to God: He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). No other man claimed to be the way to God and One with God, as John 17 describes. More on that later. (Check out a couple of our The Way, The Truth, The Life shirts here and here!)
So, the combination of both what Jesus said and did, in addition to historical, literary, and archaeological evidence and the presence of miracles, for example, are some of the reasons why we can have good and strong faith in Jesus Christ being who He said He was and trusting Him as Lord.
Repentance
Repentance is a deep and necessary part of relationship with Jesus. Once we have established His authenticity and authority, placed our trust in Him, and made the confession that He is Lord, we must repent of our sin.
The notions of repentance and sin are incredibly unpopular today, but that doesn’t make them unimportant. In addition to the kingdom, faith, and money, Jesus emphasizes repentance many, many times.
Like the definition of lord, repentance is simple: it is the act of confessing our sins to God, turning away from sin with His help, and putting our focus on Him.
Repentance also challenges us to recognize that God is God, and we are not; that Jesus alone bore the perfect and sinless standard that God the Father requires; and that it is only through Jesus’ blood that we are made clean.
At its heart, repentance is a posture of simply saying “I’m sorry” for the things that we do wrong and asking for forgiveness (and also forgiving othersโsee Matthew 6:14-15). It also isn’t something that we do once and then are done doing forever. It is an ongoing process of humbling ourselves before God, embracing His forgiveness for what weโve done, and allowing Him to empower us to live differently.
Of all the parts of Jesus’ lordship over us, repentance is at the same time one of the easiest and hardest things to do. It is easy because we know we need help and forgiveness, but even with a new nature in Christ, the fight against sin and what we selfishly want to do is an ongoing battle that we must not let our guard down to, which brings us to our next point.
Submission
Submission and surrender go hand-in-hand with repentance.
Once we are in relationship with Jesus, we can surrender our lives and submit ourselves to Him knowing that He is trustworthy. In fact, His lordship requires us to surrender our control.
Jesus describes it this way: “And he said to all, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me'” (Luke 9:23).
Jesus is saying that the Christian life is about the laying down of our own desires, unless those things are given to us by Him. We must no longer pursue our own interests but His interests, His purposes, His agenda, and His will.
When Jesus is Lord, He is our coach, our boss, and our commanding officer. What He says goes.
He directs our path, He plans our steps, and He gives us our marching orders.
Plain and simple, He gets to tell us what to do because the Christian life is about Him.
Love
Finally, we have love.
Love is what started it all in the first place. God’s love is at the heart of why He created us and it is what drives His desire to be our Lord.
1 John 4:8 simply says, “…God is love.”
In perhaps the most well-known verse in the Bible, we also see that it was God’s love that compelled Him to send Jesus to be our Lord and Savior:
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16
As was briefly mentioned earlier, God is God and we are not. As a result, He simply knows what’s best for us. So, in His love and kindness, He desires to teach us how to live. In this way, the lordship of Jesus and all of the parts of it that we have looked at so farโauthority, repentance, and submissionโall find their fulfillment in the love of God.
There are almost too many instances of God’s love in the Bible to mention. But, interestingly, many of them intertwine His love with our obedience to Him.
In John 14:15, Jesus tells us that “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
Jesus is clearly telling us that in our mutually loving relationship with Him, our obedience to Him will itself come out of our love for Him. And without His love and empowerment, we would be unable to do the things that His lordship of us requires.
The next obvious questions are, what does God ask us to do? What does working with Jesus look like? These are the questions we will examine in the next article, Co-laboring with The King.
References:
- Holy Bible: English Standard Version, Study Bible. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2011.
- Strong, James. The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible: With Main Concordance, Appendix to the Main Concordance, Topical Index to the Bible, Dictionary of the Hebrew Bible, Dictionary of the Greek Testament (Nashville: T. Nelson Publishers, 1996), G2962.
