I think it's easy for us to make the Lordship of Jesus Christ all about what we can do for Him.
You might ask, "but isn't that what it's about?"
Listen to what Jesus says in John 15:5, He says, "I am the vine, you are the branches,
he who abides in me, and I in Him, he bares much fruit.
For apart from Me, you can do nothing."
I really want you to get this, that we are not meant to simply be doing what we do FOR God.
You see, our relationship with God is not meant to be purely based on our own efforts,
the truth is when we receive the nature of Christ - yes there is work involved - but
He wants to be the one working through us.
A lot of us will look at our lives and say "I gotta fix this area, I gotta fix that area.
SOMEHOW I gotta get all these things in my life to submit under His Lordship."
And that's not a bad desire to have because our lives should be submitted under His Lordship,
but the problem is that a lot of us often go about it with the wrong motivation.
We look at this as something that we need to try really hard to do and what ends up
happening is we put the focus on us when the focus should be on Him, on what He's done
for us.
Jesus cannot be your savior unless you're willing to make Him Lord, but He cannot act
as Lord in all the areas of your life until you recognize how great a savior He really is.
And recognizing how great a savior He is means admitting that we bought with a price.
It means we are admitting we don't own ourselves anymore.
We completely lost ownership of ourselves to sin, and yet Jesus paid our debt off with
His own life, buying us back.
When your life is not your own, you are not lord over yourself, but the good news is that
when you're life is not your own you're not left relying on your own strength either.
The more that you and I recognize our desperate need for God, the more we are in a position
to receive help from Him.
God is not just our King, He is our friend.
He is not just our Master, He is our loving Father.
He is not simply our Lord, He is our savior.
See, before He can be Lord over every area in our lives we have to let Him be savior
over every area in our lives.
How do we do that?
By seeing ourselves as being redeemed by His sacrifice.
No matter how good it look like we're doing at the moment, by rejecting that pride that
says "I'm following the rules now, I've got this under control now, I'm pleasing God with
my actions now."
Be careful, because you can always fall off of a pedestal that you put yourself on, but
you can never fall out of God when He is holding you up.
When we let our hope rest in our performance we're always gonna be let down.
But, on the other hand, Paul asks us this amazing question in Romans 8:35, he says,
"Who will separate us from the love of Christ?"
And what he's saying is that when our hope is grounded in His love we will never be let down.
If we are saved, then when God looks at you and me, He sees the righteousness of His Son,
Jesus, not our own.
I mean, I don't even want Him to see my righteousness.
It's like a filthy rag.
But when we walk in the light of redemption, constantly acknowledging the love that God
poured out on the Cross, then we constantly see ourselves for who we really are.
And that's when we stop putting so much trust in our own efforts.
When our eyes are set on our savior and not on our own actions, it's that much easier
to let go.
That's when we don't have to work ourselves into the ground, trying to make Him Lord.
Instead, when His nature, when His Spirit is leading us we just open up our hands and
we let Him have control.
Galatians 3:3 says, "Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?"
It's kind of like a man who owns a horse that wont budge.
Our lives are like this horse, and it wont move.
And we want to submit to God, so we're standing in front of this horse and we're pulling on
the reins of this horse and we're trying to get it to walk behind us along this path.
But the more we pull on that rope, the more that horse yanks back.
And Jesus is saying, "when I became your savior, you let me ride on top of the horse.
I'm seated in the saddle of your life.
But that horse is not going to move until you stop yanking at that rope and let Me steer
it where it needs to go.
Look at Me, quick looking at the size of the horse, quit tugging on that rope.
You are not strong enough to move that horse."
When we choose to make Jesus savior, He gains ownership of our lives but when we trust
Him enough to let go, to let Him be Lord, we give Him control over where our lives go.
He knows better than we do, He knows the better timing, He knows the better direction.
The Holy Spirit knows how to mold us better than we know how to mold ourselves.
But I think the reason many of us never find freedom is that we're too afraid to let go
of that rope.
We're not letting the work of Jesus be our motivating factor, we are still thinking too
highly of ourselves.
Paul tells us in Romans 12:3, "For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among
you not to think more highly of himself than he out to think..."
We are not changed based on the number of blisters on our own hands.
We are changed when we choose to remember the holes in the hands of our savior.