One of my favorite statements to come from the Bible comes
from the John 1. In this verse,
Nathaniel makes the sarcastic statement of “can anything good come from Nazareth?” Phillips response is “lets go find out.” In the following verses, Nathaniel has an
encounters Jesus and becomes one of the twelve disciples. How we respond to Jesus and who He says He is
should impact our lives greatly. It can
be everything from Jesus is nothing more than a lying lunatic, to He is the
Lord of my life and everything in between.
If we make Jesus the Lord of our life, which I hope we are on a path
too, here are three ideas on how this Lordship affects our lives.
The first
one is the idea of maturity. Maturity is
more than just knowing more facts about Jesus and knowing the books of the
Bible forward and backward. How does
knowing that Jesus died for us make us change how we live our lives? It is more than just doing things and not
doing things. Rules are important, but
what are our intentions for doing or not doing something. It has to be more than fire insurance,
because this is really self centered Christianity and it makes my relationship
with Jesus all about me. It is moving
from being self centered to fulfilling the great commandment, which is loving
God with everything we have and loving our neighbor as ourselves. When we put our relationship with God first,
things tend to fall into place. I can
rattle off facts about the athletes in this years Super Bowl, but it doesn’t
mean I know them. It is shifting from
knowing facts to knowing the person.
The second idea is that the
Lordship of Christ should change is the idea of community. This idea of community doesn’t necessarily
mean that we all get along all the time.
I would argue that if a church or any other organization is always
arguing or always getting along, there is something wrong. I think that the beginning of this idea of
community is are we willing enough to share.
I see this a lot when people give prayer request, we can share just
about anything as along as it is some one else.
For some reason, people don’t want to share their deep soul, and
probably because we want to keep feeling the warm fuzzes. Community is not only care to share, but are
we sharing to do something about it. Are
we willing to come along side people no matter how dirty and messy it gets or
how much they get on our nerves. There
are healthy boundaries that we need to follow, but are we willing to put them
into place and use them.
The third idea is evangelism. Are we willing to break out of our country
club mentality and share the gospel. I
will keep this short, but are we willing to let our friends and family not
spend eternity in heaven. There is this
idea of personal evangelism and corporate evangelism. The former is what are
you doing on a personal basis to reach others for God, and the latter is what
is our churching doing to reach our community.
A person I know favorite statement about my home church is that if it
were to fall of the end of the earth, would the community miss us? This is true on a cooperate level, but also on
a personal level. If you personally
ceased to exist would your circle of influence miss God’s presence that you
provided? If you received good news
about being cancer free, wouldn’t you want to share it with the whole
world? The news we have on eternal life
is much greater than becoming cancer free (becoming cancer free is a great
thing). So If we make Jesus the Lord of
our Life, it means that we mature, live in healthy community, and tell others
what Jesus has done for us
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