If you have grown up in the church, I bet you have heard—more often than not—the phrase “accept Jesus as your Savior and Lord”. Has a ring to it, doesn’t it? But let’s face it. Regardless of where that phrase fits into your personal experience with Christianity, there are much deeper realities, commands, and implications that go well beneath the surface of this statement that we usually treat so tritely. And that’s because, I have a confession to make, and I’m sure you’re right there with me:
Many times I like the ‘Jesus as Savior’ more than the ‘Jesus as Lord’.
Problem is, I can’t just pick which one is more palatable, as an attempt to treat Jesus like a personal buffet line, choosing what I think my life-diet should be like. In fact, I would be deceived to think that I could have Jesus as my Savior without him also being my Lord. Making him Savior means making him Lord.
Truth is, I can’t have one without the other. It’s all or nothing.
Jesus is not Savior or Lord. Jesus is Savior and Lord. It’s a one-package deal. You can have both, or nothing, because he is both, not one thing.
Let’s further unpack this one-package deal:
1. Making Jesus savior without making him lord means limiting him only to save you from something (hell) but never to saving you towards anything.
Yet, making Jesus lord and savior means allowing him not only to save you from something (hell) but also to something else (life in Him).
Indeed, how can you be ‘saved’ if you are only saved from something but never to something/someone else? Is it an option, after all, to choose a Jesus to save us from sin’s penalty of hell so that we can continue to live in sin’s power, but still have a lifetime warranty of fire insurance? Surely not.
2. Asking Jesus to be savior but not lord indicates that you are still lord, in control of areas that you don’t want him to touch. Many times when we say we want to follow Jesus, what we really mean is that we have now given him permission to follow us.
Jesus did not die to save us so that he could then be our personal accomplice in our own idolatry or a servant in our own worldly courts. Rather, He served us before the Father, by saving us from the Father’s wrath, so that we could be servants for the Father’s joy.
With these two points, it’s evident that wanting Jesus as only savior is self-serving, self-preserving, and self-protecting. But wanting Jesus as Savior and Lord is God-serving, God-magnifying, and God-following.
If you want Jesus as Savior but not Lord, you will get neither. But if you want Jesus as Lord, you’ll get both.
Indeed, Jesus cannot be your Savior until you have first made him your Lord.
The verse “Take up your cross and follow me” does not mean say a prayer and receive a ‘get-out-of-hell-free-card’ in church monopoly, so that we can keep strolling around the board of life with self-interest. That verse, instead, means allowing Jesus to monopolize every part of your life, then going wherever he tells us to go, because every space on the board of life is his anyways.
If Jesus saved your whole soul, how could you not wholly live for Jesus? It wouldn’t make sense for you not to.
The words from a popular English evangelist, Leonard Ravenhill, ring exceptionally true in this case: “Is what you’re living for worth Jesus dying for?”
Why Surrender to Jesus’ Lordship?
You might be thinking, “I feel like my surrendering to Jesus’ lordship is motivated by fear and guilt more than anything else, and that can’t be right”. Correct.
But the faulty motive of ‘why‘ we should surrender is redeemed in the ‘Who’ we should surrender to: Jesus. Or, to say it another way, the reason for ‘why’ is motivated by the character of ‘Who’. And in Jesus’ character, we find ‘grace upon grace’ (John 1:16).
Realizing and relishing the greatness of grace given to us is what will naturally compel our hearts to give Jesus the lordship he deserves all along. Receiving a great grace from Jesus motivates a giving of great lordship to Jesus. Receiving a sweet grace helps us to be assured of and to trust the sweetness of His lordship.
Indeed, we’ll only follow the leader as much as we know who the leader is. And we see the clearest demonstration of the character behind this ‘Who’ on the cross. Dying in our place. Now how could we not die to our former way of life of self-lordship for Him and his lordship? He’s a better leader than we are anyways.
We’ll only ever follow wholeheartedly the One who wholly loves us, wholly gave himself up for us, and who only can wholly satisfy us.
Grace is at the beginning, and it is the spark that initiates and brings to completion in us the catalyzing work of lordship to Jesus. Without first experiencing grace, we will not willing give lordship. But because there is grace in abundance, so also will there be lordship.
To conclude, the grace given to us by Jesus compels us to elevate him as both Savior and Lord in equal degrees.
