Lord of Life. Last week I quoted 1Pet 3;15,16 - Always be ready to give an answer when someone asks you about your hope. Give a kind and respectful answer and keep your conscience clear. This way you will make people ashamed for saying bad things about your good conduct as a follower of Christ – but I omitted the first part of verse 15 - Honour Christ and let him be the Lord of your life. Whether or not we like it, Jesus is the Lord of Life, he created it, He sustains it and He knows everything about our lives, even how and when we die. When we happily accept that fact then we are very wise. As the Creator of all life we should accept that He knows all about us, everything! In fact, He knows us better than we know ourselves! So it would be very wise to allow Him to direct us, just as He wants to. He certainly wants to be the very centre of our lives and consequently we can be very special people. But, and it’s a very big – but - we all find it very hard to allow Jesus that kind of control of our lives. We’re all control freaks to various degrees and sadly that is bad news for us, for while we do what we want, invariably, it is not what He wants. What really happens when we ‘do it our way’ is that we merely succumb to the culture that surrounds us, it is all pervasive and so we do things that it dictates, without us even thinking. We all easily succumb to our church cultures, our national cultures, our family cultures. And culture is not very good! Why so? Culture is the norm that determines how a society lives; it can be a whole host of taboos where we daren’t do this or that. It is Satan who drives the downward spiral of culture, for it is never static, like anything else left to itself, it tends to chaos; that’s the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics! At the centre of this, for the individual, is the sinful nature, it dominates completely and Satan and his fiends can manipulate it all too freely. So, when we ‘do it our way’, we actually do it Satan’s way and he is much pleased. But Jesus is very sad. This is why God gave Israel the first two great commandments – Love the Lord your God with all your heart, strength, mind and soul; and your neighbour as yourself - Jesus amplified the Mosaic Law with the Royal Law – do to others what you would have others do to you - but we all know that is very hard to do, very hard indeed! So this is the reason Jesus asks us to make Him the Lord of our lives, so that He can enable us to do the impossible and defeat Satan, far more than we do usually! What does it involve to make Jesus Lord of everything? Everything! At first that also is very hard, because all hell is against us as well as our own sinful nature, but the greater our desire, the easier it becomes because He makes it easy; it’s all down to that grace that we considered last week. Probably there will be outside deterrents too, even family and friends, even church leaders, especially many church leaders, for when you succeed and enjoy the filling of the Spirit, you will be making them feel very insecure. The wonder of the Christian life is that sin and Satan are defeated, we do not have to sin! Really! The curse of sin was broken at Calvary once and for all, and we can please God for as long as we are obedient to His word. This is how we make Jesus Lord of our lives, we simply do what He says! That actually goes beyond obeying scripture, because the Holy Spirit will speak to us many times a day and give us the ‘instructions’ for the moment. Do you have those strong ‘nudges’ that make you think that you should do something? I am convinced that every child of God who has a genuine desire to be in the will of God, have these ‘nudges’ from the Holy Spirit, for He’s telling us to do things, to say things, to help somebody. This is how we get to know about those ‘good works’ that the Bible often talks about, Eph 2;10. Remember, the gospel is much more than just preaching! Unless people see our good works, we can forget about preaching. That’s the problem with most churches today, they’ve forgotten about good works and no one wants their miserable preaching. Jesus went about doing good, so should we, but far too many ‘Christians’ don’t believe that and live such insular lives that are no good to anyone, including themselves. Be assured that if you do the good works that the Holy Spirit nudges you with, very soon people will ask you about your hope. It’s a dead cert! People are very confused today, but they do want to know the truth. God is speaking gently into many lives and when they are given a Bible they say – wow, that’s great, I have been thinking lately that I must read the Bible! - join your local branch of Gideons International and they have very reasonable Bibles and New Testaments that people readily accept. But more, get out and do some good works, we always have the poor with us, John 12;8. We are now faced with generational dysfunctionality where children are born into 3rd and 4th generations of dysfunctional families and they do not know right from wrong; they are very poor, even if they get lots of financial benefits from government. When we obey the Nudges we will be blessed and a blessing to others. When we become a blessing to others and they will ask us the reason for our hope and they will listen and respond, and be born again, then we will be greatly encouraged and the whole circle will be replicated often. The more we treat Jesus as Lord of our lives, the more blessing will come. When a whole church is working like this, then revival has come to it and awakening in the community will soon follow! The Jerusalem church prayed ‘Sovereign Lord’ and the house shook and all were filled with the Holy Spirit and the church grew rapidly. Act 4;24. Obviously, there will always be some who will not respond, there always will be those who reject the Saviour, but many will trust Him. Just see the church growth in Acts, words like multiply, add, spreading, growing are continuously used, until, in just 250 years the whole of the Roman Empire was saturated in churches; southwards and eastwards too. I always say that I believe there will be a global revival before the Lord returns; I believe we are going to be in for a very nice shock as we see many millions turning to Jesus. Satan is in for big shock too! Sovereign Lord is a very strong title, this is ‘despotic’ power, good despotic power of course! It’s the Greek original word – ‘Kurios Despotees’. This power and love will be self-evident when the churches get right with God! But it won’t happen while we believe we are right, we’re the faithful and we keep on doing the same old things year in and year out! There will have to be some big time confession for our long time barrenness before we please God; who’s up for it?
Posted on: Sun, 24 Nov 2013 09:06:49 +0000
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