Quote
| From Pastor Leon, who I met this week (and this is a paraphrase): "We're spending too much time trying to convince people to make Jesus their personal Lord and Savior. No. He is Lord and the Savior. The question we need to be asking is when will you acknowledge Him and give Him his rightful place in your life." For some that might be a matter of semantics or some might say they're saying the same thing. Maybe. But I liked Leon's point. He is Lord and Savior — of every single person on the globe, whether they acknowledge Him or not. He is. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen." |
posted by theultrarev at 1:17 PM
Comments on "Quote"
-
Anonymous said ... (11:01 AM, January 09, 2006) :
-
Anonymous said ... (8:48 PM, January 10, 2006) :
-
theultrarev said ... (9:45 PM, January 10, 2006) :
-
Anonymous said ... (9:40 AM, January 15, 2006) :
post a commentHow would this approach change the way we do evangelism? Just wondering... Looking forward to seeing you in a couple.
BJB
Acknowledgment isn't enough; the demons acknowledge Jesus as Lord and Savior of humanity.
Certainly Jesus is Lord and Savior of the human race, but (and these are just generalizations) active Lordship means authority, and authority requires the subject's submission (or forced compliance) to be “effective”. For example, the Jefferson County Sheriff's office has the authority to order me not to speed, but they can't force me not to, even if they ticket me or suspend my license. The only way they can force compliance is if they imprison me, but that's outside the scope of the example. At all times they have a legal authority, or “lordship” over me, but it's not effective unless I submit. As far as Salvation, it requires nothing more than faith in Jesus as Lord (which requires submission) and in His death as payment for transgression. Salvational faith is generally evidenced by obedience (or a Christian-ese term we like to call “fruit”). Obedience is pretty much synonyms with submission to the will of God, which brings us back to Lordship...
But I digress, because Pastor Leon didn't stop simply at acknowledge (or, at least, your paraphrase didn't). It went on to continue that one must “give Him his rightful place in [one's] life.” Jesus' rightful place isn't on one's right shoulder while a devil is on the left (not that I'm insinuating that Pastor Leon or the Ultra Rev thinks that at all), but His rightful place is effect individual people because of who He is. To do that, it seems one needs to make a “personal” choice to “submit.” What is one submitting to? Christ's Lordship. And if one recognizes that, and finds a need to submit, the faith (leading to salvation) is likely already there.
Wow, that was a lot of circular logic and theological muckety muck. I think what my end-goal is and what the paraphrase's end-goal is happens to be essentially the same thing. I'm not sure why I analyzed all that, but since I have, I might as well post it.
As an aside, is Pastor Leon a Watertown-based UMC guy? If so, he's cool. If not, I'm sure he's still cool.
Blessings!
Thank you for your lengthy insightful comment. The "Pastor Leon" is not the same very nice UMC pastor from Watertown. The Leon I mention is a young pastor of a very cool church in the Utica area.
You write like you should have a blog of your own. Do you?
I do have a blog, but I haven't updated since November, and rarely is it theological in nature... :) If I get off my duff and post more, I'll shoot you the URL in an email or something.