Jesus IS Lord!



When followers of Jesus affirm "Jesus is Lord", that reality is life-altering! He alone calls the shots. His agenda is our agenda, and, well, in the face of any world power or leader, Jesus and his power is always greater, and allegiance to Him only is the way forward.

In NT Wright and Michael Bird's book Jesus and the Powers, I read this powerful assessment, 

"Even to whisper ‘Jesus is Lord’, then, carried with it an air of challenge, that perhaps Caesar’s lordship, with its pretention to divine status and unrivalled supremacy, spoke not to invincibility but to idolatry. This is precisely why the pagan philosopher Celsius accused the Christians of being guilty of ‘religious rantings’ or ‘seditious sayings’ by devoting themselves exclusively to Jesus and refusing to honour local and imperial deities.51 If so, then, it means that Paul was not a travelling evangelist offering people a new religious experience, but an ambassador for a king-in-waiting, establishing cells of people loyal to this new king, and ordering their lives according to his story, his symbols and his praxis, and their minds according to his truth. This could only be construed as deeply counter-imperial, as subversive to the whole edifice of the Roman Empire; and there is in fact plenty of evidence that Paul intended it to be so construed, and that when he ended up in prison as a result of his work he took it as a sign that he had been doing his job properly.

Wright, N. T.; Bird, Michael F.. Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies (p. 21). Zondervan. Kindle Edition. 

If Jesus is Lord, and we are praying His kingdom come and His will be done, everything has changed. This affects how we live, work, recreate, and participate in civic life and what we think and what we say. It changes how we view other people and how we love them. 

Jesus IS Lord indeed!


Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

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