Jesus Christ is Savior and Lord. In my experience, I came to know Jesus as Savior long before I came to know Him as Lord. Over the years I have read or heard many such testimonies, folks who came to a saving knowledge of Jesus as their Savior who later, often many years later, embraced the Lordship of Jesus.
However, yesterday I was leading a training session with a room full of leaders, and one stated that she felt that one of the challenges to Christian people’s sharing their faith with unbelievers is that they knew Jesus as Lord but did not believe that He was the Savior.
I have to admit that I was baffled by this statement and had to probe a bit deeper. Upon investigation, I found that what she was saying is that many Christian people believe that Jesus is THIER Savior, but seem not to believe that Jesus is THE Savior. Jesus is right for them, and as He has saved them from sin and condemnation, and as they have studied the Scriptures, they have come to follow Jesus as Lord, noting that He was first their Savior. But many are unconvinced, at least in terms of their behavior, that Jesus is the one and only Savior. Consequently, there is no urgent motive to evangelize and impose their beliefs on someone else. Built into this point of view there is either a commitment, perhaps unrealized, to pluralism or to universalism. If she is correct in her observation, the Great Commission of the church will suffer and Jesus will not be understood as the way, the truth and the life, the only pathway through which one comes to God the Father.
Are people in the church – the apparently saved – that immature in their understanding of orthodoxy? Are pastors, teachers and other leaders that inept in delievering the whole counsel of Scipture? I am still pondering her comment in this, the wee morning hours of the next day. I’m not sure, yet, where to land in my thinking about her thinking – but it is food for thought.
