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Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time, casting all your anxiety upon Him, because He cares for you.
(I Peter 5:6-7)
We are not born in submission to the Lord. Rather we are born with the needs common to all human babies, the need for food, nurture, love, and frequent diaper changings. We are born with basic needs and a desire to have those needs met. As infants, we are meant to have parents who provide for our needs. That was God's design for us from the beginning. But as a result of the fall of humanity, that may not be how it has worked out for us. Nevertheless, all of had needs and still have needs that are basic to life. The problem for us apart from Christ is that our drive is set on having those needs met. As a result, being apart from Christ and under the reign of sin and death, without even having to try we learn to find ways to have our needs met and our desires satisfied. The result is that in time we become slaves to our desires and to sin itself. When we are separated from Christ, we don't see ourselves as being in slavery or bondage to sin and our desires. Instead we see ourselves as living the good life and doing what we want. If we are asked to do something that doesn't line up with our desires, we resist and may even rebel against authority. We say we are free and seek freedom. But in truth we are unconsciously and consciously submitting to our flesh, the world, and unbeknownst to us we are submitting to the devil. We would never agree to that or acknowledge it. It would sound too harsh to our ears. Yet, the reality is that we are living apart from God and unwilling to submit to God. We do things that please us. That is how we spend our time. We think we are living in freedom and doing what we want with our time, when in reality we are spending our time as slaves to things that are foreign and counter to what God intends for our lives.
When we begin to encounter Christ Jesus, there is a good chance that we may be both drawn to him and repelled by him. For some of us, our initial reaction may have been at one of the two ends of the scale, but most of us probably see ourselves somewhere in the middle. We are drawn to Christ because he is unlike anyone we have ever encountered. We hear him say things that really resonate within us and encourage us. We find hope in some of what he says. Many of us may have even found that Jesus was addressing an issue that was a significant concern in our own lives and we were grateful for the insights he brought us. But we were also repelled by some of the things Jesus said as well. Some of the things he said hit a little too close to home and leave us feeling uncomfortable. We don't like him pointing out the things in our lives that we are ashamed of and want to keep hidden. We certainly don't appreciate the nerve he has in telling us that these things are a problem and that we need to be done with them. He has no right to be talking to us like that. Nevertheless, what he says gets us thinking. In time we come to see that what Jesus has been saying to us has a ring of truth to it. We begin to see that we have issues that need to be dealt with; issues that may even be controlling our lives. We spend time listening to him and thinking about what he says. We find Jesus to be an interesting person. What he says is challenging and sometimes uncomfortable for us, but we continue to spend time listening to him. It will come about if we are to mature in Christ that we take some time to look honestly at ourselves in light of what we have heard Jesus saying. Then something seems to click. We see that he has been right all along. We decide that we can believe him and that we should believe him. We may even begin to put some of the things he has said into action. We do this because we have spent time encountering Christ. We have spent time reflecting on what he has said. Within us, the Holy Spirit has been using that time and our reflections to open our eyes to Christ.
At some point we reach a point where a decision has to be made. We have been listening to Jesus and we have come to believe some things about him and what he said. But we have not yet submitted to him. We have not yet acknowledged that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world. We cannot yet say that there is no other name in heaven or on earth by which a person can be saved apart from Jesus himself. Eventually, we reach a point of crisis where we have to decide who we believe Christ is. Can he deliver us from the things in our lives which we are concluding don't belong there any longer? We have a limited understanding of ourselves, but by the work of the Holy Spirit speaking to us our understanding has grown so that we are able to recognize that there are things that are not right and that go against what God says. It is at this point that we spend time wrestling with ourselves and our desires. We wrestle with the call Jesus is making to us to follow him and be his disciple. His call for us to surrender our lives in submission to him. How long this takes us will vary from one person to another. But it is a critical time in our lives. It is a critical step towards being a God honoring disciple of Christ. Being that we are moving towards maturity in Christ, we take the step of receiving Christ as both the savior of the world and savior of us personally. A transformation takes place in our lives and in our thinking. The change has taken place internally. It has taken place in our hearts. But it begins to work itself out in our day to day lives, slowly at first, but growing little by little. Our understanding of Christ as savior brings true freedom from some things in our lives that had held us in captivity for a long time. Now that those things are gone, put to death in our lives, we find a growing desire to follow Christ and to spend more time with him. The challenge for most of us is that there are other demands on our time that we are trying to balance. Nevertheless, we find ways to spend time with Jesus. We are learning to submit some areas to him and doing so willingly and with increasing joy.
As we continue to mature, we find Christ delivering us from things that were in our lives that we would have never thought to be a problem or even an issue. Yet, over and over again as we spend time with Jesus, the Holy Spirit points to something within us and calls us to surrender it. We are growing in our submission to the authority of Christ. We have been seeing him doing great things in our lives. Things we would have never imagined. We are growing in our knowledge and love of God and our desires have been gradually shifting from ourselves and self-gratification, to an increasing desire to glorify God. God has been setting us apart for Himself, sanctifying us. There eventually comes a point where, for us to become a mature Christian, we have to surrender all that we are and all that we hope to be to Jesus as Lord. True, he is our Savior and we have is a growing list of the things that that he has saved us from in our lives. But we begin to discover and accept that Jesus came to save us from ourselves, from sin and death, in order that we would live under his reign in our lives. Jesus is to be Lord in our lives. We have sat in the position of lord of our lives, as our own god, but that is no longer to be the case. We are to submit to Jesus as Lord. That means that we are no longer our own for we have been bought with a price. We are to do what our master does and carry out the will of our heavenly Father. Up to this point we had lived with the idea that we were in control of our time. Oh sure, we had been giving more and more of our time to Christ and his Church, but without even realizing it, we had remained in control. But all that changes when we submit to him as Lord. We have come to realize that Christ dwells in us and that we are to be living for the one who died for us and was raised from the dead. We are to serve his interests and not our own. Some people may never take the step of submitting to the lordship of Jesus Christ. But for those who are mature Christians, we readily submit to the Lord and go on living for him. That Christ is Lord is not a challenge or a restriction of our freedom. Actually, his lordship is our freedom. We no longer live in bondage to our sinful desires. Sin no longer reigns over us or in us. Christ reigns. We are free to pursue the desires of our heart. Why is that? Because our heart has been changed and our desires have also changed. How is that possible? Because we have a new Lord in our lives, Christ. We are his humble servants. What's more, he calls us friend and tells us what he is up to. We have the promise of an eternal inheritance with him in his kingdom. We are children of God, no longer children of the devil. We are in Christ and Christ is in us. It is the mystery of our faith, but it is a reality in our life. The way we spend our time has been forever transformed. Our time is the Lord's time. We don't worry about what we will eat or what we will wear. We know that we will be taken care of like the birds and the flowers. We can live for him and in doing so, truly live. What we once saw as a limited time to enjoy ourselves on this earth pursuing our pleasures, we now see in a different light. We see time in terms of eternity. We find out pleasure in pleasing God. All because we are submitting to Jesus Christ as Lord of our lives. He is Lord of all time and eternity.
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