And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, heard his cry and saw how he died, he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!” Mark 15:39
Is it possible to embrace Jesus Christ as your Savior, but not necessarily your Lord? Well, put another way: Can you take it in stages—you believe some things but not everything so that you don’t become a radical? You may say to yourself, “Yes, I would like to go to heaven but let’s not get carried away with this whole business.”
Years ago a young man struggled with this issue. In his youth, his sexual escapades were well known. According to his own testimony, he was trapped, as he put it, in “the swirling mists of lust” that thrust him into the “whirlpools of vice.” He went to church and he maintained a facade of religious respectability, but as he later reflected on his own behavior and lifestyle, he considered his life to be an intolerable moral contradiction. The man’s name? Today we call him St. Augustine, but a saint he was not in his early years. Eventually Augustine was attracted to a famous preacher who was the Bishop of Milan, and listening to Ambrose, he began to see himself as he really was. Eventually, he was converted his life completely changed.
Augustine didn’t believe that you could embrace Christ as your Savior apart from bowing your knee in submission, recognizing His Lordship. Writing of Augustine’s concept of discipleship, Richard Foster says, “Augustine did not believe, as is so common today, that one could be a convert to Christ without being a disciple of Christ. For him, conversion and discipleship were two sides to the same door—both were necessary for one to pass through the doorway. He knew that ‘receiving Christ’ required a radical re‑ordering of his life. He had counted the cost and he understood that conversion meant a lifestyle without his mistress and a profession other than rhetoric, which he believed taught ‘the arts of deception.’”
“Even more, he understood that turning to Christ meant turning away from the arrogance and the intellectual pride that had so fiercely driven him … . For Augustine, conversion was not just assenting to a few mental propositions; it was restructuring his whole life.”
Question. What does it mean to really be a Christian today? Join a church? Sign a card? Raise your hand in a service? Now, before you answer, ponder a few of these statements. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new person. The old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Then reflect on Jesus’ stern words to His own disciples: “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24).
At some point, if your commitment is genuine, it must go so deep that your personal behavior and your lifestyle are affected; apart from this, commitment is only mental. Again Jesus challenged the disciples saying, “Why do you call Me Lord and do not the things I command you?” (Luke 6:46).
Life is too short to play games, to go through the motions of pretending to be what you are not. If you see in Augustine’s struggle something of your own personal life, it may well be that you, like Augustine for many years, never really committed your life to Christ. You may know the language, you may have friends fooled, you may even know the motions of it all, but you don’t know the reality. If so, you are the only one who can turn it around.
So say, “Yes, Lord! You are not only my Savior, I embrace You as Lord as well!”
Resource reading: Luke 18:18-30.
