Lordship Salvation Is More About Christ Subjecting Himself to the Father's Rules Not Us Subjecting Ourselves to Them

Romans 5:18, “So then, as through one trespass there is condemnation for everyone, so also through one righteous act there is life-giving justification for everyone. For just as through one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so also through the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. The law came along to multiply the trespass. But where sin multiplied, grace multiplied even more so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace will reign through righteousness, resulting in eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

I am not an international missions expert but am learning some helpful things year after year as our relationship with a local Cuban church in Havana deepens and continues. It seems that much of God’s teaching is less about your quest to learn than it is about how God seems to wisely stumble us into situations that we are clueless about. Providence shapes and moves and lays out the tracks that you walk, and as you look back, you see God knowing you more than you are knowing Him by your own pursuit. After three years of regular trips to Cuba, God opened the curtain and revealed how He has been knowing our church and teaching us about our international folly unbeknownst to us. So, here’s my attempt at explaining what I’ve learned from the last three years that was not truly clear to me until this point.

It seems that one of the newer terms to mark Christians as legitimate or false is concerning the coined phrase known as “Lordship salvation”. It sounds as if the concept of Lordship salvation has become as key to being Christian as trinity and resurrection and inspiration of scripture. There are some that affirm this concept to be essential to biblical fidelity and salvation while others that claim that Lordship salvation is a heretical teaching that damns people at worst and negatively effects people at best. As I write this you may begin to wonder which side I will advocate and write for. I have chosen to take neither side on the issue. On the one hand, I hear those denying Lordship salvation and think that denying this concept is deeply problematic and wrong. To deny the Lordship of Christ is to deny Christ. On the other hand, I hear the way many in the Lordship salvation camp are speaking about this concept and find it to be deeply troubling and inconsistent with historic orthodoxy. The Lordship salvation camp seems to often misquote scripture to argue for a salvation that is a mixture of legal submission to law and faith reception to grace. They have replaced the instrument of faith with the instrument of law submission and redefined faith to in some way be an act of law conformity. The Lordship salvation camp seems to often misquote scripture to argue for a salvation that is a mixture of legal submission to law and faith reception to grace. They have replaced the instrument of faith with the instrument of law submission and redefined faith to in some way be an act of law conformity.Hence, I feel that I must neither deny Lordship salvation as many do nor affirm the way many are arguing for Lordship salvation. I am a reformed believer who believes in the necessity to subject oneself to scripture not sides, and not just some scripture but all scripture in all of its contextual circles (tota scriptura). I also believe that bad solutions to real problems are not justifiable. Meaning that simply because there are many professing Christians acting as if God’s authority has no meaning or place does not mean that arguing for Christ’s Lordship in a way which redefines the sola’s (God’s glory alone, grace alone, Christ alone, faith alone, scripture alone) of our faith is not a valid solution but simply a perpetuation of aberrance in the name of orthodoxy. So what I will do is walk us through texts that speak of and define Christ’s Lordship and provide a definition which neither nullifies Christ’s Lordship nor nullifies the apostolic gospel of salvation by grace. This article will attempt to show the biblical language of Lordship not the evangelical lingo of Lordship.

Lordship Is About Conquering Through Being Conquered

Under this heading I want you to consider two texts that are pertinent. The first is the entrance of Christ on Palm Sunday when He comes into Jerusalem on a donkey in accordance with the prophecy of Zechariah 9. The second is how God providentially through Pilate writes the King of the Jews (Matthew 27:37) while Jesus is on the cross. Both elements in the conversation of Christ’s Lordship share a commonality as to how we understand His Lordship.