About this sermon
The basic Christian confession is ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and the Apostles’ Creed calls him ‘our Lord.’ Paul writes to a troubled church at Corinth and first reminds them that they are sanctified in Christ and call on the name of the Lord Jesus with all his people everywhere. Calling on his name means worshiping him as God, as the church did from the start, long before Nicaea. Confessing Christ as Lord means living under his rule, standing for the truth, and speaking it in love.
Sermon transcript
In standing for the reading of God’s Word, we continue our consideration of foundations of faith, this Bible-based series that has been guided by the Apostles’ Creed. The title of my sermon this morning is Our Lord, and our sermon text is 1 Corinthians 1, verses 1 and 2. I’m going to read through verse 3 to fill out the context of this opening section of Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians, his first epistle to the Corinthians. But let us hear God’s holy word. 1 Corinthians 1, verses 1 and 2. called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus and our brother Sosthenes, to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Dear friends, the grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God endures forever. Let’s pray for God to bless the preaching of His Word. Our Lord and Father in heaven, we thank you and praise you that you have given us a sure and certain word. You have communicated your revealed will to us in the holy scriptures, your God-breathed, inerrant, infallible, authoritative word. We thank you for your word for indeed, Lord God, again, it is a lamp unto our feet, a light unto our path. It is a guide to our way. We ask that by your spirit, you would open our minds and hearts to behold wondrous things from your word. We pray that your word would find a lodging place in our souls this day and we pray that by your spirit you would bless the proclamation of your word.
Oh Lord, set a guard over my lips that I, your unworthy servant, might declare your word with clarity and power and with the assistance and grace of your spirit. We pray these things in Jesus’ name and all of God’s people said. Amen. You may be seated. like to encourage especially the children but also the adults to follow along in your sermon outline. And children, the key words you can be listening for in my sermon today are the words Lord and Lordship, Unity, Holiness, Apostle, Worship, Obedience, and Trust. Well dear friends, the basic New Testament creed, the basic Christian confession can be summarized in three simple English words. The words, Jesus is Lord. Lord, Jesus is Lord. Friends, when we truly confess that Jesus is Lord, sincerely from our hearts and in accordance with the word of God, then we are expressing true saving faith in Christ.
It is because confessing the Lordship of Christ is an expression of true saving faith in Christ that it is, in this sense, necessary for salvation. That very familiar passage I quoted often, and you can turn there if you’d like, but that very familiar passage in Romans 10, verse nine, the Apostle Paul, if you recall, says the following. He says that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Paul there, he’s not denying the truth of justification by faith alone because true faith expresses itself by mouth confession, heart belief and mouth confession ordinarily at least go hand in hand. Indeed, my friends, confessing the Lordship of Jesus Christ is one of the marks that sets apart a Christian from a pagan.
The Apostle Paul makes this clear in 1 Corinthians 12, verses 2 and 3. And I’ll just read that briefly to you in these verses. Paul, as he’s discussing the matter of the spiritual gifts in the early apostolic church, Paul writes, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know, again he’s addressing these Christians who had been converted to Christ from a pagan background. He says, you know that when you were pagans, you were led astray to mute idols however you were led. Therefore, I want you to understand that no one speaking in the spirit of God ever says Jesus is accursed and no one can say Jesus is Lord except in the Holy Spirit. Well, dear ones, the historic Christian church, both in its liturgy and worship, as well as in its corporate life together as a covenant community, has commonly referred to Jesus Christ not merely as the Lord, but as our Lord.
We find this kind of corporate communal language, confessing Jesus Christ as our Lord, being used in that ancient Bible-based creed of the historic church that is known to us today as the Apostles’ Creed, that creed which is guiding our series, our Bible-based series in the foundations of the faith. In the Apostles’ Creed, in the second credo, or I believe statement of the creed, we confess together with the universal church, I believe in Jesus Christ, his only begotten son, and what comes next, our Lord, our Lord. This creedal language is used in our passage for this Lord’s Day morning, as the Apostle Paul refers in verse two, to all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours. This statement will be the main focus of my sermon for this Lord’s Day morning.
But in order to appreciate the depth of what is being said here in this portion of God’s Word, it’s important to understand this passage in its historical context. It’s important to understand why Paul wrote 1 Corinthians. When did Paul write it? And who wrote it? Well, we know that Paul wrote it. It claims to be written by Paul and no scholar, even the liberal and skeptical scholars, agree that this is a genuine Pauline epistle. The apostle Paul wrote 1 Corinthians probably sometime between 53 and 55 AD. The scholars differ upon the exact year, but probably sometime around 53, 54, 55 AD. And he wrote this epistle to the church in the ancient city of Corinth. Now what do we know about the ancient city of Corinth? Corinth was quite a center for trade and commerce.
As one commentator puts it, Corinth sat on the isthmus connecting the Greek mainland with the Peloponnesian Peninsula. This location made it a flourishing crossroads for sea traffic between the Aegean region and the Western Mediterranean. It was a place where many cultures and religions mingled. But friends, not only was Corinth a center of trade and commerce and business in the ancient Roman Empire, Corinth was also a center for pagan religions, and it contained at least 12 idol temples. Its most infamous temple, of course, being dedicated to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, whose worshipers practiced religious prostitution, and which at one time was served by a thousand sacred prostitutes. Corinth was a city that was absolutely, utterly saturated with paganism and idolatry. Pagan idolatry was part of the warp and wolf of everyday life. It was inextricably connected to business life.
It was connected to family life, culture life. Everything was centered around and saturated with and influenced by pagan idolatry. So it was a very challenging environment in which to be a Christian. Many of the believers in the Corinthian church were Gentiles who had been converted to Christ from a background of pagan idolatry. Now friends, given the ungodly environment of the city of Corinth and given the pagan background of many of the members of the church in Corinth, it really shouldn’t surprise us that some of the Christians in the Corinthian church struggled to put away their old idolatrous ways and their immoral practices from their pagan past. And many of them struggled to live out consistently and in a mature way the implications of Christ’s lordship in their lives. It should also not surprise us that the church in Corinth was a highly dysfunctional church.
It’s a church that had many pastoral issues that the Apostle Paul needed to address and which he does address in 1 Corinthians as well as 2 Corinthians. If you read the Corinthian letters and read it in depth and with a sensitive eye to discerning the original setting, you’ll realize, wow, this is a messed up church and yet it is Christ’s church. Its membership includes those whom Paul describes in verse two of our passage as those sanctified, set apart, consecrated as holy in union with Christ Jesus, in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, holy ones, set apart ones. These issues that Paul has to address in 1 Corinthians would include such things as spiritual immaturity in the church, divisiveness, immorality, idolatrous practices. Some of the Corinthian believers continue to engage in various idolatrous activities and sought to rationalize that.
There were cases of conscience, there were marital issues, and there was doctrinal error. Here in his epistolary introduction to this letter, Paul anticipates some of the major themes of this apostolic letter to this troubled, dysfunctional church. To quote from one commentator, Paul’s apostleship and the Corinthians’ sanctity and unity are among the letter’s most important themes because those were amongst the biggest issues that this church faced. So let’s dive into our text for today, and let me just briefly explain the first couple verses. As I mentioned before, we’re gonna focus especially on the end of verse two, but let’s start off with verse one. How does Paul begin this letter, this epistle? Well, he begins, as was customary in the Greek custom of letter writing, he begins by identifying himself. He says, Paul, an apostle called by the will of God to be an apostle, a commissioned messenger, an officially sent messenger and spokesman of Christ Jesus, and our brother Sosthenes, Sosthenes being an aid and assistant to Paul, to the church of God that is in Corinth.
Again, as I mentioned, Paul follows the typical Greek custom of letter writing. which begins with identifying the author first of the letter and then identifying the audience to which he’s writing, and then there’s usually some opening greetings, and then it gets to the body of the letter, and there’s usually also a closing set of greetings at the end of such letters. But what does Paul start off doing right out of the gate? Well, he begins by asserting his apostolic authority and asserting the divine origin of his apostolic call. Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus. Why does he do this? Why does he start off by identifying himself as an apostle and by asserting his apostolic authority? Well, because there were some in the Church of Corinth who were questioning Paul’s apostolic authority.
So right out of the gates, Paul identifies himself. He says, look, I’m an apostle of Jesus Christ. I didn’t choose myself to be an apostle. This is not a letter that I’m writing. This is not a personal letter that I’m writing from my own merely human perspective. He is writing in his capacity as an official spokesman, as an apostle of Christ Jesus. And he is an apostle. He didn’t choose himself. He didn’t raise himself up. He’s not a self-anointed, self-appointed leader in the church. He was appointed and called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus. So his words must be taken with utter seriousness because what Paul says Jesus by his spirit is saying through him. You know, some liberal scholars like to try to drive a wedge between Jesus and Paul.
They try to say, well, you know, Paul kind of is not really speaking for the real historical Jesus. But friends, when Paul speaks as an apostle, which he does in the New Testament writings, he speaks in the name of Christ on behalf of Christ. What is said in this epistle, this is the will of Christ, this is the revelation of Christ to his church. And he addresses the church in Corinth as the church of God in Corinth. What does it mean, the church of God? Well, it means formed by God and belonging to God, not to some party. If you read on in 1 Corinthians, one of the biggest issues in the Corinthian church was a party spirit, divisiveness. There were cults of personality. There were Christians in Corinth who gravitated towards their favorite teachers.
Some said, I am of Paul. I’m Paul’s man, he’s my man. I’m of Apollos, I’m of Cephas or Peter, I am of Christ, I’m above all of you guys, right? There was this party spirit, but Paul is reminding them that they are the church of God, not the church of Paul or of Apollos or of Cephas or what have you. thing to understand or recognize is that the word church, which is ekklesia in the Greek, means assembly. And sometimes this word was used to refer to secular or civil assemblies. And that is perhaps why Paul describes the church in Corinth as the church of God in Corinth. You are the church of God, you’re not just a secular human assembly. It is the church of God. This helps to distinguish the church from secular and civil assemblies.
And how are they described as the church? Again, as I already pointed out, he immediately identifies them as to those sanctified in Christ Jesus. Now, again, brothers and sisters, if you read 1 Corinthians It’s clear that this is such a dysfunctional, messed up church. But Paul does not begin his letter to these believers by wagging his finger at them, by rebuking them. There’s plenty of finger wagging, if you will, and rebuking that comes later on. But Paul begins by reminding them, first of all, of their identity in Christ. Every pastoral issue in the church, every spiritual issue in our lives as Christians, must be addressed from the standpoint of our identity in Christ, because that is the only way, ultimately, that those issues are going to be addressed and resolved. And he says, they are sanctified, set apart, together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours.
Why does he talk about those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord? Well, again, Paul here is stressing the unity of the Corinthians with the church universal. Now some commentators, like I believe Charles Hodge, think that when he speaks of all who in every place call upon the name of the Lord Jesus, that he’s reminding them that, look, you’re united in Christ with the other churches in this region. But I tend to agree with those scholars who believe that what Paul is doing here is he’s helping, he’s trying to point them to the unity of the universal church, the church Catholic or universal, that we are united with all believers everywhere. in our confession of the Lordship of Christ. So friends, all of which leads us, all of this leads us to consider some of the implications of Christ’s Lordship.
Again, Paul says that you are called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours. What are some of the implications of the Lordship of Christ as Paul is speaking of it here in this passage? Well, first of all, beloved, confessing Christ’s Lordship highlights His deity, His Godhood, and therefore his worthiness to receive religious worship. This is the first point in your sermon outline. Confessing Christ’s lordship highlights his deity and therefore his worthiness to receive religious worship. Paul speaks here, he uses this language of calling upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. That indicates worship. I want you to think about this. If Jesus Christ is not fully God, if He is not true God even as He is true man, the God-man, if He is not fully divine, then offering him religious worship in our prayers, in our praises, in our hymnody, in our worship song, in our confessions of faith, such acts would be acts of idolatry and violations of the very first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me.
If Jesus is not God, then every time we gather together to worship him as God, we are committing idolatry and blasphemy, high blasphemy against the God of heaven. But what’s interesting to me, brothers and sisters, In many of the mainline churches, theological liberals and modernists, many of whom reject the literal deity of Christ, many of them continue in their worship services to offer prayers in Jesus’ name and to sing praises to him in their hymnody. But again, if Jesus is not fully God, then our liberal and modernist friends who do this while rejecting the literal deity of Christ would, again, they would be guilty of high blasphemy against God. If you’re ever in a conversation with a theological liberal who questions or disagrees with the truth that Jesus is God, you might wanna bring this up.
Well, if Jesus isn’t God, do you pray to him? Do you pray in his name? In your church services, do you sing hymns that are addressed to Jesus as a deity, as God? However, friends, passages like our sermon text for this morning highlight the truth that the church has worshiped Jesus as its divine Lord from the very beginning of its existence. For to call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that language means to invoke him in religious prayer and worship. Now, the reason I bring this up, if you, If you’re familiar with the arguments that skeptics and atheists often use, one of the biggest arguments is that they’ll say, well, the earliest Christians didn’t believe that Jesus was God. The earliest Christians didn’t worship Jesus. That was a belief that developed later on in the history of the church.
I even, I recall watching a video clip from, some of you may be familiar with the podcaster, I think Joe Rogan, and he’s an interesting character, but he’s not a Christian. I remember watching a clip where he once, I think he said something along the lines of, oh, come on, these Christians believe ridiculous things. The belief that Jesus was God was not, that was invented at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, right? This is a common historical myth that’s out there, this idea that the early Christians did not believe that Jesus was God and did not worship Him as God. Friends, contrary to what you will commonly hear today from the lips of the ignorant, the misinformed, and from pseudo-intellectual Dan Brown Da Vinci Code types, it is simply not historically accurate to assert that the earliest Christians did not believe in the deity of Jesus and that the church only gradually and at a later stage of development came to believe in the divinity of Jesus and to worship Jesus as God. from a historical perspective that is historical hogwash.
It’s simply not true. And our passage for today helps to demonstrate the falsity of those skeptical assertions. After all, as I mentioned before, the Apostle Paul wrote 1 Corinthians sometime around 54 or 55 AD. only a little over 20 years after the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. And yet the language that Paul uses here in verse two about calling on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, this language indicates that the practice of calling upon the name of Jesus Christ as Lord, calling upon him as divine, in acts of prayer and worship was a well-established practice very early on in the life of the earliest apostolic church. In fact, I would suggest to you that an unbiased investigation of the evidence from the New Testament indicates clearly that the early apostolic church confessed and worshiped Jesus as divine Lord, as God, from the very beginning of the Christian movement. at least since the resurrection of Christ and his ascension into heaven and the pouring out of the spirit on the day of Pentecost.
The church from the beginning confessed and believed in the deity, the Godhood of the Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, the earliest Christian heresy, the earliest heresy in the church was not the denial of Christ’s deity. but one of the earliest heresies was the denial of his full humanity. The Gnostics denied the Lord’s full humanity, not his deity. Dear friends, this being the case, Let me ask you, dear listener, do you accept the deity, the full deity of Jesus Christ? Yes, Jesus was also a man. He’s fully God and fully man, true God and true man, united in one divine person. He is the God-man. He is the word made flesh, Emmanuel, God with us. He has two natures, yet is one person. He has a divine nature and a human nature, but we’re focusing today on the divine nature, because as Paul writes here, Christians are those who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours.
Do you accept his deity, dear listener? Do you worship him as your Lord? And so the lordship of Christ clearly highlights his deity, but another implication of Christ’s lordship is that the lordship of Christ indicates his sovereign rule over all, and especially over the universal church. The Lordship of Christ indicates His sovereign rule over all, and especially over the universal church. Now I wanna take you, as we compare Scripture with Scripture, I wanna take you to another passage, a very familiar passage, Matthew 28, verse 18. This is after Jesus has risen from the dead, and He is speaking to His apostles before His ascension, and He is giving them the Great Commission. And what’s the first thing that Jesus says in His Great Commission? Look at verse 18. It says, And Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Now let me pause there. Let me ask you, dear listeners, how much authority has been given to the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ? How much authority? Some authority? All authority. All authority where? In heaven and on earth. In other words, all authority in the entire universe has been given to the Lord Jesus Christ. Now let’s pause there. Some of you may say, now wait a minute, Pastor. If Jesus is fully God, if He’s eternally God, hasn’t He always, as God, had all authority in heaven and on earth? Well, He certainly has. But how then can Matthew speak of, have Jesus speak of authority being given to him by the Father? Well again, Jesus speaks here in Matthew 28, 18, he speaks here as the incarnate authority. word, as God incarnate, as the God-man. So as the God-man, all authority has been given to him.
But with respect to his divinity, his deity, he has always had all authority in heaven and on earth. But this, I just highlight this because again, this underscores the truth of his sovereignty over all. Every tiny atom in the most distant galaxy is governed by the Lord Jesus Christ. He is Lord over all the universe. He is Lord over all of the nations and He is Lord over you and me, dear brother and sister in Christ. He is sovereign, and the lordship of Christ not only implies his deity, but along with his deity, it implies his absolute sovereign rule over all, and especially over his church. Dr. Charles Hodge, in commenting on the meaning of calling upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, wrote the following in his commentary. He writes, to call upon the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, is to invoke his aid as Christ the Messiah predicted by the prophets and as our almighty and sovereign possessor and ruler.
It is in that sense Jesus is Lord. all power in heaven and earth has been committed unto him. And he died and rose again, that he might be the Lord of the dead and of the living. That is, that he might acquire that peculiar right of possession in his people, which arises from having purchased them with his blood. to call upon the name of Jesus as Lord is therefore to worship Him. It is to look to Him for that help which God only can give. And then he goes on to say, all Christians therefore are worshipers of Christ. And every sincere worshiper of Christ is a true Christian. Amen. Brother Hodge. And of course friends, the reason Christ is able to come to the aid of his church is because he is indeed the sovereign Lord over all.
Dear ones, since Jesus Christ is Lord and since therefore we as Christians may call upon him for aid as our Lord, let us not be fretful or anxious. We face troubling times, don’t we? We face violent and uncertain times. And it’s easy for us to be anxious. It’s easy for us to fret because of the wicked and their scheming. But we need to remember, brothers and sisters, and I’m not saying that everything’s gonna be comfortable or easy. Who knows what the future holds for us? For all that we know, 2024, the year that will soon be upon us, may involve suffering for the church. It may involve persecution. It may involve trials and tribulations. But whatever happens, whether good or ill, we can rest knowing that Jesus is the sovereign Lord, that he is in control, and that he, as he has promised, causes all things to work together for our good, our ultimate good, and for his ultimate glory.
Remember, we serve a Savior who is indeed Lord, sovereign over all things, governing us and all things for His own ultimate glory and our own ultimate good. Dear listener, do you trust Him as your sovereign Savior? Do you confess Him as your ruling Lord? Are you resting in His sovereignty? Finally, the Lordship of Christ implies His absolute right to require our unquestioning allegiance. This is the final point in your sermon outline. The Lordship of Christ implies His absolute right to require our unquestioning allegiance. What is the basic Christian confession? It is Jesus is Lord. That means, of course, as we’ve seen, that means that He is divine. He is fully 100% God. It also means that he is the sovereign Messiah King, the one who possesses the absolute right to require of us and of all people, our unquestioning, unhesitating trust, our full submission, our total allegiance, and our wholehearted obedience.
He is indeed King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He sits on the throne of heaven, reigning over the universe. He reigns over the nations. He reigns in a special way over His church. And He has the right to reign on the throne of your heart and mine. Brothers and sisters, He is our Lord Jesus Christ, as Paul describes Him here in verse 2. And yes, He is indeed the personal Lord and Savior of every true believer at an individual level. That’s very popular language, church language, in our contemporary church culture, you know, have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? The Bible doesn’t exactly use that kind of language but I understand what that’s getting at and certainly we affirm the need to personally repent of sin and personally trust Christ as our very own Lord and Savior in order to be saved.
You can’t be saved simply by belonging to a church. You have to personally, by the grace of God, you must repent. You must trust Christ as your Lord and Savior from sin, as he is offered to you in the gospel. And yet notice that Paul here in this passage, because he’s addressing a church, a covenant community, as most of the New Testament does, notice that Paul here emphasizes the corporate and communal aspects of Christ’s lordship over the church. And he describes the church how? As those called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours. And friends, this was a key truth that the Corinthians were not grasping. The believers in the Corinthian church, they were They were fighting, they were engaged in personality cults, there was division, there was conflict, there was neglect of the poor in their midst and so forth.
There were a lot of problems. And these problems in large part stemmed from the fact that the Corinthians did not grasp the significance for the church of Christ’s lordship over his church. The Corinthian church struggled with division and with unholy behavior. Resolving these issues would require them as it requires us to recognize that confessing Christ’s Lordship requires maintaining genuine spiritual unity and pursuing holiness in heart and in life. The point being, beloved, in closing, as we wrap up our time in the word today, dear ones, true unity and sanctity under Christ’s divine lordship go hand in hand. Genuine spiritual unity in the church is a unity in the truth of the word. It is a unity in the gospel. It is a unity in God’s word. but it is also a unity that cannot exist without acknowledgement of Christ’s Lordship.
Genuine spiritual unity cannot exist in a church that rejects Christ’s Lordship and its implications by tolerating, excusing, or celebrating sin, or by neglecting the pursuit of practical holiness and godly living. I grew up in a so-called mainline church, A church that has a wonderful, in many ways, Bible-based liturgy. I learned many scriptures from the liturgy of the church, but I didn’t hear the gospel proclaimed in that church. And like many of the mainline churches today, this church has fully embraced, this church in which I was raised, has fully embraced current cultural fads and current ideologies such as the legitimation of homosexualism, transgenderism, the LGBTQ plus ideology and so forth. In other words, the church in which I grew up has rejected the implications of Christ’s divine lordship over the church. We think more recently of the United Methodist Church, a very old mainline denomination in our land.
It’s my understanding that this church is splitting, that the conservatives in the church are exiting, and there’s been a big church split. Oftentimes when those kinds of splits occur, the theological liberals or modernists in the church will point their fingers at the conservatives and say, you guys are being divisive. You guys are being unloving. You’re being bigoted, right? It is common for theological liberals and modernists in the church who typically reject the deity of Christ It’s common for them to accuse those of us who are theologically orthodox of being divisive and unloving. They accuse us of dividing the church. They accuse us of being schismatics because we’re not willing to kind of go along to get along. Now let me just say that sometimes we Orthodox, those of us who affirm the full authority and inerrancy of the Bible and seek to defend the Orthodox understanding, the biblical understanding of the Christian faith, sometimes we can be unkind or harsh in the way that we defend the truth.
Sometimes we can come across as being very angry. And sometimes we have reason to be legitimately angry. I mean, I get angry. My blood boils when I witness false teachers leading the sheep of Christ astray, leading them away from Christ and towards practices and beliefs that will be spiritually harmful to them. But nevertheless, the scriptures call upon us, brothers and sisters, to speak the truth in love. We must speak the truth boldly, without compromise, but we must seek to speak the truth in love. So, point well taken. However, friends, the real schismatics and dividers in Christ’s church are those who reject his lordship, those who reject the authority and the teachings of the Bible, those who tolerate unrepentant sin in the church. In the second credo of the Apostles’ Creed, we confess together, I believe in Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, our Lord.
If we confess that Jesus is Lord, we must live under His Lordship. We must do the things he commands. We must believe the things that his word requires us to believe. And we must stand for the truth of the gospel and the law of God without compromise in the face of pressure and even in the face of persecution. Friends, Jesus is Lord. Is he your Lord? He is our Lord. let us submit to His Lordship and honor His Lordship by our faith and by our lives. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, we thank You that Jesus, our Savior, is Lord, that He is God, that He is We ask that you would grant us the grace to live consistently and in a mature way under his divine Lordship, and help us to give faithful witness for the Lordship of Christ, even in the face of a hostile culture.
Be with us now, Lord, and bless us. We ask these things in Jesus’ name, amen.
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