Christ is lord of all! What a bold statement! Maybe even an arrogant statement! Lord of all? Do we believe that?
It was said of one preacher that “for tender minds he served up half a Christ.” Behind that lie two realities – first, that many of us don’t want the full gospel, we’d rather just have religion; and second, that many preachers just give people what they want and not what they need. For tender minds we serve up half a Christ. And maybe give you a buzz for the moment, but nothing that nurtures, nothing that stays around. We are tempted to serve nothing but dessert and call it a meal; but anybody who has ever tried that knows that no sooner has the sugar high left you but you are hungry again.
I hope today to serve up more than half a Christ and more than a dessert gospel. I hope to share the measure of the full stature of Christ and a broad gospel.
Christ is lord of all things. His church has received a gift of universal scope, a wide-ranging responsibility. We the church have been given a gift of representing Christ’s lordship in all things. The full gospel is the mind-stretching, heart-firing, gut-wrenching idea that in Jesus Christ, all things come together. To Him all things are subjected. And the church of Jesus Christ, if it is to be faithful, is to receive all things from Him and is to claim all things for Him. Christ is lord of all.
Wow! Are you up for that? Do you think you can take a full gospel message this morning? Do you think your mind can range and roam over all things – from the tiniest subatomic particle to the ten thousandth galaxy flung into outer space? Are you ready to think about everything from the smallest personal decisions to the most far-reaching political policies?
Well, pastor, the Redskins do play Dallas at one o’clock today. Don’t take more than twenty minutes to talk about “all things”! I understand. So let me first condense the message; then give you some history; and then show you what a wonderful gift we have been given. We have been given the gift of claiming all things for Christ, the gift of universality.
Here is my message, thoroughly condensed; take this away, whether you get anything else or not: Unless Christ is lord of all, He cannot be lord at all. Do you agree? Will you repeat that with me? Unless Christ is lord of all, He cannot be lord at all.
Now for a very short history lesson. In the year 312 AD, at the Battle of the Mulvian Bridge, a general named Constantine was fighting for control of the Roman Empire. Constantine, it is said, saw in the sky a cross, and the Latin words which translate, “In this sign conquer.” “In this sign – the sign of the cross – conquer.” Constantine took that to mean that if he would convert to the Christian faith, the battle would go his way. So he did convert, the battle was won, he went on to be emperor, and in short order not only did Constantine remove the laws which prohibited the Christian faith, but he then put in place laws which forced people to be Christian! This emperor, in the fourth century, in one fell swoop, took the Christian church from being an illegal society, despised and persecuted, to the top of the social heap. The only legal religion. How’s that for a success story?
And so about a century after Constantine, when the leaders of the church gathered to write a new doctrinal statement, they were no longer persecuted and harried followers of an illegal cult. They were princes of a far-flung church. They were proud leaders of a rich and powerful institution. They were light years beyond the poverty and the faith of the early church. Before Constantine, you could lose your life for preaching the gospel; after Constantine, you could get rich living from the gospel. Before Constantine, you had to hide and worship in secret if you wanted to follow Christ; after Constantine, you could build stately churches, wear glorious robes, and stand at the emperor’s right hand, giving advice and wielding power. What a change!
And so when these church leaders gathered to adopt a new statement, they wrote that they affirmed one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. The word catholic just means universal. It doesn’t speak of a particular denomination. The catholic church means the universal church, the church that is spread over the whole world, the church that is involved in everything, the church that is to influence every aspect of life. One holy catholic or universal church.
The problem is, however, that that church began to think of its universality as power. As that church grew in wealth and strength, it saw the gift of universality as the opportunity to take power for itself. It tore down its small buildings and built larger and grander ones. It walked away from sharing with the poor and began to amass great wealth for its inner circle. It sponsored crusades to convert whole nations by force. It forgot that wherever there is power, power corrupts, and that church failed to use its gift of universality for the poor and the needy. That church lost sight of the last, the least, and the lost. That church gave up its soul. It failed to be faithful. It blew its opportunity.
Some of the soul of the church was recovered a thousand years later, through what historians call the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther and John Calvin and the other reformers, most especially our Baptist fathers and mothers, saw that this powerful church was nothing like what the Lord intended. I’ll say more about that this coming Sunday, when we observe Reformation Day. But for now, let me just move quickly to this: God’s gift to the earliest church was the gift of universality; God has given us the gift of claiming all things for Christ. But this is not to be done in arrogance; it is not done by forcing people to do anything. It is not a matter of Christians claiming privileges for themselves. The gift of a broad, full gospel is a matter of seeing that all things ultimately belong to Christ. It is a matter of offering a solid, consistent witness in every arena of life. The gift of God opens our eyes to see everything out there as a place to claim for Christ.
Here is the way this gift is expressed in the Ephesian letter:
The gifts he gave were [given, so that] … all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.
To maturity, the measure of the full stature of Christ. Or, to put it in the sentence I taught you a while ago: Unless Christ is lord of all, He cannot be lord at all.
Now let me take you on a grand sweep through the gift of universality:
I
Unless Christ is lord of all, He cannot be lord at all. Unless Christ is lord of our political life, He cannot be lord at all. The church under Constantine found that it had a place in politics. They misconstrued it. They made a power trip out of it. But they were right in this – that faith must speak to politics.
Now you and I cherish the tradition of the separation of church and state. It is right and proper that the state should not rule the church, nor the church impose its wishes on the state. It is right and proper that we not ask for tax money for the church’s ministries, and it is on target that we not expect the government to give us privileges. I cherish the American tradition of the separation of church and state.
But that does not mean that we should keep faith and politics separated. That does not mean that we should not work for God-given values to be embedded in the life of this nation. We as Christians are given the gift of universality. That means that we can see how the things that matter to God also matter to this nation. We are called to fight for justice; we are summoned to work for mercy. We have to stand for life-affirming policies. We must get involved in the political process – not in partisanship, not in throwing our weight behind certain candidates – but we must get involved wherever there is injustice, wherever there is immorality, wherever there is dishonesty, wherever there are those who hurt. Christ is the lord of politics.
I am proud of those of you who get out there and take stands – as area neighborhood commissioners and community activists and civil rights organizers and advocates. I am proud of that.
But I also see for us, as a church, gifted by God with insight, heart, and compassion, the need to think much more broadly about what we can do for justice, for mercy, for human needs. We need to receive the gift of universality, we need to let Christ be the lord of politics. Why? Do you know the answer by now? Because: Unless Christ is lord of all, He cannot be lord at all.
II
Let me take this a step further. Unless Christ is lord of all, He cannot be lord at all. And so unless Christ is lord of our culture, He is not lord at all. Unless Christ is lord of our art and our music and our literature, he is not lord of all. Unless Christ is lord of our culture, lord of our radio-listening, our TV-watching, our movie-going, our book-reading, and our Internet surfing, he cannot be lord at all.
I want to see the day when we Christians will really think about the kind of world we are living in. Someone once pointed out that the issue is that we may win people to Christ one by one, but the culture out there is taking them away twenty by twenty. We need to understand this. We need to understand the power of communication. We need not only to control our own appetites and watch out what our children see and hear. We also need to dream a great and positive dream about communicating something authentic in today’s culture.
I frankly don’t know what the answer is to that. There are already a host of Christian radio stations, TV programs featuring preachers good, bad, indifferent, and mostly hungry for money. We have religious bookstores and church-built web sites on the Internet. We seem to come in alongside the negative stuff and try to provide an alternative. That’s good as far as it goes, but it isn’t enough. I don’t know what we can do. I’d like to think that some of the finest and most creative minds in today’s church would tackle this. I’d like to think that some of our own members who are in the communications fields would find ways to claim the culture for Christ.
You know, they are saying that the Internet is only barely beginning to affect us, and that cyberspace is going to be the greatest frontier to be claimed for the lordship of Christ in the 21st century. What a challenge! And we don’t have a clue. Our culture needs to be claimed for Christ, because so much is happening that shapes everything. Somebody needs to get involved with the arts and make a difference. I’m not the one; I am some kind of dinosaur, I know, because I haven’t even been to a film in years. Can’t afford the time or the money. But I know that plenty of people today pick up clues about how to live, how to dress, how to speak, how to feel, how to act, from the media. Christians must get into this, because, once again, Unless Christ is lord of all, He cannot be lord at all.
III
Now let me move a little closer to home. Unless Christ is lord of all, He cannot be lord at all. Unless Christ is lord of your everyday routine, he cannot be lord at all. If you cannot take Christ to your workplace, I would suggest you are not taking Him anywhere. If you do not take Christ to your schoolroom, then I’m sorry, but I suspect that you do not have Him at all. If you cannot see Christ at work in your neighborhood, then is He at work anywhere in your life?
What does it say, when your pastor calls you at your office, and the receptionist says, “May I tell him who is calling?”; and when I say, tell him his pastor is calling, she says, “What?! Mr. MMMM has a pastor?” What does that say? Remember that old question about whether, if you were accused in criminal court of being a Christian, there would be enough evidence to convict you? If Christ is not lord of your workplace, then He is not lord at all.
Kids, when you go to school and hang out, just chillin’, and somebody spits out the name of Jesus as a curse .. do you just giggle or pretend not to hear? You want to be cool. You want to be in. Oh well, I can come to church on Sundays, where it is safe to speak about Jesus. Oh, no, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t. I’ve spoken with both of the young people baptized this morning about how they need to tell their friends at school and in the neighborhood about their commitment to Jesus. Unless He is going to be the lord of your everyday routine, He is not going to be lord at all.
What will it mean, neighbor, when somebody you’ve lived next door to for twenty years gets sick and is about to die, and you’ve never once raised the issue of their relationship to God? You’ve never once told the old, old story of Jesus and His love? What will you say when I remind you that in God’s word it says that “there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved”, other than the name of Jesus Christ? Will we say, I’ve got my salvation, my one-way ticket to heaven, and that’s all I need? No, God’s gift of universality means that He has given us our surroundings, our work, our play, our school, our neighborhood. It’s all there for us to claim for Christ. Christ is to be lord of our everyday routines. Don’t rule anything out, why? .. you know why .. Unless Christ is lord of all, He cannot be lord at all.
IV
Now, finally, let me be truly meddlesome. Let me go right down to where you and I live. Let me cut close to the bone, and if it hurts a bit, well, I shall not have served up half a Christ for fear of touching tender minds.
We are given the gift of universality. We are given the chance to make Christ the lord of politics; Christ the lord of culture and the arts; Christ the lord of our everyday routines. And the most wonderful gift of all is the gift of making Christ the lord of every part of your inner, personal, spiritual lives. Unless Christ is lord of every part of you, He cannot be your lord at all.
God has given His church, and each member of it, the gift of universality. He has given us the chance to open every chamber in our lives to Him. And it is a fulfilling wonder to see life blossom when He takes control. “Take time to be holy, be calm in thy soul; each thought and each motive, beneath His control.” There is something wonderfully liberating, powerfully freeing, in receiving the gift of the lordship of Christ. Maturity, the measure of the full stature of Christ.
a
I have to ask you today, have you received the gift of His lordship over every part of your life? Have you come to the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ, in your interpersonal relationships? Is it still all about power and pride, or have you received the gift of being able to get out of what I want, what I feel, what I am about? Is Christ the lord of your relationships, so that there is love and mercy, compassion and tender-heartedness? Have you received the gift of His lordship over your relationships? Unless Christ is lord of relationships, He cannot be lord at all.
b
Have you received the gift of His lordship over every part of your life? Have you come to the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ, in your sexuality? Whatever your age, you are a sexual being. Are you living in a way that makes you ashamed, you have to hide? Is that still all about what feels good at the moment? Is that still about men running a power trip over women, or about women using their sexuality to get what they want? Is Christ the lord of your sexuality, so that whether you be married or single, whether you be young or old, whether you be straight or gay, still the standard is not “if it feels good, do it”, but the standard is the measure of the full stature of Christ? I tell you, in this arena, as in all others, Unless Christ is lord of all, He cannot be lord at all.
c
Have you received the gift of His lordship over every part of your life? Have you come to the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ, in your finances? Who is in charge of your money? We are what we spend. We really are. When that emperor Constantine became a Christian, and then commanded his soldiers to be baptized, he ordered that their sword arms not be immersed, so that they would be free to fight, despite the lordship of Christ! Some of us have not baptized our wallets. We want that money. And we have not heard the Lord say, in the clearest of language, “You cannot serve both God and wealth.” Please do not understand what I am saying as merely a thinly-veiled plea for more money for the church budget. I am speaking about our very souls; and the way we get and spend our money speaks with absolute clarity about who the lord is in our lives. Even in the wallet, especially in the wallet, unless Christ is lord of all, He cannot be lord at all.
d
What can I say this morning? Men and women, the time has come to get right down deep into our hearts and to know who we are. The time has come to see the gift God is giving us and to claim it, the gift of a universal, broad gospel. The hour has come for us to repent and turn away from everything that erodes commitment to Christ. The moment is here when we rigorously and carefully, thoughtfully and prayerfully, open up every thought and every motive to Christ.
Where is your life going today? To what is the inner core of your life given? Are you just on a Sunday-only religious trip, or have you unwrapped the gift of maturity, the measure of the full stature of Christ?
Our theme hymn utters a prayer:
Cure Thy children’s warring madness, Bend our pride to Thy control; Shame our wanton, selfish gladness, Rich in things and poor in soul. Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal.
And what is His kingdom’s goal? Surely you know it by now: Unless Christ is lord of all, He cannot be lord at all.
