13 Thoughts for 2013: Part 3 Jesus is my Master

Romans 10:8-12

It’s the word of faith that welcomes God to go to work and set things right for us. This is the core of our preaching. Say the welcoming word to God—“Jesus is my Master”—embracing, body and soul, God’s work of doing in us what he did in raising Jesus from the dead. That’s it. You’re not “doing” anything; you’re simply calling out to God, trusting him to do it for you. That’s salvation. With your whole being you embrace God setting things right, and then you say it, right out loud: “God has set everything right between him and me!”

These verses are packed full of truth and you could take them in many directions.  But for this post I will take you one way - and that way is to silence and trust. These verses ended up being a perfect follow-up to the last two sections that we've looked at because living out the reality of what is declared in those verses is much harder in real-life than it looks on a piece of paper: to love those who are unloved, to call out to the nobodies you are somebodies, to treat people with the knowledge that they are loved and chosen by God.

But today's verses bring us back to the truth - it is about Him, trusting Him, embracing Him and believing that He is at work - even if we don't see it in the immediate moment.

Jesus is my Master

You're not doing anything; you're simply calling out to God, trusting him to do it for you. 

That's salvation.

There is beauty in these words, there is life and there is death, there is hope and there is trust.

Below are some quotes to place alongside these verses and the theme that popped out for me was silence and trust:  

Be still and know that I am God -

allow God into the everydayness of your life

and release the need to control the outcomes.

(quote by Todd Hunter from a sermon Be Still and Know)

How does love become unconquerable?

By never asking what the enemy is doing to it, and

only asking what Jesus has done. 

Loving one's enemies leads disciples to the way

of the cross and into communion with the crucified one.

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

Just as our love for God begins with listening to God's Word,

the beginning of love for other Christians is learning to listen

to them... We do God's work for our brothers and

sisters when we learn to listen to them.  So often Christians,

especially preachers, think their only service is always

to have to "offer" something when they are together with

other people.  They forget that listening

can be a greater service than speaking.

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

So today I am thankful.  Thankful that all we have to do is simply trust.  But even in the "simplicity" there is a depth and a tenacity because we are to do it with our whole selves - body and soul, our whole being.  It is a letting go because to place Jesus as my Master means someone else/something else has to come out of that seat.  But in this embrace God does a replacement and we discover that God has already done it - He has set everything right between me and Him.  So from this security and assurance let us learn to also embrace and love our neighbors.

In Christ,

P.S. I don't have written down where I got the Dietrich Bonhoeffer quotes, sorry:(.