Unreserved Submission is to God Alone

Brethren, Jesus Christ is Lord (master) of the Church. HE is the one who bought us all with His blood. (That is to say, by his death on the cross, He paid for your sins and purchased you and me out of the hand of the devil). It is now our duty to submit to Jesus Christ absolutely. HE is Lord of all.

I hope these Scriptures below will suffice to make God's viewpoint on this matter absolutely clear to you, that both corporately and individually, we are owned by God.

" ... the church of God which He purchased with His own blood." (Acts 20:28)

"Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and YOU ARE NOT YOUR OWN? "For YOU WERE BOUGHT AT A PRICE; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's." (1 Corinthians 6:19,20)

"And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence." (Colossians 1:18)

Jesus is Lord of all. This is clearly stated in Acts 10:36 - "The word which God sent to the children of Israel, preaching peace through Jesus Christ — He is Lord of all — ".

Brethren, the question is not whether we should obey our Lord, but how we know if a thought in our mind is truly from the Lord. And this is where the spiritual battle truly is for many sincere Christians.

Beware of easy solutions and cheap cop-outs here

One danger Christians face today is to think that they can "outsource" the job of hearing from God to their pastors and spiritual leaders. Now I am very aware that there are two equal and opposite extremes here. Some people are so independent and closed to all forms of God appointed human leadership that they are left to fight the devil alone. They usually end up as casualties in the spiritual war. The other extreme is where people give cult-like devotion to human leaders, placing their lives absolutely at the disposal of some leader and his vision to change the world.

Neither extreme is healthy.

Jesus Christ did NOT delegate his Lordship over your life to anybody. HOWEVER, in limited spheres, God HAS appointed leadership and human authority over us. Major problems occur when any authority figure PRESUMES to cross over into areas of authority over others in which God has not appointed him or her. I would like to give some illustrations of this.

If the president of a country decrees that from now on no one must worship anyone but him, that president is an oppressor who has stepped over the line into areas of authority not given by God. But if a president or political ruler declares that taxes are going up - sorry, but we have to swallow it. God DID give authority to civil government in that area. Taxes are necessary to maintain the common infrastructure of a country.

If a schoolteacher tells a child that she must not listen to her parents, this is also an example of overstepping the bounds of delegated authority.

Church leaders ALSO have a sphere of authority given by God. It relates to the affairs of the local churches that they have been appointed to oversee. How the church is run, when meetings are held, order of service

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