THURSDAY 8th
2 Peter 1:11
‘. . . and you will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
I am returning to this verse in our devotion again today and want to briefly just consider the words ‘of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’. Peter uses the phrase two more times in this epistle, ‘through the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’ 2 Peter 2:20, and ‘But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’ 2 Peter 3:18.
It is important that we progress in our new birth experience from not just knowing Jesus as our Saviour but allowing him to also become our Lord.
We welcome him into our lives as Saviour, that is as the only one who has done all that is needed to grant us salvation from sin, but we need also to allow him to reign in our lives as Lord, as the one who is in the place of authority in our lives. It is not that we become robots, but that we surrender to his will, we ensure that we conduct our lives in conformity to the pattern that he laid out for us in Scripture, we live not to please ourselves but to please him.
Jesus is Lord, we have no doubt about this for we are reminded of it in Scripture in the following verses that we know so well, Philippians 2:9-11, ‘Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father’, but we need to ensure that we allow him to be Lord of our lives. We acknowledge his Lordship with regard to not only his position as the one who is Lord over all, but also as the one who is Lord of my life.
We sometimes sing, ‘King of my life, I crown thee now, thine shall the glory be, lest I forget thy thorn crowned brow, lead me to Calvary’. We need to continually keep coming back to the place called Calvary, where we accepted Jesus as our Saviour and to daily surrender our lives to him, to take up our cross and to follow him, to allow him to be Lord of all.