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What Do We Owe Our Master?

Posted by on October 13, 2011 in General | 2 Comments

David Leach

Silent_reverence

What do we owe our Master? We do call Jesus “Master” do we not? Do we owe our master loyalty and fidelity? Obedience? Do we owe Him singleness of mind? Do we owe Him honest service, and not just works done to the satisfaction and approval of our family or fellow church members or people at work?

If Jesus is genuinely our Master, is He not our primary concern? And if He is our primary concern, do we not handle all our many other secondary concerns with an eye to His approval? Do we hope to please this Master by our ongoing ignorance of the details of His Word? Are we hoping our Master will shrug at our disobedience to those teachings when we do manage to confront them in His Word? Are we secretly hoping that Jesus will wink at our sins since we have a overall Christian persona?

Allow me to interject my own experience here. I had thought that increasing old age would make discipleship to Jesus easier. (It has not always worked out that way.) After all, only a fool does not see the road of our temporal lives on this earth ends for most before seventy, and for those relatively few that live on, time is obviously short. Why then do not older people become increasingly fixed in their attention on things above? Well, some do, but most do not. If we have been remiss in recognizing Christ as Master in our youthful years, what possible excuse do we have for our latter years? At minimum, does not our own prudent self interest dictate growing attention to our Lord Jesus, if only as a pragmatic choice? Why then our reticence?

The answer is obvious, and the answer is no different for the old than for the young. There is in us this thing called “self” that refuses to relinquish control and bow the knee of life to every aspect of Christ’s dominion. Oh, we make a pretty good show of it generally, but inwardly many of us reserve an area or two that says “private” or “don’t even bother to knock.” The problem with this is that we cannot rightfully call Jesus “Master” while we are content sheltering His enemies. Bitterness, anger, lust, resentment, pride and such – and the sins they incubate are incompatible with Lord Jesus – and while we knowingly harbor such pools of rebellion, we may publicly call Christ Lord, but we know unless we are completely and utterly deluded, that whatever we call Him, we do not truly serve Him as Lord without unfeigned obedience.