Lordship Salvation, Free Grace & the Sovereignty of God — Rolfe Barnard

Jesus Christ as Lord by Eternal Decree

Good morning, friends. We begin this morning, the seventh in the series of messages on the subject of the Lordship of our blessed Savior, Jesus Christ. And these mornings together, we've been using as our basic text that passage of scripture found in 1 Corinthians 12, verse 3.

No man can say that Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Ghost. There's a cryptic categorical statement. It's either so or it isn't so. If it's so, we ought to pay some attention to it, those of us who are trying to preach and to exercise our calling and to witness to men and women about the terms upon which the God of all heaven brings men in the saving relationship to himself.

Now this morning, I want to continue the message that we brought last Lord's Day. I brought to you last Lord's Day three things the Bible teaches about the fact that Jesus Christ is Lord. He's Lord by God's eternal decree.

He's Lord whether we recognize him or not. He's Lord over the saved, thank God. He's Lord over the unsaved. And he's going to bring this world into subjection to himself, that he may turn it over to the Father, a world that's been brought back to recognition of the sway and the Lordship of Almighty God.

We saw last Lord's Day that he deserves to be Lord in virtue of his death and resurrection on our behalf. And we also saw in an intimate look into the heart of our blessed Lord that he desires to be the Lord of all mankind.

And that men by their willful rebellion, in language that I suppose we have to use to accommodate our thinking, men rob him of the joy that was set before him by continuing to cry, we will not have this man to reign over us.

The Certainty of Judgment Before Christ

Now this morning, if I can, let's get right down to cases. And I want you to elect yourself a committee of one to listen and see whether the word of God has a message for your own heart. Sitting or standing before a microphone, a person tries to picture people who are listening and wonders in his heart of hearts how they are in relationship to a living God.

And I want this morning, if I can, to bring to you three truths that are implied if Jesus Christ is sovereign, if he is Lord of all and King of kings. What does the fact of his Lordship or his sovereignty imply to men and women everywhere?

I think about the fact that if everything's been turned over to the Lord Jesus, then if anybody's sent to hell, the Lord will have to send them. I think about the fact that if the scriptures are right when they tell us that everything's been turned over to the Lord Jesus, then if any man's judge yonder at the great white throne, the judge will be the Lord Jesus Christ.

I think about the fact that if Jesus Christ has been appointed Lord of all mankind, that no man can escape him. We must meet him, meet him now as blessed Savior, or meet him then as judge of all mankind.

My, how solemn is the fact that no matter how you live or no matter how you do, you cannot escape meeting the Lord Jesus Christ. You're going to have to deal with him as he deals with you. And I wish that that could be faced by men and women.

You can't get by, you just can't do it. Somebody says, well, I don't have anything to do with him. Well, but you must, you must, either in time or yonder at the judgment. If I could this morning, I'd like to lay three things close to your heart.

Entire Submission to Christ as Lord

And the first of these is this. If the Lord Jesus Christ has been appointed Lord both of the dead and the living, by God Almighty's divine eternal decree, then that lordship and that sovereignty that God has turned over not to you or me, but to him, demands my entire submission to him.

It demands my utter surrender to the Lord Jesus Christ. Oh, I wish we believed this. I know you and I have lived in a generation where preachers have omitted the truth that you cannot have Christ as Savior without having him as Lord.

But that will soften the awful flames of hell. And I'm here on this radio to ask you to listen to me. Hear me now. I'm not trying to debate a point or prove something. I'm simply stating a fact. And you're going to have to suffer by it or be blessed by it in eternity that you can't divide the Lord Jesus Christ up as he's been divided.

You cannot leave out his lordship and preach the Christ of the gospel. I say that to preach Christ as Savior without preaching Christ as Lord makes a mockery of the gospel and of the entire Christian life.

I say that there must be true repentance, and repentance looks in direction to the fact that you and I live every day of our life under the lordship of Christ, whether we recognize it or not, and that if he is Lord, then we must sanctify him as Lord in our lives and not sanctify our own will or our own selves.

Repentance and the Necessity of Lordship Salvation

I'm speaking to men and women this morning who come up in a generation where men and women seem to want to receive Christ as Savior in order to have a passport to heaven, but they desire to remain in their sins and in the world.

And those of us who preach must be faithful and declare, like Peter did in Acts 8, thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter, for thy heart is not right in the sight of God. Repent, therefore, of this, thy wickedness, and pray God if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee, for I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity.

The sainted Mr. Spurgeon of Blessed Ministry used to warn his students, and I wish you'd listen to this quotation from Mr. Spurgeon, said he, if the professed convert distinctly and deliberately declares that he knows the Lord's will but does not mean to attend to it, you are not to pamper his presumption, but it is your duty to assure him that he is not sainted.

Do you imagine that the gospel is magnified or God glorified by going to the worldlings and telling them that they may be saved at this moment by simply accepting Christ as their Savior while they are wedded to their idols and their hearts are still in love with sin?

If I do so, said Mr. Spurgeon, I tell them a lie, I pervert the gospel, I insult Christ, and I turn the grace of God into lasciviousness. I wish Mr. Spurgeon could face preachers today and personal workers and Sunday school teachers that make fun of the great basic truths of the word of God and dare to substitute their little efforts for the work of the Holy Spirit and going around talking about decisions and how many converts and how many additions they had.

I've had them, but bless God, theirs mine, not the Lord's. I tell you, my friends, these people that say you walk down this aisle and do so-and-so and so-and-so, I guarantee you will be saved. They are the enemies of men's souls.

And I lift up my voice now before you go to hear your own preacher this morning and let him ease your pain by just saying that Rock Marlin's a fool. I tell you now that you cannot have Jesus Christ while you are still an open, outright, downright rebellion against his law in your life.

And for anybody to tell you that right now in the shape you're in, and just take Jesus as your savior and you won't go to hell when you die, is to pervert the gospel. They're enemies of your soul, and you just make a decision.

And at the judgment bar of God, you'll find out that you're one of that crowd. How many demons you cast out, how many wonderful works you commit in Christ's name, he'll say to you, depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.

I never did know you. I never did know you. My friends, it is true today that the Son of God does not save rebels while they are flaunting the flag of their rebellion. There must be utter submission. There must be utter surrender before there can be salvation.

The Finished Work of Christ and True Obedience

What a parody of the gospel when many are told to trust Jesus, to take them to heaven when they die, who nevertheless are living in the practice of sin and rebellion against the holy laws of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Mr. George Goodman has left on record an illustration of the truth, of the utter hollowness, our utter impossibility of claiming to rest on the finished work of Christ. We hear that, don't we? While refusing to live under the lordship of Christ.

Mr. Goodman says a king has part of his kingdom in rebellion, and in order to show his grace, causes mercy to be proclaimed to the rebels on their yielding to him and seeking reconciliation on the ground of the proclamation.

This king threatens destruction to those who continue to defy his authority. One of the rebels is warned of his danger, but he replies, I'm in no danger. I'm resting on the proclamation. I'm sure the king is faithful.

He'll never break his promise or withdraw his proclaimed mercy. But somebody says to this one, but you're still in rebellion. You're continuing in the course he condemns, and you're indifferent to his commands, and the mercy is offered to those who yield.

And the man says, yeah, that's right. But the mercy is free. There are no conditions. And to make conditions would make it no more of grace, is the reply. What should we say, says Mr. Goodman, to such reasoning?

Alas, is it not in effect what some of us say, who, while refusing Christ as Lord, profess to trust in him and his work for salvation? Why, hell's going to be so full of these people trusting in the finished work of Jesus, whose hearts have never been circumcised by the grace of God and have never had a personal encounter with the Lord of glory, and likes all of Tarsus, bowed down and said, Lord, that settles it.

What will you have me to do? Dear old Walter Marshall, who wrote that book that everybody copies now on sanctification, he wrote it some 300 years ago, let me quote him. Why, Mr. Marshall says, why does a man seek a pardon if he intends to go on in rebellion and stand out in defiance of his prince?

They seek a pardon in a mocking way and intend not to return unto obedience, to take a part of his salvation and leave out the rest. But Christ is not divided. They would be saved by Christ and yet be out of Christ in a fleshless state, whereas God doth free none from condemnation but those who are in Christ.

O my soul, the utter lordship and sovereignty of Jesus Christ demands, if I were to escape hell, demands, it's this or hell, demands utter, absolute, one hundred percent submission and surrender to Jesus Christ as Lord.

And his lordship and sovereignty imply in the second place for men his absolute ownership of me and of mine. In Acts chapter 10 and verse 36 we find these five words, how pregnant they are with meaning.

He is Lord of all. Why, bless your heart to listen to present day preaching, it's all right for unsaved people to do as they please. Why, I hear it said that a Christian ought to tithe and a Christian ought to keep the Lord's day holy and a Christian ought to love God, but that isn't so.

Everybody ought to tithe. The tithe is holy, says the Lord. The tithe is mine, he's jealous of it. I preach, my friends, that the cattle on a thousand hills belong to the Lord, they don't belong to unsaved men.

And I preach that there is something that America's fixing to rot at the core if they don't come back to peace, and that is that the Lord's day is not a day of reclamation and pleasure and sin, but it's indicative of a nation's recognition of the sovereignty of God that he sets aside a day to be devoted to him.

And I say that while we're not trying to legislate anybody, we can't do that. We do look men and women in the face and tell them, now, every time you take a penny out of the first tenth of every dollar that comes into your hands, I don't care whether you're saved or not saved, you're a thief, bud, you're a robber, you're doing what God forbids you to do.

That's his, don't you put your hand on it. And the way we treat God's holy day now is a sight for sore eyes. My friends, my Lord is Lord of all. He's the Lord of all the money that is in the world. He's the Lord of the Sabbath.

He's the Lord over you. He's the Lord over me. And I warn you now that he owns you, and he owns me, and he owns everything you've got, and he owns everything I've got. And to recognize and submit to the sovereignty and lordship of Christ is to recognize his absolute lordship and ownership, not only of me, but of mine, every last thing that I have or ever hoped to have.

Unquestioning Obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ

And then in the last place, to recognize and to submit to the lordship and sovereignty of Christ not only requires entire submission, not only requires recognition of his absolute ownership of me and of mine, of you and of yours, but it requires unquestioning obedience.

That plaintive cry of my Lord in Luke 6, 46, Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? I seem to hear the plaintiveness in the voice of my Lord. He said, Don't you know that won't do any good?

Don't you know you can't get by with that? Don't you know just calling me Lord's not what I'm after? Don't you know I mean the recognition of my lordship by the way you live? Don't you know that if you actually believed I was Lord and surrendered to my lordship, you would obey me without question?

Now, nobody does that. Nobody will understand or believe the Bible now unless they can understand it. I have them scream at me, I don't understand that. Well, I don't know that we are entitled to. And the mother says to the Lord, Jimmy, do so and so.

And he says, Why? And church members say, Why? And everybody says, Why? And we question the authority of God. But I tell you right now, there will be no questions when my Lord speaks. We are simply to say, Speak, Lord, thy servant.

Hear it. We are to bow like Saul of Tarsus and say, Lord, that settles it. I've found out who you are. What do you have me to do? What do you have me to do from now on? I'm under your orders. You know in the army, I as a chaplain, and in the army especially during times of war, brother, you don't question an order, you obey it.

That's what the beat over soldiers do. And they train them and they try to harden them. I chonder when the bullets are flying. Death is everywhere. And the commanding officer says, March. He don't want some little buck private wanting to give him a lecture on why we are to march.

He wants them instinctively to march. And oh, my soul, that person who does not instinctively march at the command of the Commander-in-Chief, the Lord Jesus Christ, certainly needs to be told. And I tell you now, you've miscried.

You don't know what salvation is all about. God help you. You don't know what obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ is. The soldiers train to act just like that because of obedience to the command. Now, somebody says, well, Brother Bonham, you never will get anybody to save that kind of preacher.

No, I won't. I'm telling you now again that you can take Jesus as your Savior. Some of you have done it a dozen times, still not saved. You can walk the aisle of your church and they can count you as another decision.

You're still not saved. But oh, my soul, it takes the power of the Holy Spirit to bend you and bring you to where you not only say it, but you say it and mean it. He's my Lord. He's my Lord. You can't do that in your own strength, but thank God through his enablement you can.

He alone, my friends, can present, that is the Holy Spirit, can present the claims of Christ to be Lord. And he who creates a desire within some heart, just listen to me now, will enable you to crown Jesus Christ King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

And on and on as you live, you'll constantly discover new territories in your lives. And when that new territory that has not been surrendered is discovered, you'll bring it under Christ's imperial scepter and crown him Lord over that.

Absolute, unquestionable obedience to the will of the Lord Jesus Christ is a sign that you are saved. During the First World War, a Red Cross nurse was sick unto death, and she was being attended by another Red Cross nurse.

And just a little while before this one died, she began to move her lips and she could hardly talk, and she said, breathe, breathe, breathe. And the attendant nurse thought maybe she wanted a sip of water, and she brought her some water, but she shook her head she didn't want any water.

And then pretty soon the dying woman said, breathe, breathe. And the nurse didn't know, she brought her a Bible, thought maybe she wanted the Bible, but the dying woman shook her head she didn't want the Bible.

And then directly she said, breathe, breathe. And the attendant nurse didn't know, so she brought her a notebook and a pencil, thought she could write her a request. But the dying nurse shook her head.

And then she lifted herself up with about the last strength she had on the bed. She put the palm of her hand down and lifted herself up in a half-sitting position. And she began to say, breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe.

For the Lord.

Closing Exhortation: Mercy at the Feet of Christ

Father, we come again at the close of another broadcast. As once again we've tried the best we've known how. We trust under the anointing of the Holy Ghost to lift up a standard against Satan and to be true to the souls of men and women, boys and girls, who hear these broadcasts and announce and proclaim and insist upon the fact that this world is under the judgment of the Lordship of Jesus Christ, that men can't get by as they ignore him and resist him and rebel against him.

The only place for a poor old hell-deserving, hell-bound sinner is prostrate at the feet of the Lord Jesus, crying for mercy. Oh, God, speak to people's hearts as now they've heard this another broadcast.

Get glory to him who loved us and loosed us from our sins. We pray, our Father, for those who ought to be helping us with our prayer and their financial support. Lord, speak to hearts and enable us to continue these broadcasts as we go from place to place trying to preach the law and the gospel, reaping a harvest of souls for our blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

We ask these things in his name and for his sake. Amen.

Still Waters Revival Books also publishes the Puritan Hard Drive, the most powerful and practical Christian study tool ever produced. All thanks and glory be to the mercy, grace, and love of the Lord Jesus Christ for this remarkable and wonderful new Christian study tool.

The Puritan Hard Drive contains over 12 ,500 of the best Reformation books, MP3s, and videos ever gathered onto one portable Christian study tool. An extraordinary collection of Puritan, Protestant, Calvinistic, Presbyterian, Covenanter, and Reformed Baptist resources, it's fully upgradable and it's small enough to fit in your pocket.

The Puritan Hard Drive combines an embedded database containing many millions of records with the most amazing and extraordinary custom Christian search and research software ever created. The Puritan Hard Drive has been produced to assist you in the fascinating and exhilarating spiritual, intellectual, familial, ecclesiastical, and societal adventure that is living the Christian life.

It has been specifically designed so that you might more faithfully know, serve, and love the Lord Jesus Christ, as well as to help you to do all you can to bring glory to his great name. If you want to love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, then the Puritan Hard Drive is for you.

Visit PuritanDownloads .com today for much more information on the Puritan Hard Drive and to take advantage of all the free and discounted Reformation and Puritan books, mp3s, and videos that we offer at Still Waters Revival Books.