How do you treat Jesus?
Discussion question for May 7, 2010.
Do you treat Jesus as your Savior? Do you treat Jesus as you Lord? What is the difference? How do you understand “regeneration”? How about “justification”? How about “sanctification”? How does your understanding of these terms and concepts affect the way you live?
Here’s my summary of our discussion.
Conventional wisdom is that we treat Jesus as Savior by asking Him into our heart and being “saved”. This is often accompanied with a feeling of joy or peace at that time. I believe accepting Jesus as Savior needs to be more of a condition than an event. Not that a person needs to pray the “sinner’s prayer” every day, but to be accepting Him on an ongoing basis.
Treating Jesus as my Lord means to surrender my rights and self to Him. The opposite of Jesus as Lord is pride (selfishness) not ignorance. The self-surrender is an ongoing action, just like accepting Him as Savior.
Regeneration is to be given a fresh start. Through regeneration we are a new creation, restored (again generated) into God’s image. It is a return to the Designer’s specifications. It is not by my efforts, nor by anything I have done, but only as a gift by the will and choice of God. Without regeneration I am stuck in a religion through which I must try to repay or earn the right to be made new. Jesus described the regeneration to Nicodemus as being “reborn” – from which we get the term “born again”.
Justification is the accounting term that deals with resolving sin compared to righteousness. God can not overlook sin and still be just. It must be paid for. The functional step then is for God to transfer the debt of the sin from the sinner to Jesus, even though He was falsely accused. He does this by His grace, not for anything we have done. Justification takes care of the sin by transferring it away, making you “just – as – if – you’d never sinned at all”.
Sanctification means to be walking in your unction and made holy by the Holy Spirit. Unfortunately, we ran out of time before we could discuss this point further.