We Will Have No King to Rule over Us
“Where am I missing it?” As a pastor now ministering in the United States, that was the question John Guest was asking himself. He felt that he was not connecting with his parishioners in Pennsylvania. He was a fine preacher, an excellent scholar, and a very friendly and engaging personality. He was also very devoted to Jesus Christ and to preaching His Word.
One weekend as he was antiquing with his wife, he found his answer, the missing link of understanding in his ministry. The answer was printed on a Revolutionary-era sign that he spotted in an antique shop. The sign, which would have hung in a Colonial general store, read, “We will have no king to rule over us!” John Guest came to understand that he had come from England where having a king, calling someone Your Lordship, was a part of the culture. But the idea of lordship and total monarchy was something completely outside of the American psyche.
Advertisement
That independent spirit created a great nation. But it can get in the way when it comes to submitting your life to another in relationships like marriage, friendship, work, but especially and primarily in a relationship with God. Nothing could be more central to the Christian life than the creature submitting himself to His Creator.
We are considering submission in John 17 because it is at the very heart of this prayer. In this prayer Jesus is perfectly submitted to His Father. He calls God His Father, and this speaks of submission. Jesus says that He is doing what the Father wants Him to do, and this speaks of submission. In seeing this submission, there are messages for our lives as His people. Submission is not popular for a people bent on self-identity, self-realization, and self-reliance, but God calls us to a life of submission, and we can learn something about it from this passage.
I want to address four myths about submission in the Christian life.
Myth 1 — Submission to God Is a Loss of Freedom.
Many people believe that if they submit their lives to the Lord Jesus Christ, they will lose their freedom; they cannot do anything that they want to do in life. A tragic flaw in this reasoning is that a person who is not under the lordship of Jesus is not free. The Bible says that you are in bondage to sin, to the lusts of your own flesh, to the whims of an evil spiritual opponent who wishes you destroyed, and to a world that is alienated from the one who brings true freedom. Or as that great theologian Bob Dylan put it,
You’re gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may the Lordbut you’re gonna have to serve somebody.1
This myth then precipitates another lie: You can be a disciple of Jesus without a radical submission to Jesus in every area of your life. This desire to have it both ways took on a very seductive heresy a few years ago when we heard about Jesus being our Savior but not our Lord. This is a lie. If He is not Lord, He is not Savior.