Joel Osteen, the pastor of Lakewood Church, the largest Protestant church in America, admitted in a shocking interview that he really isn’t happy as he appears.

“I remember joking around when I was a kid,” Osteen confessed, “and at one point I snuck up behind my mom, tapped her on the shoulder, and when she turned around I had this big, toothy grin on my face hoping to get a laugh out of her.”

What he got was a whole lot worse!

“She looked at me, frowned, and then she pointed her finger at me and scolded (like only moms can), ‘Joel Scott Osteen, your face will freeze like that!’  Now, it has.”

I tried to reach Joel Osteen to verify the truth of this story, but he didn’t respond to my inquiries.  I also had no success trying to find anything on Wikipedia.  If you also can’t find any truth to this tale, I’d suggest you just chalk it up to April Fool’s silliness and a curiosity to see how something like this could impact a person’s blog stats.

If you’ve spent any time at all in a church anywhere in America (especially at the end when the music is playing and the emotions are flowing), then you’ve heard somebody tell you that you need to make Jesus the Lord of your life.  Heck, forget church.  If any of the following apply to you, you’ve probably heard it, too:

• You spend time flipping through religious cable programming early in the morning or late at night, or
• You attend festivals with large crowds where people hold signs and hand out religious pamphlets like they’re giving away candy, or
• You have a church-going Grandma.

And while I’m not knocking any of those situations (especially church-going Grandmas), I do want to tell you the 1 obvious reason why you and I can’t make Jesus Lord. My guess is that it’s so simple, you’ve missed it.  The reason?

He already is.

That may surprise you, and before you go running down the road ahead of me warning everyone who may read this that I’m guilty of heresy, allow me to walk you through a couple of mental gymnastics and then share with you why I think this is so critical.

It’s always good to start with the Bible

As I’ve been researching this idea, I’ve realized something.  Nowhere in the Bible are people told to make Jesus Lord.  But there are plenty of places in the Bible where people are told that Jesus is Lord.  A few that come to mind are:

Then Jesus said to them, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” (Luke 6:5 – emphasis added)

They will wage war against the Lamb, but the Lamb will triumph over them because He is Lord of lords and King of kings–and with Him will be His called, chosen and faithful followers. (Revelation 17:14 – emphasis added)

On His robe and on His thigh He has this name written: King of kings and Lord of lords. (Revelation 19:16 – emphasis added)

Here’s one last passage that really drives this home:

Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.  (Philippians 2:9-11 – emphasis added)

What is clear from these verses is that Jesus isn’t waiting around for you or me to make Him Lord of anything because God has already made Him Lord of everything.  Is Jesus any less Lord if you or I don’t say He is?  Of course not, any more than I would cease to be my children’s dad even if they stopped telling people I was.

Wait, so you’re saying we all go to heaven?

Absolutely not.  What I am saying is that I’m not sure we fully understand the absoluteness of Jesus’ Lordship.  Towards the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus shocked His listeners when He told them that not everyone who said “Lord, Lord” would actually be saved (Matthew 7:21-23).  But He did tell them who would be saved: “he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”

So what is God’s will?  What can we do that will give us 100% certainty that we won’t be kicked out of heaven at the last-minute like the poor dudes in Jesus’ sermon?

Therefore they said to Him, “What shall we do, so that we may work the works of God?” Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work (think, will) of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.”  (John 6:28-29)

Basically, these men asked Jesus the same thing we are: what’s the one thing I can do that will guarantee me salvation?  Jesus’ answer wasn’t “make me your Lord.”  It was “believe in Me.”  Now, to us, believing in Jesus is the same as “give Him an hour on Sunday and if you really love Him, maybe even Wednesday.”  But in the Bible, believing was the same as “accepting and acknowledging in such a way that actions would change to match” whatever was being believed.

I can believe a chair exists, but I don’t believe in that chair until I sit in it. Believing biblically assumes action.  A lot of people “make Jesus Lord” in the same way.  They believe He lived and died for their sins.  They even believe that He rose again.  But their lives don’t reflect that He IS Lord because they’re still doing whatever THEY want.

If everything hinges on you and me “making” Jesus Lord, then that might change some things.  But if Jesus already IS Lord, well, that changes everything, and that might be the biggest reason why we bristle at it.

The unseen danger of pride

If you’ve stayed with me this far, your head is probably spinning.  It would be so easy to simply say that this is all just semantics and not waste another minute on whether we should make Jesus Lord or accept that He already is.  But let me try to clarify this in such a way that allows us to see the insidious nature of pride and how it can blind us to our real need of Jesus.

Consider this quote from A. W. Tozer:

Christianity today is man-centered, not God-centered. God is made to wait patiently, even respectfully, on the whims of men. The image of God currently popular is that of a distracted Father, struggling in heartbroken desperation to get people to accept a Savior of whom they feel no need and in whom they have very little interest. To persuade these self-sufficient souls to respond to His generous offers God will do almost anything, even using salesmanship methods and talking down to them in the chummiest way imaginable.

This view of things is, of course, a kind of religious romanticism which, while it often uses flattering and sometimes embarrassing terms in praise of God, manages nevertheless to make man the star of the show. (from Man: The Dwelling Place of God, p. 27 – emphasis added)

In an irony to beat all ironies, our sudden decision to “make Jesus Lord” still leaves room for us to take pride in having the wisdom to make that decision.  We call our friends and tell them that we just walked the aisle at church and that we made Jesus Lord.  But if we choose to make Him Lord today, then couldn’t we just as easily choose to make ourselves lord tomorrow?

“Many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord…”

But what if salvation had less to do with you and me making Jesus anything and had more to do with you and me accepting who Jesus already is?  What if instead of us coming to Jesus, it was more about Jesus coming to us?  Then, wouldn’t salvation be so much more about God’s faithfulness instead of our brilliance in picking Jesus?  And wouldn’t that make the foundation of our hope more secure when our feelings about that choice change the next day, or hour, or even second?  Of course it would.

This could easily leave all of us wondering what hope any of us have for being saved?  Our hope comes from the simple fact that God has been seeking us even when we weren’t seeking Him (Psalm 14:2), that He didn’t stop seeking us even when it meant sending His own Son on a deadly rescue mission (Luke 19:10), and that He is committed to bringing everyone who believes in that Son into life with Him (John 3:16).  What do we bring to the table?  Nothing.  Just a heart full of sin that acknowledges His lordship, and a life full of trust that acknowledges that biblically believing in Him means obediently walking with him (see Romans 10:9; John 15:5; Acts 16:31).

JESUS IS LORD.

Those 3 words change everything, and every one who has ever lived, is living, or ever will live will do so in repentance or rebellion because of them.

But none of us will ever have the ability to make Him anything less.

After spending yesterday behind the wheel for well over 9 hours, I got home last night just in time to see North Carolina State choke away a 16 point lead, but not in time to get my Thursday blog posted.  And as frustrated as I was about State not being able to hit free throws at the end of the game to pull off the upset, the truth of the matter is that – if they had won – it would have been an upset.

But when Dayton beat Ohio State, and Harvard beat Cincinnati, and Mercer beat Duke, well, those weren’t just upsets.  Those were the perfect illustration of what may be one of the most peculiar verses in the Bible.

Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom. (Song of Solomon 2:15)

It seems a little weird to find gardening tips in the Bible, yes?  And then to think that somehow it can apply to March Madness may seem even odder, right?  But stop and think about this: it’s never really the BIG THINGS that get us, is it?  Isn’t it almost always the LITTLE THINGS that trip us up?

This is a principle that applies to so many areas in life, and every time March Madness rolls around and the country jumps on the bandwagon of the latest version of “the little engine that could,” I think of this verse, because of Duke or OSU or Cincy had paid attention to the little foxes, they may still be in the hunt for a national championship.

Consider the following scenarios that I’m pretty sure you would say a BIG FAT NO to:

• Being asked to steal ONE MILLION DOLLARS from the Federal Reserve.
• Waving goodbye to your CRYING WIFE AND KIDS as they watch you jump into a sports car and speed off to a new life with a younger woman.
• Knocking on your neighbor’s front door and then BLOWING HIS HEAD OFF with a shotgun blast when he opens it.

Not only would we all say a hearty NO to those situations, we probably wouldn’t really even be tempted to say YES.

But what about a LITTLE WHITE LIE on your TAX RETURN?  Or a QUICK PEEK at a REVEALING IMAGE of a swimsuit model?  Or some JUICY GOSSIP about what your NEIGHBOR DID?

So many people say yes to those situations, and even if they don’t ACTUALLY DO them, they’re A LOT MORE TEMPTED than they would have been in the first ones.

The reason is simple: it’s easy to defend against the big attack because we make sure our guard is up.  But the smaller ones?  The little foxes?  The Mercers and the Harvards and the Daytons?  Just like Duke, Ohio State and Cincinnati, we let our guard down on the small ones, and the results are so often disastrous.

Here’s the bottom line that we all need to remember.  Long before there was Joe Lunardi and Bracketology and Cinderalla stories, God knew how the real game would play out.  He knew that we would look to him for the BIG THINGS, and yet never bother to ask him to help us with the LITTLE THINGS.

Sure, he’ll be there to help you find a job when you’re UNEMPLOYED, but if you trust him and ask him to help you develop patience, perhaps you’d find him helping you KEEP THE JOB YOU ALREADY HAVE even though it drives you crazy some days.

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)

The guy who wrote that was one of the guys that hung with Jesus A LOT.  The more he was around Jesus, the more he started to realize that he needed to have Jesus close to him in EVERY SITUATION, whether it was a BIG TRIAL or a LITTLE PILE.

So do we.

Want to make sure that your life doesn’t end up looking like Duke or Ohio State or Cincy?  Are you ready to stop losing out on BIG OPPORTUNITIES because you didn’t take care of LITTLE RESPONSIBILITIES?

Stop only asking God for help when you face the BIG GIANTS, and start letting him help you with the LITTLE FOXES, too.