I Call Him Lord

Except for the Gospels, where Jesus is the living and breathing Word, God seems to reserve the power of His audible voice for critical moments. He breaks His silence only when it’s His true and clear Word that could muster the listener to turn, go, act, or change.

God must really want your attention if you hear His voice. How could you ignore it? And if you do choose to ignore His voice. . . it might be to your own dismay.

If you hear the voice of God, ya best obey.

There have been two times in my life when I have heard the voice of God: once, sitting in another man’s car outside of my home, and again, a decade later, sitting in a meditation class at church.

Even though those are the only two times I’ve heard the voice of God, I’ve been listening for His voice and trying to stay in His will ever since I first surrendered my life to His lordship as a college freshman.

In that first encounter with Jesus, I surrendered my relationships, career path, heart, mind, and spirit to God. And I meant it. . . at one in the morning.

In the light of day, and in the light of the coming weeks, months, and years of living and walking with Jesus, that surrender has had to happen over and over.

There have been many times that I have needed to remind myself what it means for Jesus to be Lord.

Lords rule over kingdoms and territories. If Jesus is Lord, what is His territory? Where is His kingdom? In biblical times, the only lord was Caesar. To call someone else “Lord” meant death.

These were big stakes back then, but they’re stakes I can’t relate to in my context.

Colossians 1:15-20 provides some additional insight about Jesus’ domain. Six times in this passage, Paul declares that Christ reigns supreme over all things. All things in heaven and on earth, all things visible and invisible.

“All things” means something far more vast to us today. Telescopes have caught glimpses of worlds beyond our planet. The Hubble Deep Field, an extremely long exposure of a relatively empty part of the sky, provided evidence that there are about 125 billion galaxies in the observable universe with an even higher number of stars, with an even higher number of planets.

All of that is Jesus’ domain. All of that is under the lordship of Christ.

Every particle and planet, every culture and creature, every equation and earthling, Jesus Christ reigns over them all.

I love the way Eugene Peterson puts the latter half of the Colossians passage in The Message paraphrase: “. . .All the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross.”

Encountering the Lord Jesus Christ is acknowledging that each and every piece and particle of my life is under His lordship, because of His love. Because God so loved the world.

It is in my best interests to submit my life to the one who holds all things together.

The first time I heard the Lord speak to me, I had been trying to maintain an unhealthy friendship with a colleague who was persistently flirtatious. No matter how much praying I did, no matter how many Bible verses I threw up on my Facebook wall, no matter how much I tried to keep a stiff arm while also being “nice,” I kept letting the advances of my colleague into my heart and into my life.

In the passenger seat of his car one night, I desperately wanted the Lord to rescue me, from my colleague, from myself, from the ruin I was willfully driving my life into. In response to my silent prayer, “Lord, help me,” I heard God say, “Sarah.”

You know you’re in trouble when God calls you by your name.

“Sarah. Get out of this car. Now.”

I still get goosebumps, ten years later. My Lord rescued me.

I have been trying to navigate this world according to “the Way and the Truth and the Life” that is Jesus Christ ever since I turned eighteen (John 14:6). Sometimes it doesn’t feel like the Way is clear. Sometimes the Truth seems fuzzy to me. Sometimes the Life is harder than I imagined it would be.

God knows none of us perfectly follow the Way, the Truth, and the Life, but the good news is that when I’m trying to walk in God’s Ways, the True North of my compass is God’s love and forgiveness. Whatever I do, whichever way I turn, God will be with me, as long as I am using His Love as my compass and submitting my life to Him.

When the Way is unclear and the Truth evades me and Life is harder than I imagined it would be, it takes the rest of the body of Christ to come alongside, to provide the lamp to my feet and the light to my path.

And if even that doesn’t work, sometimes God Himself has to speak, again, when He knows I’m really not getting it.

The second time I heard God speak, I thought I knew the Way—all road signs appeared to be flashing green. I quit most of my freelance writing and took a job as an administrator at a university, a role I had held a decade earlier. It promised insurance. It promised a steady paycheck. It promised tuition benefits for our children. It promised all kinds of good things.

But.

I couldn’t write anymore. The job drained me in ways it hadn’t a decade earlier. I felt cranky and tired all the time. It was harder than I thought it would be, but it still seemed like the right thing to do—the thing God wanted me to do.

Six weeks into my new job, I sat in a meditation class at our church. I prayed, “Show me what I’m supposed to do,” and within seconds of sitting in silence in that room, I heard God say, “Sarah.”

That calling by name again. I knew what that meant.

“Sarah, I gave you all of these opportunities to use your gifts with joy and freedom, and you chose stability and insurance.”

I was devastated and simultaneously grateful for the Lord’s correction. I felt a little like Elijah on the mountain, when God asked Him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:9).

What are you doing here? I didn’t call you to this mountain. Now go back and do my good work, the good work I called you to do.

God called me back to joy and freedom.

That is the kind of Lord I want to live my life under, the One I want to live my life for.

As Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians, when we begin to “grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,” we begin to see that the lordship of Christ is not limiting at all. It’s freeing. It’s freeing because it is ruled by love.

When I daily choose to submit my life to the lordship of Christ, I make space for the fruits of the Spirit to grow (Galatians 5:22–23). That choice requires me to loosen my grip on each area of my life, allowing Christ to enter in with His vast love and mighty grace, so He can transform me into His likeness, one frightening and freeing step at a time.

And He is taking His time. Paul says so in Philippians 1:6, “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion, until the day of Christ Jesus.”

Thank God for that. I can only handle so many startling “Sarahs” whispered in my ear at a time, preferably spaced out over decades.

When God calls your name, ya best obey.

–Written by Sarah Wells. Used by permission from the author.