Christ Is Lord Over His Church

Part I in a series

by A.W. Tozer

From his book “Reclaiming Christianity: A Call to Authentic Faith”

And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.

Matthew 28: 18

Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified both Lord and Christ.

Acts 2: 36

Before considering the Church in all of its aspects, we must clearly establish the foundation of the authority of the Church. If the Church had simply evolved over time, and church doctrine and practice was merely a result of that evolution instead of an institution purposely established by Christ, then we would have a different matter on our hands. However, this is not the case. There is an absolute authority within the Church, and that authority is Jesus Christ. This Christ is the Lord of His Church, and He will be the Lord of the world. How does Christ exercise His Lordship over the local church? The answer to this question solves a myriad of problems that are plaguing the evangelical Church today.

One way that Christ exercised His authority was by inspiring His apostles to write letters, as the Holy Spirit moved them, to the various churches. Much of the New Testament is comprised of these epistles. In Paul’s letters, the apostle instructed new believers in doctrine and set forth authoritative injunctions to correct any wrong beliefs they had. These new churches, born out of raw paganism and baptized into the Body of Christ, had a desperate need for instruction. Nothing in their culture had enabled them to be what Christ had called them to be. They came out of paganism, and their gods had been the gods of pagans. Although they knew almost nothing of God and Christ, they believed on Christ, and now the Lord of the Church, through men like Paul who wrote to these churches explaining His truth.

Timeless Biblical Principles

Some Christians panic as soon as any problem arises in their church. Somebody gets offended, and the dear sensitive saints hold up their hands and run for cover, crying, “Isn’t this just terrible?” But problems in the Church are nothing new, and there are really no new problems. The men of God who wrote the epistles had to deal with people who were offended. They wrote letters as they were inspired by the Holy Spirit to address these problems at a particular time in history, but in so doing they also solved them for all of us down through the ages. They laid down universally applicable principles, for there are as many problems in the church as there are people.

It’s a fact that some Christians are troubled. They are not optimistic, but pessimistic, and when they become Christians, they carry that pessimism over. A person carries his or her temperament into the kingdom of God. If you are bright, you carry that over into the Kingdom, and if you are a gloomy fellow, you carry that over as well. The point is, temperament is not sin, it is just the way a person is; and when he or she is converted, the Lord has to deliver that person from what is wrong in his or her temperament.

Our Lord is the same today as He was yesterday. His Church is also the same today as it was yesterday, so He does the same things today that He did before the New Testament canon was closed in the first two centuries. In Paul’s day, thousands upon thousands of people lived in Rome, and tens of thousands lived in Corinth, Galatia, Thessalonica and Ephesus. There were hundreds of thousands of people, and yet the epistles say, “Paul, to the Romans.” Why did Paul write to the Romans or the Corinthians? He was not writing to the masses at all, but to the small minority group within Rome or Corinth. He was writing to those who had believed in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul addressed his epistles to a peculiar group within the community of those cities – a minority group identified as “the Church” who called Jesus Christ Lord and prayed to Him as God. In this way, Jesus addressed Himself to His own followers – the Christian community within a local city, a local church. He does the same today. He applies the inspired epistles to the situations we face every day. The epistles are for people who have heard about this Son of the virgin who came from God and died for men, who rose the third day, who opened the kingdom of heaven to believers, and who is now sitting at the right hand of God. They were written for people who have heard about Him and they have come together, believed and worshipped.

When the apostles wrote their epistles, they wrote out of the authority of divine inspiration. Therefore, the epistles do not advise; they command. So these prescripts – these orders from Jesus Christ, the Head of the church – come to us within the Church. For us today, they call us back to our first love. We have no other command or authority.

The epistles addressed those careless Christians who needed to be instructed and warned and cautioned. These Christians had to be corrected, for some of them were in error. For example, some had the wrong ideas about the resurrection of the dead, so Paul wrote 1 Corinthians 15 and put them straight on that issue. And some of them believed the Lord had already come, so Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians and put them straight on those faulty beliefs.

Even a man full of the Holy spirit may allow the cares of this life to dull his spiritual life, causing him to neglect his prayer life and lose out in his spiritual life. Nothing God can do for you now can fix you like concrete so that you will always be good. You have to walk with God on a daily and continuous basis. That is what the epistles address.

Dealing with Carnality

It might be hard to imagine that there were carnal Christians even in the apostles’ day. A carnal Christian has the seed of God in him, but he also holds on to the sins of lust and jealousy and many other things from the old life. those evil things are described as “carnal,” from the Latin word meaning “flesh.” The carnal man, while he is born again, has so much of the old carnal nature that he is not living a very good life. So the Holy spirit wrote, through the apostles, to men such as these. They had to be delivered from the sins of the flesh. What applied to them applies to us today.

There were also contentious, rebellious and divisive people in the Early Church, and their numbers have not decreased today. The Lord wrote to them and to us, through His apostles, to straighten us out. The Holy Spirit worked through Paul to lay theological foundation. He told the believers how things were so that they might be encouraged and hear the exhortation that followed.

It is surprising how many Christians live below the scriptural expectation for their lives. They are gloomy. They wake up in the morning and think for a moment that everything they knew and thought they had in Christ, and all that they thought God had done for them, was a mistake. Maybe later on they find their way through, but for a while they are discouraged. Some people are like that, so the Lord has to encourage them. Some Christians are born into the world as bouncing Christian babies, and others are thin and anemic and have a long, hard time of it. So the Holy Spirit has something to say to all people.

The Holy Spirit, through the Scriptures, lets people know what they can have and what they cannot have. And if we are faithful to tell them what we believe and what God can offer them, they will come to us and say, “How can I get in on what you have?”

to be continued…

Part II – The Mystery of Reconciliation