Making Jesus Lord

“Not my president,” pouted large numbers of deeply disappointed Democrats last November. Many are still saying it. I didn’t know it, but the disclaimer did not originate in 2024 or even in 2016. It goes all the way back to George W. Bush’s hair-splitting victory over Al Gore in 2000, which turned on something like 327 votes. Back then, it meant something like “Gore actually won, so Bush is not the real president even if some people say he is.”

Now it means something more like “If I don’t acknowledge it, it isn’t real.”

That’s an incredibly silly statement on its face. I’ve never liked Joe Biden, and I still don’t believe he won legitimately in 2000, but he wielded the powers of the office for four years regardless of my opinion. Had I lived in the US during those years, he would have been my president whether I admitted it or not, and he remained the president of those Republicans who simply referred to him as “the resident” instead. Facts are facts regardless of how we feel about them personally.

Christians say some things equally nonsensical, some quite ancient. “King of my life I crown thee now,” went the old hymn. That’s from a good century and a half ago, but we still sing it and believers say things just like it, talking about “making Jesus the Lord of your life”, as if the truth of Christ’s lordship is a matter that turns on how we think about it or what we do to demonstrate it.

The fact is, Lord, King or anything else, Christ is what he is entirely independent of our thoughts about him and the actions we take because of it. We are not “making” Jesus anything he isn’t already. If refusing to acknowledge a sitting president is silly and petulant, then what shall we call declining to recognize there is a man seated at the right hand of God right now to whom “all authority in heaven and on earth” has been given.

I always prefer the language of scripture to the tropes of evangelicals. In the words of the apostle, we confess Jesus as Lord. That’s the correct verb. We do not make him Lord or crown him king of our lives, but we enthusiastically proclaim his lordship and kingdom. In doing so, we are getting the jump on a very large crowd. One day, every tongue will do the same.

Acknowledging the lordship of Christ is as meaningful as acknowledging the existence of gravity as a force. The flesh likes the illusion of independent agency, but Jesus is already Lord, and the only real thing we do when we come to Christ is to make evident our former ignorance of reality by publicly acknowledging what was always the case. There is some real significance to recognizing Jesus as my Lord, but the only person for whom it’s any kind of major issue is me. By acknowledging Jesus is my Lord, I say nothing new or revelatory about him, but I tell you a whole lot about myself.