“With the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” I can put it this way. Members of the German Church talk much these days about a “state of conferring.” By that they mean that sometimes there are occasions when the issues of the faith become so much alive that the Church must speak and define. There were such occasions in the fourth century, hence the great crop of creeds which sprang up at that time, some of which are still used today. Such a time occurred again at the Reformation. Luther and others could see the deadly peril of the Church and they knew they had to speak out freely and precisely—hence the Augsburg Confession and the Helvetic Confession, the Formula Concordiae and other documents. Now, say the conferring Christians in Germany (and I believe they are right) do so again for we live in such times. Nazi paganism has pushed the Church into a state of confession again. Hence they have made this Barmen Declaration.
I want to make clear the point that is in my mind. I am using this ancient and modern history as an illustration. My point is that for the individual and for the Church there are times of confession, when the duly honorable, safe, and Christian thing to do is to confess one’s faith. What Paul has here chiefly in mind is baptism, in a day when inevitably baptism was not a rite for children, but the admission of adult converts into the Church. It is hard to conceive of anyone deciding to be a Christian without making public confession of faith in one way or another, without saying, “Jesus is Lord—for me too.”
And other times? How can I define them? How can I tell you to be a Christian and not to be a prig? No one can do that for you. I can tell you this—the closer you live to Christ, the more certainly you will know. If you really have the faith in your heart, I am not worried about the words in your mouth. If you are really joined to God in Christ, he will give you the right words at the right time and place. There is a vast amount more to say about this, but this must do for now.
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7. Editor’s Note: Charles Kingsley (1819–73), for whom CKB was named, was a famous nineteenth-century Anglican priest, social reformer, university professor, historian and novelist. He was particularly associated with a form of Christian socialism.
8. Editor’s Note: This is lines two and three of Wordsworth’s poem Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3, 1802.
9. Editor’s Note: A poem attributed to Katherine Craster in the mid-nineteenth century, which came to be called “the Centipede’s Dilemma.”
“CONFESS WITH THE MOUTH AND BELIEVE IN THE HEART”—Romans 10.9
[Preached three times from 7/28/02 at Bishop Auckland to 5/14/06 at Sacriston]
When you read these words you are reading one of the oldest parts of the New Testament. You are seeing words that Christians were using before any part of the New Testament was written. Paul slips in these little pieces of tradition from time to time. He does it (for instance when he writes to Corinth—“I delivered unto you first of all that which I also had received, how that Christ had died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and that he was buried; and that he had been raised on the third day according to the Scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas. . .” And he goes on adding names of those to whom the risen Christ had appeared, until of course he comes to his own). This is what he was taught; what he passed on.
Here he is writing to a Church he had never seen, to Rome, to Christians who he had never met. But they would recognize this; like him they had been brought up on this. If Paul learned these things when he first became a Christian only about three years after the crucifixion, they must go back to the very beginning of Christianity. This is what they thought, what they said, when they discovered that the crucified Jesus was alive. He is Lord—over sin and death. God has raised him from death. They knew it from the beginning and they repeated it in many situations. See them take the new converts down to the river for baptism. Do you confess Jesus as Lord? Yes. Do you believe that God raised him from death? Yes. Or you may see them in another context.
Here is the aged Polycarp, of whom we have something like contemporary evidence. The proconsul of Asia had no wish for his death but the crowd demanded it. “Why not,” he tries to persuade the old man, “why not swear by the fortune of Caesar?” And Polycarp replies, “Eighty-six years have I served him and he has done me no harm; how can I deny my King who saved me?”
In services, at baptisms, in courtrooms, in talks with neighbors, in the conduct of business, in family life—it is the same everywhere, “Jesus is Lord, God raised him from death.” Thin theology, you may say, poor liturgy; but we shall come back to that. And if you want to know what basic Christianity is, how to make it real to yourself, how to explain it to a friend, this is it. You cannot get anything more basic and provocative than this. So we begin Jesus is Lord.
JESUS IS LORD
What does it mean? Well of course it may mean nothing at all. “Not everyone,” said Jesus, “who says lord, lord shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” Anyone may mouth the words. Anyone may persuade himself that in doing so he is performing a religious act, which is pleasing to God. And it is worth nothing at all. At the other end of the scale, you may have seen Paul say elsewhere that no one can say Jesus is Lord except in the Holy Spirit. It is so hard a thing to say realistically, meaningfully, that it is beyond human power. It takes the power of the Spirit of God himself to say the words with the meaning they ought to bear. This did not mean spiritual excitement, a shouting of Hallelujah in a prayer meeting, though no doubt it sometimes expressed itself that way. Paul himself knows what it meant.
You will recall the story of the journey to Damascus. Struck down by the blinding light, confronted by an unknown person, he cries, “Who are you lord?” That is the “lord” of sheer bewilderment, fear, awe in the presence of the supernatural. But with the identification of the divine figure—“Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” the word gets a new meaning. “What shall I do, Lord?” This is the Lord who requires and is offered unqualified obedience. Say the word, and whatever you say, I will do. This is the “Lord” that costs something, that expresses a life of service. And it is only the Holy Spirit who can transform the staggered exclamation into the reality of day-to-day living. You will often see this two-stage development and many of us pass through it. And this is not a bad thing. There is nothing wrong with the beginning provided you are not willing to spend your life in it. But sometimes people do.
We have had Paul; here is another biblical picture. “Good master”—that is not quite up to the level of “lord,” but it is a good respectful way of beginning. Sometimes at least a teacher will tell you the right thing. But the man who was approaching Jesus knew that there was something missing—“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” You know the answer and you know he could not take it “sell off all you have, and follow me.” “Good teacher; yes you say such nice things, and you agree with Moses the Law-giver. I will address you with all respect. But no—I shall not do what you say.”
I paused there thinking of two examples, one positive, one negative, both biblical, both two thousand years old. A bit out of date aren’t they? And the thought came to me that I have spent some time this week writing an obituary for a boy who was at school with me. Always a good fellow, always a Christian, and an intelligent man, an accountant (and not the bad kind of whom we have heard too much in the news of late). So what will he do? The three children are off his hands, he’ll surely work a few years more, and then enjoy a pleasant, leisurely, retirement. No, at fifty, life really began when he entered the ministry (Church of England), and worked until he could do no more. I don’t think he ever said no to Christ, the challenge to act came late.
All three examples run the risk of confusing what I want to say. Yes, Paul quotes the words, “if you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord,” which are fine if they are truthful. Sometimes they are insincere. The record of the Church is full of both sorts. There have been the great and the little authorities of the Church who used the right words, but whose lives showed