My Father, the Evangelist
My own father is a full-time evangelist and has led thousands of souls to Christ over the last forty years of faithful gospel ministry. I just called him in Easley, S.C., to have him rehearse for me his experience and give me a reading as an evangelist on the two step, Savior-Lord paradigm.
He said that he used to talk that way but has given it up in recent years (he just turned seventy) because of how much damage he saw it doing to the churches as it encouraged people to think they were saved who were not. He quoted Romans 10:9 on the phone and said, "If a person does not have Jesus as Lord, he does not have him at all."
He himself received Christ at the age of six at his mother's knee. Then as a teenager in 1934 during special services at his dad's church in Reading, Pennsylvania he was brought under deep conviction of the weakness of his life and the cowardice of his witness. He went forward and "surrendered totally to the Lord." That was the first time, he said, that he knew the fullness of the Spirit in his life, and he became powerfully courageous, even standing up the next day in his public high school and preaching for twenty minutes.
But he does not say Jesus was not his Lord before that experience of deeper surrender. Rather he talks of coming more fully to submit to his lordship which had reigned savingly over his life for the past ten years but had allowed him to have many struggles and come to a crisis of commitment.
Then at about the age of thirty there was another crisis. He was drowning in debt and experiencing depression and insomnia. He began to read a book by James McConkey about submission to God. The basis of the book was Psalm 37:4-5, and the author spoke of committing all to God and submitting to God's sovereign plan for your life and resting in him. My father said that he realized at that point, in spite of the great power in his life for saving souls, he was not totally submitted to God. He bowed and gave up all to the Lord again. He said he found a peace beyond anything he had ever known.
His point was, and my point is, that from the time of our first saving acceptance of Christ, he is our King and Lord and Savior and Priest and Prophet and Counselor. All that he is, he is for those who are his. And then begins a life of faltering and growing yieldedness to Christ in all that he is. This can come in the form of decisive crises, or in the form of gradually growing commitment, or in the form of daily surrenderings. The lordship of Christ, in reality, is something that is not discovered and yielded to once, but thousands of times. It is yieldedness to his lordship that is at stake every time we are tempted to sin-every day.