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Submission and Obedience

Here's how the Christian mind thinks.

The Christian Mind

“You call Me Teacher and Lord, and you say well, for soI am. If I then, yourLord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you. Most assuredly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master; nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.” John 13.13-17

The Christian Mind
Harry Blamires (1916-)
“The Christian mind…is dominated by a demand for submission and obedience. The Christian mind conceives the Christian fact as something which claims, possesses, controls, and overpowers. Over against this, the secular mind conceives the Christian fact as something to be claimed or not claimed, to be possessed or not possessed. And in so far as the individual mentally claims Christianity instead of being claimed by it, mentally possesses Christianity instead of being possessed by it, he has failed to shake off the secular presuppositions which debar him from thinking Christianly.”

Put another way, we don’t so much receive Jesus and the Gospel as we do submit to them. As we submit to the claims of Christ and the demands of the Gospel, we receive Jesus by grace through faith. He comes into our lives in the Person of the Holy Spirit, plants a flag on the beach of our souls, and radios back to heaven that we now belong to our rightful Father, and no longer to the father of lies. Following Jesus means submitting to Him in every area of our lives. We may not pick and choose with Jesus. He is not Someone for merely a part of our lives, at our beck and call whenever we like; He is Lord of all, and that means Lord of all our lives, every moment, every situation, for our good and His glory. If we have not received Jesus like this, it is because, as Harry Blamires goes on to say, “one may think secularly about the Christian fact in the very act of proclaiming oneself a convert.” We do not claim Jesus, or possess Him. Quite the opposite, in fact.

How do the people you serve understand what it means to receive Jesus as Lord? Ask a few.

Kingdom Vision
Two books can help you begin to strengthen your vision of Christ and His Kingdom. Order a copy of The Kingship of Jesus (click here) to grow in your understanding of what in the world Jesus is doing as He sits at the Father’s right hand. And what He’s doing is bringing His Kingdom to earth as it is in heaven, which is the subject of The Kingdom Turn (click here). Let these two books challenge your vision of what Christ can do as He makes disciples and builds His Church.

Renewing the Mind
We are currently running a multi-part series on Renewing the Mind in our daily ReVision series. The sixth installment is entitled, The Mind of Christ in His World: Part 1, and is available as a free PDF download by going to the website, www.ailbe.org, clicking on today’s ReVision column entitled, “Speaking Everywhere” and clicking the link at the end. I urge you to follow this entire series, and to consider using it with your leaders. If you are not subscribed to ReVision, you can do so at the website. Or you can download each week’s PDF study in a format suitable for group or personal use.

Join us in giving thanks to God for the people He moves and enables to support The Fellowship of Ailbe with their prayers and gifts. Does He want to use you? You can contribute to The Fellowship of Ailbe by using the Contribute button at our website, or by sending your gift to The Fellowship of Ailbe, 19 Tyler Drive, Essex Junction, VT 05452. Thank you.

Except as indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. All quotations from
The Christian Mind are from Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind (Ann Arbor: Servant Books, 1963, 1978).

T.M. Moore

T. M. Moore is principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He and his wife, Susie, make their home in the Champlain Valley of Vermont.
Books by T. M. Moore

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