Lordship salvation?

Bible Questions - VBVM Staff - December 03, 2009

Can a person have Christ as his Savior without submitting to Him as Lord? Some teach that both are required for someone to be truly saved.

The answer to the question in a word is yes, but to be be clear, we need to define a few terms.

According to the Bible, to “have Christ as Savior” means to be born again and saved by the grace of God. At the moment of salvation, a born-again Christian receives the Holy Spirit as a “down payment” on his inheritance (e.g., Rom 8:14-16; Gal 4:6; 2Cor 5:5; etc.). The Spirit comes to indwell the believer and remains permanently, making possible a life of obedience and glory to God.

Secondly, to “submit to Him as Lord” is generally taken to mean demonstrating outward, visible evidence of faith through obedience to New Testament teaching. The fact that salvation will produce fruit in the life of the believer is also a Biblical truth, however some have taken this truth further by concluding that a person's failure to following Christ obediently as Lord should call into question any claim of salvation. Termed “lordship salvation," this viewpoint gained popular acceptance from John MacArthur’s widely-read book, The Gospel According to Jesus.

So to rephrase the question, can a person believe the Gospel, enter into grace, and receive the indwelling of the Holy Spirit yet still remain disobedient to the Lord's commands, even to the point of showing no visible spiritual fruit as evidence of salvation? Again, the answer is Scripture is yes, this is possible.

MacArthur and others have argued against such a possibility, often citing John 14:15-24 (among other passages) to support their view, but we believe lordship teaching is an overreaching (if well-intentioned) interpretaion of Scripture. While an exposition of John 14 and related passages is beyond the scope of this answer, suffice to say that any attempt to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between justification and sanctification is wrong, because it presumes too much concerning God’s eternal purposes and our own propensity to obey Christ's commands.

First, how does any believer walk in obedience to the Lord in the first place? Scripture says that sanctification – like salvation – is a work of the Spirit in the heart of man (Titus 3:5; Eph 5:26). Though men are called to yield to the Spirit and obey His direction, without the empowering work of the Spirit, any attempt of obedience would be a work of the flesh and without hope of success.

So, when we argue that every believer must prove that Jesus is Lod by demonstrating some measure of sanctification, we presume that God is prepared to make that work happen, at leat to such a degree that we will always detect it. This is a presumptuous view, to say the least. Is it be possible that God might determine to bring salvation to a person by His Spirit but yet also determine to bring sanctification to such a small degree or in a manner that we fail to notice His sanctifying work in this person's life?

Of course, such a scenario is possible, and that possibility by itself contradicts lordship salvation teaching. It means we can't judge whether someone has truly trusted Jesus for salvation merely on the basis of how much progress they have made in sanctification according to some measure(s) we choose, because God may determine to produce little or no visible sanctification in some cases (see Heb 6:1-3).

Secondly, is it possible that a person could respond to Jesus as Lord (i.e., show Spiritual fruit) but to such a limited degree that the change is not visible outwardly? For example, could a person’s thoughts and beliefs become more Christ-like in some small way without others noticing? Again, it's possible, and this possibility disallows lordship teaching.

When we teach that salvation must always involved accepting Jesus "as Lord," we add a condition to the Bible's teaching that salvation by faith alone. We cannot insist that salvation always means demonstrating outward Spiritual fruit, because we assume wrongly that we will always have enough discernment and opportunity to witness such progress in a person’s life.

We cannot teach that salvation depends on any human work whatsoever – regardless of whether it occurs before or after faith – since salvation comes by God’s grace alone (Eph 2:8-9). Believing in Jesus as Savior means that one day - if not right away - we will know Him as Lord, but it doesn't require a work of obedience.