You Must Have All of Christ or You Have None of Christ

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It's a heresy today to try and divide the Lordship of Christ and His office as Master from His role as Savior when all three offices come together. While salvation is indeed not by works but there's one thing we can't deny: Christ is not someone who is divided into portions where one can receive Him as Savior but not as Lord. The teaching itself has been one of the biggest reasons why so many false converts abound today.

It's a heresy today to preach a Christ who is a Savior but not Lord. To say that it's optional to submit to Jesus as Lord is an utter heresy for this reason. Jesus is Lord and you must submit to His Lordship whether you like it or not. Christians are not just required to submit but they will submit. A true and real salvation submits to Christ for salvation and submits to Him in the process of sanctification. The Christian will delight to submit to Christ's Lordship and they delight to see their imperfect but genuine repentance perfected at a daily basis.

The late Aiden W. Tozer said these wonderful quotes from his book "I Call It Heresy":
To urge men and women to believe in a divided Christ is bad teaching for no one can receive half of Christ, or a third of Christ, or a quarter of the Person of Christ! We are not saved by believing in an office nor in a work. (pp. 10-11) 
The Lord will not save those whom He cannot command. He will not divide His offices. You cannot believe on a half-Christ. We take Him for what He is - an anointed Savior and Lord who is King of Kings and Lord of all lords! He would not be Who He is if He saved us and called us and chose us without understand that He can also guide and control our lives. (pp. 18-19)

The analogy can be compared to having a car. Do you want a whole car or do just want portions of a car? You can't have the car when you just have the front or the rear. You must have the whole of the car to have the car. To buy only half of the car is to have no car at all. To think of Jesus as Savior but not Lord is a divided Christ. When a person has truly received Jesus as Savior that person recognizes this fact - Jesus is Lord and Master and He has every right to command the Christian. Anybody who thinks of having Jesus only as Savior but not Lord is not seeing the real Jesus but a false one.

The problem today is that people tend to say, "But the Church is a hospital for sinners and not a museum of righteous saints." I won't apologize that whenever I say that the Church is both a hospital for repentant sinners and a museum of righteous saints. From the same book "I Call It Heresy", A.W. Tozer also rebuked the same foolishness saying:
Brethren, I believe it is the result of faulty teaching to begin with. They thought of the Lord as a hospital and Jesus as chief of staff to fix poor sinners that have gotten into trouble. 
"Fix me up Lord." they have insisted "so that I can go my own way!" 
That is bad teaching, my brethren. (p. 19) 

Have we forgotten that the Church testifies itself as a museum of righteous saints from poor sinners who sought repentance? If all the hospital does is just fix victims without teaching people how to live well then it's no longer a hospital but an institution that cares more about money than saving people. It's really stupid to believe that the Church is a hospital of sinners. It's as sinful as the idea of Roman Catholicism where people seek to use their religious deeds to cover up their sinful lifestyles. How many live sinfully, go to confess their sins to a priest who cannot save souls because he's also a lost sinner, go to Mass on Sundays and do it all over again? Any church claiming to be Christian but teaching the dangerous doctrine of Antinomianism is just as much as a gate of Hell as any cult that claims to be a Christian denomination but it isn't.

The Church's mission is a hospital only for poor repentant sinners. The Lord is not just a hospital and Jesus won't fix poor sinners if they don't want to. No, it's not "Fix me up Lord so that I can go my own way." It's rather "Fix me up Lord and teach me your way." That's what it means for the Church to be a museum of righteous saints and a hospital for sinners. If anybody teaches that salvation is a license to sin is a false convert. Those who are truly saved don't want to live the same wicked life anymore.

To close, here's a quote from the late John Gill who said in "A Body of Divinity":
In subjection to Him, as King of saints, they not only receive Him as their prophet, to teach and instruct them, and embrace His doctrines, and as their Priest by whose sacrifice their sins are expiated but also as their King whose laws and ordinances they cheerfully submit; esteeming His precepts concerning all things, to be right, none of His commandments grievous but from a principle of love to Him, keep and observe them. (p. 555) 

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