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“If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved” (Romans 9:9-10).
When Bobbie was 9 years old, his teacher asked him to write an essay about an oak tree. Here is what he wrote: “An oak tree can be cut down and sawed into boards. You can make baseball bats out of them. You can also make home plates out of the boards. You can make bleachers out of the boards so people can watch baseball games.”
Can you guess what was on Bobbie’s mind? By the way, little Bobbie grew up to be Bob Feller one of the all-time great baseball pitchers. At the age of nine years, he was saying – “For me to live is baseball.”
In Romans 10:9-10, the word that is translated “confession,” literally means “to say the same thing.” This is the confession that Paul tells us is part of what we must do to be saved.
What is it that we need to confess? What is it that we all need to be saying? Peter said in Matthew 16:16 “You are the Christ the Son of the Living God.” Martha said in John 11, “I believe that you are the Christ the Son of God, who was to come into the world.” Paul says that in our text that we are to confess that Jesus is Lord.
Unfortunately, there are many people who have said these words, but haven’t made the confession in their hearts.
And there are people who have made this good confession, believed, repented, were baptized and are highly zealous workers in the church. But when people meet them on the street, they’d never know they were Christians.
What does “LORD” mean? In the days of Jesus, it meant that someone was your “Master.” Many times it meant you were a slave.
Consider, when you say “Jesus Christ is Lord,” you are saying that He owns you. To confess Jesus as your Lord means He owns everything you call your own – your possessions, your family, your spouse, your time, etc.
To confess Jesus as Christ (Messiah) means that he is our “anointed one.”
Larry Fitzgerald
Woodlawn church of Christ
Abilene, TX