My wife and I used to live in El Paso, Texas, where I was the pastor of a church called Jesus Chapel. Three different years, we called the church to prayer and fasting at the start of the new year. As we prayed over El Paso and its sister city in Mexico, Ciudad Juarez, we could see two prominent features that dominate this area – a place called Mount Cristo Rey in El Paso, and the mountain in Juarez where it is written in white letters, “La Biblia es la verdad; Leela!” (The Bible is the truth – read it!) It occurred to me then that those two prominent features of that community tell us practically all we need to know for a successful life here on earth and hereafter! I preached a message about it back in 2011. But this week, one of the lectures I was listening to directed our attention to Ps. 1 & 2, and I saw that those psalms convey the same message! I just had to share it with those of you who check this website…
First, there’s Mount Cristo Rey. Cristo Rey means Christ is King! On the top of it, there is a statue of Jesus, overlooking the cities of El Paso and Juarez. The history of the statue is pretty interesting. At the foot of that mountain, there’s an area that used to be called Smeltertown, because they drew metals out of rock by smelting it there. The Catholic priest of the Smeltertown parish, Father Lourdes Costa, got the idea to put a cross up on that high place overlooking his parish and the city in 1933.
The Diocese of El Paso bought 200 acres on the mountain, and in 1934, Father Costa’s parishioners hauled wood up there to make a cross people could look to. Then hundreds of them worked for 5 years to create a pathway to the top, making it possible for people to hike up there. An iron cross, built at Smeltertown, replaced the wooden one in March of 1934.
Then a Spanish sculptor named Urbici Soler was commissioned to make a permanent statue. Soler went to Austin to personally select over 40 tons of the finest limestone which he then had shipped to El Paso and winched up to the top of the mountain. The statue’s base was completed first on May 15th of ’39, and then on May 24th, Urbici placed the first limestone block. From that day until October 29th of the same year, the sculptor was on the scaffold working from 4 am till sunset every single day until completion! He carved it all on site with an air chisel, just in time for the first pilgrimage, which happened on that very same day. On the fiftieth anniversary of the statue’s completion, October 29th, 1989, a crown was built around the base of it to commemorate the great achievement.
The statue is truly impressive, a monument for millions of inhabitants and passersby to see. But it’s the name it bears and the point behind it that really counts! Christ is King!
If everyone in the world truly realized this and truly submitted to Christ as King, how different all of our lives would be! This is the message that all must hear! See, Christ is the King of the universe, of that there is no doubt. He made everything that has ever been made, so He owns it! He knows everything that can be known, even how many atoms make up the universe, when a sparrow falls to the ground, how many hairs are on our heads. He is all powerful, so He can direct and control absolutely everything that goes on in the universe. He rules over absolutely everything, everywhere, with one exception.
He doesn’t rule over our decisions. He has given us free-will, and we can decide what we’re going to do with our lives. Don’t get me wrong. He can steer us. He protects us, whether we know Him or not. He can get even the most pagan of people to do His will in one way or another. He’s quite capable of making us do whatever He wants. He can break the proudest person if He wants to. The thing is that He just doesn’t normally do that. He allows us to choose in life.
He has worked that way with human beings from the beginning, in the Garden of Eden. He told Adam and Eve what to do and what not to do, giving them wise counsel. He let them make their own choices, but with Satan’s help, they chose wrongly!
Rev. 11:15 says that one day, all the kingdoms of this world will become His Kingdom and He will rule again absolutely. Every knee shall bow, every tongue confess that He is Lord. The only human beings who will be there with Him at that time will be those of us who have made the choice to submit to Him as King in this life. Those who submit to Jesus as King will rule and reign with Him forever in the new heavens and the new earth. The Lamb will come back as the Lion! Those who rebel and choose their own way will be destroyed and cut off forever. Let that statue on the mountain remind us all that Christ is King! Let’s proclaim His kingship to all people, so they might bow their knees to the King while there is still time. This was the message of the apostles.
Now how does a person recognize Christ as King? Well, what’s the first thing Jesus taught His disciples to pray? Jesus taught us that the first thing we should pray is, “Let your Kingdom come, your will be done in earth as it is in heaven.” (Mat. 6:10) Of course, that speaks about the day when Christ will return and rule, and it’s a prayer to hasten that return. But it’s much more than that!
It’s a prayer for God to rule as King in our lives here on earth, right now! The first and most important prayer we should pray is for God’s Kingdom to come into our hearts and for His will to be done in our lives. God’s Kingdom is the place where God rules and His subjects obey Him!
For that to happen, there are two requirements on our part: First, we have to see that He is Lord, He is King. We have to understand that God made us, owns us, and has every right to our lives. We have to also see that He has sent Christ to redeem us, to buy us back to Himself. Through Christ our sins can be forgiven and we have access to God again through Him. All of this can be summed up by the verb believe. Believing these things, accepting them by faith, is the first step toward living under God’s rule, living in His Kingdom. Christ cannot be King unless we believe and recognize He is King, Messiah, Lord, Redeemer, Savior. For God to rule in our lives, we have to believe this. We have to believe God is good and His way is best for us. And in the Bible, believing implies obedience; if we believe something we act upon it.
Second, we must repent. That means, we voluntarily decide to give up the lordship of our lives. We stop calling the shots as we see ‘em and as we want ‘em. We give up that right. We recognize that all we’ve done along that line has been selfish, sinful, and wrong, and we renounce it and turn from it. So if you’ve been getting drunk, you recognize that’s wrong, you ask forgiveness, and you turn from it, period. If you’ve been living in sexual sin, you turn from it. If you hate someone, you repent and stop doing it. If you are racist, or greedy, or a gambler, or proud and self-righteous, you recognize it’s all sin before God, and you renounce it, repent, and turn from it.
Now, that all sounds pretty cut and dried, doesn’t it? Just do it! Stop it! Obey God! Live right! Here’s the problem – we’re not very good at following through on these things! We may recognize we’re doing wrong, but it’s very hard to stop doing it! We may struggle and struggle and keep failing at it. We may want to forgive someone, but that resentment just keeps coming up in our minds. We may want to stay away from some temptation, but it keeps getting the best of us.
That’s why we always say the Christian life isn’t difficult, it’s impossible! If you think it’s easy, you’re not living it as God wants you to! You haven’t seen what all is required! But I want you to know today that the Christian life is possible because the King will live it in you Himself, if you will cooperate with Him and allow Him to do that!
That’s why Jesus said to pray, “Let your Kingdom come, your will be done.” As we pray and seek God daily, desiring His will with all our hearts, learning what He commands and endeavoring to do it, He empowers us by His Spirit to live the life of a child of the King. The truth is, only those who submit to Christ as King are true Christians, true disciples. It’s not those who say, “Lord, Lord,” but those who do His will who are His. The rebellious aren’t really in the Kingdom.
We know these things because of the second message on the mountains – The Bible is the truth, read it! This fact, if accepted, can change our lives and those of all other people on earth! Every one of us must become convinced that the Bible is God’s infallible Word and is absolute truth! We have to teach others this reality as well, and spread God’s Word everywhere.
There is so much out there to help you with this, and I don’t have time to even go over it today, but if you will seek, you can find that which you need to convince you of this, if you only have an open mind. Oh, it’s the greatest Book ever written, the greatest treasure we could acquire! So many say they believe it, but have never developed the discipline to even read it through once, or to read it in a regular, daily way. So much is lost because we neglect the treasure so near at hand!
If we want to live under Christ the King, He has given us His Word to find out how that’s done. It’s the Word which God’s Spirit uses to reveal to us who our God is, what He has done for us, what He promises us, and how we can live with Him. It contains everything we need for living a successful, godly life which pleases the Lord, brings Him glory, and will lead us to everlasting life with Him.
Paul tells us in Romans that we need to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Ro. 12:1, 2). The Word of God will gradually renew your mind, give you a new perspective, eradicate the wrong concepts you’ve taken in from the world. It will reorient you with a new direction in life. It’ll keep you from so many tricks and traps of the devil; false teachings, sinful ways, etc. The Word of God will inspire true faith in you, because that’s the way faith comes to us. Faith is nothing more or less than believing God and believing what He has said. As a famous hymn says, “What more can He say than to you He has said?” Everything you need is in His Word!
Here’s what I want to urge you to do regarding God’s Word. First, just read it every day! Use a plan. Read, meditate, think about it, look up things you don’t understand online, or ask me, or find books, like Halley’s Handbook. As you read, ask God to illuminate your mind by His Spirit, to give you understanding, to speak to you. Some day’s readings will be really exciting and speak right to your situation. Other days will seem blah, nothing special, maybe even boring. That’s ok, just keep reading! You need the discipline!
Not only that, but reading through all of it will give you a better, more balanced overall view of the spiritual life. You’ll see many different aspects of who God is, what He’s done, what He requires, how we’re to respond to Him, etc. Many parts will be fuzzy to you – you won’t understand them. But what you do understand, grab hold of!
Pray for things you see in the Word. Pray prayers you read there, for things the people in the Bible prayed for; protection, guidance, provision, help, deliverance, healing, understanding. Through the Bible, God speaks to us, through prayer, we speak to Him. We ask and receive whatever we need.
I am convinced that none of us really pay enough attention to the Word today. Our churches are filled with teachings from psychology, because people think it’s more practical and will help them more. Most of the big churches don’t teach the Word in depth, because the pastors are afraid of running people off. Instead, it’s self-help, pop-psychology, devotions, and light, topical messages.
Some time ago, I was researching something and found an external hard drive I could buy for $890 with 12,500 books by Puritan authors, plus MP-3s and DVDs. I discovered that these people studied the scriptures intently, and found that they spoke to all issues of life, addictions, sex, marriage, temptation, inner conflicts. If we applied ourselves as they did, we’d need less counseling, and we’d have greater victory in life. The Bible is the truth we need. But the question is, do we really believe that? We must not! Otherwise, we wouldn’t look in so many other directions!
Our problem is, we say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know all that!” But we neglect the Word of God, and suffer many negative consequences because of it. So many of our problems, be they in marriage, relationships, business, government, finances, or whatever, could be successfully overcome if we would just recognize the Kingship of Jesus and the wisdom of His Word, searching the scriptures more diligently and asking God’s help in applying them to life. We need to really pay attention to God’s holy, inerrant, inspired Word!
In Mat. 7:24-27 and James 1:22, we see that it’s not just the hearers of the Word, or even the people who claim to know Jesus whose “houses” stand the tests and trials of life and live successfully for God. It’s not those who only say, “Lord, Lord.” No, it’s the ones who truly submit to Christ as King and who diligently study His Word, so that they can be doers of it, who live the abundant life Jesus promised us.
This week, we learned that Psalms 1 and 2 are considered the introduction to the whole Book of Psalms. Our professor pointed out that Psalms teach us how to live a blessed life by walking with God. He said the two introductory psalms reveal what’s most important in order to do that. We must submit to God’s anointed King, the Lord Jesus Christ, and we must walk daily in His holy Word. I was so blessed to hear this, and my mind went back instantly to my sermon from 2011, The Message on the Mountains! I had to dig it out, tweak it a bit, and share it with all of you! I pray God will help me, you, and everyone we come in contact with to apply this message to our lives today and every day!
Very encouraging- I know I need to open the Word more often to be closer to what God wants me to be.
I’d love to help with that if I can!