“Jesus Is Lord”: All the Eggs in One Basket

Photo by Rebekah Howell on Unsplash

The following article is an adaptation of a sermon prepared for the National & Global branch of Indiana Wesleyan University.

When our son was a toddler and our daughter a baby, we lived in Huntington, Indiana, where my husband was an associate pastor. Right next to the church was a house with a giant inflatable Gumby in the window. Our son was absolutely fascinated with that figure, and was delighted to receive his very own Gumby at his third birthday party. Gumby and Pokey (yes, we had the orange horse, too!) played out many scenes on our living room floor, guided by Robert’s fertile imagination. All was well—until the baby sister became a toddler herself, with her own interest in that bendable green figurine. Then Gumby became the center of a fierce tug-of-war! The outcome was inevitable; the only detail to be determined was timing. At some point, despite his stretchiness, Gumby was going to end up dismembered and distorted, in the hands of one or the other, accompanied by tears and tantrums.

Sadly enough, Gumby in the hands of two warring siblings is an apt picture of a Christian or a Christian community with divided loyalties. Whether the “little loyalties” that tug on us are political, ideological, social, cultural, familial, or even ecclesial, they quickly become “caesars.” And we must remember—in fact, I would say it is perhaps the most urgent reminder for Christian communities in 2023—that when the early Christians declared, “Jesus is Lord,” the flip side of that affirmation was, “and Caesar is not.”

The apostle James offers a sharp word picture for describing the reality of trying to live in the tug of competing loyalties. He calls it being “double-minded”: 

“Therefore, submit to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be miserable and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you” (James 4:7–10, NRSV).

Double-minded—obviously, the opposite of that is being single-minded. An Old Testament metaphor that captures well the quality of being single-minded is the image of “a perfect heart.” We find this powerful metaphor in 1 Kings 11:4, where it describes the tragic final chapter of the life of Solomon, a king who began so well in his walk with God and his leadership of Israel. The writer says that Solomon, at the end of his reign, “did not have a perfect heart with the Lord his God” (KJV). The NIV interprets this accurately as “he was not fully devoted” to the Lord his God. The Hebrew says, powerfully and literally, that Solomon “did not have a heart of peace” with the Lord. It is the picture of a heart torn by warring loyalties. What happened to produce this condition in someone who started out with a singular commitment to the Lord and his covenant? We’re not left guessing. The writer explicitly states that it was a case of divided loyalties—not just the many “loves” of Solomon for his multitude of wives and concubines, but also for the alliances and allegiances those foreign wives represented. They turned his heart away after other gods—the gods of power, influence, and wealth, the gods of empire-building, all the little “caesars” of his day. Solomon had a heart at war, in which many competing loyalties left him like Gumby, dismembered and distorted. I think it is important to remember here, because this plays out over and over again in the pages of Israel’s history, that the disastrous condition of Solomon’s heart was not due to outright apostasy (overt rejection of Yahweh) but to the attempt to wed the ultimate and exclusive loyalty belonging to Yahweh with the other allegiances.

Every time I read this passage in 1 Kings, I am reminded of the difference between two types of bed coverings. Think first of a patchwork quilt—all those tiny pieces. No matter how lovingly and carefully it’s been stitched together, each of those little seams that join one piece of fabric to another is a potential weakness, a place where the workmanship can be pulled apart. Now contrast that with the tightly woven, heavy woolen blankets produced by indigenous artisans in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador and Peru. Made of a single material, without seams, those blankets are almost impossible to tear. Solomon, because of his divided loyalties, ended up with a patchwork-quilt heart. The Old Testament writer and James call us to Andean blanket hearts—“hearts of peace” in the OT vernacular, or “single-minded” in James’ lexicon.

A heart of peace (a perfect or perfected heart) is a heart that is cut from a single cloth, a life that has a single directionality and a singular loyalty. Just as “in Christ” defines our corporate identity, so “Jesus is Lord” is the declaration that defines our singular collective loyalty. A Christ-centered community will and must be a community with an exclusive and ultimate loyalty to Jesus the Lord.

The series of imperatives in our passage in James comes in the context of two major problems in the community to which James was writing (vv. 1–6). The first problem is conflict internal to the community—wars, fighting, strife. James calls the second problem “friendship with the world.” That this is not an innocent or innocuous matter is clear, because James describes this friendship in scathing terms as “hostility toward God” and “adultery” (v. 4). In other words, friendship with the world—allowing other loyalties to share space with our loyalty to Jesus as Lord—is essentially a breaking of covenant relationship with God. That is why James calls his readers to “lament and mourn and weep” (v. 9) whenever they discover double-mindedness (divided loyalties) in their midst. Such a condition has put distance or barriers between them and God; thus, they are called to “draw near” to God (v. 8). Divided loyalties stain and distort their actions and attitudes; that is why James calls them to cleanse their hands and purify their hearts (v. 8). Their community can have only one Center; the presence of usurpers is not a minor matter that can be laughed off or reasoned away, but a grave offense that must be confessed, repented of, and cleansed. If you’ve been tracking at all the extraordinary move of God’s Spirit that began at Asbury and is spreading to other campuses and communities around the country and around the world, you are aware that confession, repentance, and cleansed hearts are the cornerstones of that awakening.

James speaks his mind. In all of the New Testament, there’s no voice more frank and direct—except perhaps that of James’ older brother! And yet, even in this no-holds-barred passage with its stark assessment of double-mindedness, there is a lovely thread of grace. We see a rather Wesleyan interplay between human agency and divine work. Yes, there is a problem, and yes, the imperatives represent actions that the human community must take in response. But this is not a pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps DIY project. The imperatives are accompanied by divine promises. God, says James, will draw near to us in our repentance and will raise us up when we come humbly to him with genuine confession of our double-minded condition (vv. 8, 10)

So let’s consider some of the implications of this urgent call to be a community of singular and exclusive loyalty, whose only allegiance is expressed simply: “Jesus is Lord.” First, I want to suggest that the young people in our world desperately want us to be this kind of community. A father of teenagers who took his kids to Wilmore during the Asbury Outpouring to experience what God is doing among Gen Z reported this conversation with them on the way home:

I asked the kids what made the service so good. One of them simply said, “It was only about Jesus.” I pushed him a little: “Wrap more words around that.” The teen’s response: “Well, dad, it feels like most churches are about Jesus and something else. . . You know, Jesus and a political thing, or Jesus and a social justice thing. You know, Jesus and something else. It’s like Jesus is sharing the stage in most churches. Today we had church and it was just about Jesus” (Doug Stockton).

If we are to be truly Christ-centered communities, it means that Jesus can’t share the stage with other loyalties among us!

As our team was prayerfully brainstorming about this series of messages for the IWU staff chapel, Dr. Andrea Summers used a phrase that stayed with me. She spoke of a Christ-centered community as “a highly inconvenient” kind of community. I think she is exactly right at this point of being single-minded, with a singular loyalty, because that requires an orientation that runs counter to the easy and fluid loyalties of our culture. The hard and inconvenient truth is that there is no room among us for “party lines” or “identity politics,” whether those are social, political, or ecclesial. If we are asked to fill in the blank in this statement, “we are followers of _______,” there is no human name that can fill that blank (even John Wesley. Sorry folks!). As the Lord says in Isaiah 42:8: “I am the Lord; that is my name! I will not yield my glory to another or my praise to idols” (NIV)

Maybe, at its heart, this is an issue of trust. Let me illustrate it this way. As people “of a certain age,” my husband and I have had to enter the bewildering world of talking about long-term investments and retirement portfolios. Most of the time I find the conversations laced with mystifying language. However, one thing is abundantly clear—the consistent advice from the professionals is, “Diversify!” Or, as my dad would have said, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!” The rationale—if one source of security fails or one investment bottoms out, you’ll still have hope in the others. But with the radical declaration that “Jesus is Lord,” the church is called to put all its eggs in a single basket. One loyalty, one source of security and identity. Are we willing to make that kind of all-in leap of trust?

Let us not forget who this One is who asks of us this exclusive, singular loyalty. This is the One like a Son of Man, whom Daniel saw in Babylon and John saw on Patmos, the One “to whom was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed” (Dan. 7:14, NRSV). Our response, as individuals and as a community, perhaps can be summed up in the words of a familiar song, which is a James-like prayer for single-mindedness, for perfect hearts, for undivided loyalties: “So give us clean hands and give us pure hearts. Let us not lift our souls to another.”

Rachel Coleman is an affiliate professor (Biblical Studies) for Asbury Theological Seminary and an adjunct instructor for United Theological Seminary and Indiana Wesleyan University, as well as the regional theological education consultant (Latin America) for One Mission Society.