Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. – John 13:13 To have a master and to be mastered is not the same thing. To have a
master means that there is one who knows me better than I know
myself, one who is closer than a friend, one who fathoms the remotest
abyss of my heart and satisfies it, one who has brought me into the
secure sense that he has met and solved every perplexity and problem
of my mind. To have a master is this and nothing less – “One is your
Master, even Christ.”Our Lord never enforces obedience; He does not take means to make me
do what He wants. At certain times I wish God would master me and
make me do the thing, but He will not; in other moods I wish He would
leave me alone, but He does not.“Ye call me Master and Lord” – but is He? Master and Lord have little
place in our vocabulary, we prefer the words Saviour, Sanctifier,
Healer. The only word to describe mastership in experience is love
and we know very little about love as God reveals it. This is proved
by the way we use the word obey. In the Bible obedience is based on
the relationship of equals, that of a son with his father. Our Lord
was not God’s servant, He was His Son. “Though He were a Son, yet
learned He obedience . . .” If our idea is that we are being
mastered, it is a proof that we have no master; if that is our
attitude to Jesus, we are far away from the relationship He wants. He
wants us in the relationship in which He is easily Master without our
conscious knowledge of it, all we know is that we are His to obey.