we have a responsibility to grapple with Christ’s teaching, its perplexities and problems, seeking to understand it and to relate it to our own situation. But ultimately the question which faces the church is very simple: is Jesus Christ Lord or not? And if he is Lord, is he Lord of all? The lordship of Jesus must be allowed to extend over every aspect of the lives of those who claim that ‘Jesus is Lord’, including their minds and their wills. Why should these be excluded from his otherwise universal dominion? No-one is truly converted who is not intellectually and morally converted. And no-one is intellectually converted if they have not submitted their mind to the mind of the Lord Christ, nor morally converted if they have not submitted their will to the will of the Lord Christ.
The thing is that such submission is not bondage but freedom—freedom from the inconsistencies of self, the fashions of the world and the trends of the church. It spells freedom from the shifting sands of subjectivity, freedom to exercise our minds and our wills as God intended them to be exercised, not in rebellion against him but in submission to him.
I do not hesitate to say that these are the kind of people Jesus Christ is looking for in the church today, people who will take him seriously as their Teacher and Lord, not paying lip-service to these titles (‘Why do you call me, “Lord, Lord,” and do not do what I say?’), but actually taking his yoke upon them, in order to learn from him and to ‘take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ’.