There’s a worship song called “Hosanna in the Highest”. No, it’s not by Hillsong. It’s more upbeat and a song I heard in Mandarin on the weekend. As I was singing along and glancing at the lyrics, the line “Be exalted, oh Lord my God” stood out to me.
In Mandarin, it goes 被高举，哦主我神 （Bèi gāo jǔ, ó zhǔ wǒ shén）
Now, my Mandarin is not amazing. I knew there were quite a few words/phrases to refer to God in Mandarin, but up to this point, I didn’t realize that there was a distinction between “zhǔ” and “shén”.
In the PowerPoint slide, the word Lord was over “zhǔ”, and the word God was over “shén”. Sometimes words do get swapped around in translation, so there’s no exact formula to match English and Mandarin characters, but I realized that the character 主 (zhǔ) without the tick at the top is 王 (wáng), which means king, and can also mean lord. In Mandarin, shapes and symbols carry a lot of meaning, and the similarity in characters show that the word lord does match with zhǔ.
This made me think about the names and attributes of God. They don’t just describe God, but also parts of our relationship with God. In the song, we can sing that the Lord is our God, but is God our Lord?
Generally, we sing “my God” more often than “my Lord”. It is pretty easy to say “my God”, but saying “my Lord” implies lordship and authority over yourself as well loyalty and service on your part. That is more than belief or words. This requires action.
Even demons believe there is a God, but if God is not Lord over them, the belief is for nothing. Instead of some distant, vague deity, we know a God who desires to know us and also be Lord of our lives.
A question to ask yourself is “what would it look like if I submitted myself to God? Instead of having God as “the Lord”, how would I go from “the Lord” to “my Lord”?”