Giving Up Your Seat
Good Morning,
Have you been to a party where they played musical chairs? To refresh your memory, it involves a certain number of people who walk in a circle while there is music playing. When the music stops everyone tries to grab a seat. There is the catch. By design there is one less chair than the number of people walking. Someone is always left standing. The only way that person could sit down is if someone gave up their seat.
When it comes to taking our faith from mere knowledge to action, perhaps the most important action we must take is giving up our seat on the throne of our life, and to do so repeatedly. In many ways our spiritual journey starts and ends there. Our throne is made for one person only. In fact, no matter how hard we try, two people simply will not fit. What’s more, whoever sits on the throne determines everything about how we live.
If we keep the seat, our choices, priorities, values, and pursuits will reflect, first and foremost, what we want. This can mean always taking the easiest routes, making comfort the highest priority, demanding control, minimizing risk, and focusing primarily on the short end of the rope. It might mean expedient decisions regarding relationships. Or succumbing to peer pressure on moral issues. It can certainly impact areas related to our health, our generosity, our forgiveness of others, the patience and grace we extend, and our financial planning. No area is unaffected. Like it or not, many of the choices we are presented with put our selfishness and God’s will at odds.
Yet when God is on the throne, the prayer, “on earth as it is in heaven” takes on profound implications. Humility fueled by our identity in Christ shows up in us. We shift from a me first to others first focus. We live, love, give, and forgive, out of our desire to please Him. What’s more, the result is a life with more peace (even in situations where the world says peace should be absent). God redeems our past and uses it for our good and His purposes. Our time here on earth takes on a new, transcendent perspective as we seek things that will last forever. Our relationships will reflect His heart. Our joy and hope are rooted in the Almighty and not our circumstances. Through the power of the Holy Spirit we can make choices, that while going against the grain, bring about eternal good. It is the most invigorating, hard, joyful, patience building, exciting, fulfilment brimming life imaginable. It is a life that not only changes us, but the entire world.
Will you make the critical choice to give up your seat?
“Sin has may manifestations, but its essence is one. A moral being, created to worship before the throne of God, sits on the throne of his own selfhood and from that elevated position declares, “I AM”. To set our will against the will of God is to dethrone God and make ourselves supreme in the little kingdom of Mansoul.” – A.W. Tozer (Knowledge of the Holy).
Questions to ponder this week:
1. Who is sitting on the throne of your life this morning? How is this reflecting itself?
2. How can you make continual the decision to put God on the throne?
Live on purpose, Ron Klopfenstein, CPLC
