Who Sits on the Throne?
Life is a daily choice of competing allegiances. My struggle is not always between good and evil. Often it is a battle between good and best, between the important and the imperative. Here’s the deal: at no time in this coming new year am I going to struggle with telling Jesus to get out of my life. I am never going to say, “God, you have no place in my life.” My conflict is, what place will He have? Let me offer an illustration. We have all watched the Olympics on television. In whatever event we consider, there will always be a 1st place finisher. After that, there will be 2nd place, 3rd place, and so on. As a result, in the Olympics, you have your gold medal, your silver medal, and your bronze medal participants. The problem in life is not that we do not allow God to stand on the medal platform; people are quite happy for God to be a silver medalist or a bronze medalist. The key priority for many people is that they want to stand at the top and get the "gold medal.” To be honest, I have to say that I battle that as well. Often, we think we are doing good when we invite Jesus to share the gold medal with us.
Our problem is not that we are telling Jesus that He has no place in our lives. Our problem is that we like to sit on the “throne” and invite Jesus to stand next to us as we decide what our life will be and what our life will stand for. It is easy to be critical of the atheist who denies that there is a God. We often think we are better than the critic who dismisses God and looks down on God’s claims. Yet, when we claim the “throne” of our lives and when we demand to be in charge, how are we any different? My observation is that there are many “practical atheists” masquerading as Christians. Many people will claim to follow Jesus, yet they will not bow before Jesus and His authority. Our world is filled with Christian-related cults. Many heretics even claim that they admire Jesus. These cults and heretics have one thing in common: While they do not deny the historical reality of Jesus, they dethrone Jesus. They minimize His claims to be God-incarnate. They dismiss and ignore the commands and teachings of Jesus.
God must be our ultimate authority. God’s Word, the Bible, must be our charter, our rule for life. What choices will we make? What values will we embrace? What truth will we bury deep in our hearts? All of these questions revolve around our dedication to or avoidance of the Bible. The early Church was all-in regarding God’s Word. New Testament Christians were bold in their testimony that Jesus was not "one among many." He was, He is, the one and only! When heretics (in the first century) fought to blur the issue of who Jesus was, the Apostle Paul said that Jesus was the image of the invisible God. Paul stated that God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in Jesus. The Bible affirms that Jesus is fully God (Hebrews 1).
This conversation points to the issue of how we live and what truth we embrace. If we want to know God, if we want to pursue God, there is only one path. That path is commitment and dedication to following the way of Jesus. The way of Jesus speaks to our morality and sexuality. In a world that wants to redefine these issues, we are called to submit to Jesus (and Scripture). The way of Jesus speaks to our ethics and integrity. Will we be honest at all times? Will we speak truth in a relativistic world? Will we treat others the way Jesus wants us to treat them?
The way of Jesus speaks to how we use our money, our time, and our talents. In the battle between the important and the imperative, we often lose sight of God’s plans and commands. The tyranny of the “urgent and now” often drowns out God’s call to faithful service and sacrifice. At the end of each day, as we reflect on how we have lived, the big question is: Who sits on the throne of your heart? Keep looking up!