Who Sits on the Throne?

Verse of the Day: 1 Samuel 15:15, And Saul said, “They have brought them from the Amalekites; for the people spared the best of the sheep and the oxen, to sacrifice to the LORD your God; and the rest we have utterly destroyed.”

In Exodus 21:3-5, God made it clear to Israel that they were not to have any other gods before Him, and that He was a jealous God. He was not jealous as we are jealous. He is jealous in that He wants the best for us and bowing down to anyone other than Him is less than the best for us, for there is no other god like our God. One of the consequences of pride that we give little thought to is the fact that pride leads us, very quickly, to idolatry. We become the greatest god in our lives. Saul’s pride led him down that path to where he became the god of his own life. He dethroned the LORD and put himself on it. We see this in his statement to Samuel when he was making excuses for his disobedience and says, “for the people spared the best of the sheep and the oxen, to sacrifice to the LORD YOUR God”. He no longer considered the LORD his God. When we get to the place that we make ourselves our own god, we open the door to make other people and things our gods. Material things become our gods because those gods boost the image we have created for ourselves. We serve the god of money because it enables us to buy the things that make us look more important than we really are. In Matthew 6:24 warns, “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” We buy into the whole “prosperity” heresy, and even though we may know some of God’s Word and still go to church, we become hearers and not doers of God’s Word. James 1:22-25 admonishes us, “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; 24 for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. 25 But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.” Some of us, like Saul, have become masters at sounding like what we are doing is for God’s benefit, as if God could not be God without our superficial service and empty sacrifices. We quickly forget that God knows our heart and our intentions. Jeremiah 17:10 clearly tells us, “I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings.” Our dethroning of Jesus may not even be as blatant as what I have just described. Our removal of Jesus from the throne of our lives may be as subtle as us making decision in our lives based on how we feel and what we think is best, based on our own wisdom, even though it contradicts God’s Word. Any time we choose our preference, opinion, or feelings, over God’s commands and His truth, we have chosen to put ourselves on the throne that belongs to Jesus. Have we allowed our pride to turn into idolatry? Based on how we are making life decisions, who is really sitting on the throne of our lives?

Today, God extends an invitation to you to accept His gift of salvation (Rom 6:23). Will you accept it? Anyone who calls on Jesus, by faith, in repentance, confessing your sins, will receive eternal life. Do not put off calling on Him, and receive Him and His gift of salvation today (Rom 10:13).