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Since you’re reading this page, I imagine you’re asking the Lord for a breakthrough in a vital area of your life. Maybe you have taken stock of what you’ve accomplished, who you have become, how your marriage is unfolding, or how your kids are turning out. As you have looked over that inventory scribbled down somewhere in your heart, you have been disappointed or even deeply dismayed.
How thankful I am that at each step of the way, someone reached out to help me when I felt hopelessly alone, looking up at nothing but rock.
Jeff hadn’t thought about it much lately, and it seemed to be a dead issue … until he stepped into that harness with his betrayer holding the line. At that moment, he suddenly had to trust Vince with his life, and he couldn’t.
I tell you this story because no one can move toward change without a significant level of trust in a good outcome.
God is always at work on His end of the rope. You can reach for change with full confidence in the Person above you!
But these approaches gloss over a big problem—the spiritual climber is trying to make a breakthrough alone.
You’ll understand your parents and their influence on you in a different way than ever before.
Lasting life-change is simply what happens when we are confronted with God’s truth and choose to respond. We’re never the same again. Either we make a breakthrough and go forward, or we fall back. There’s no neutral ground.
A First Chair believer is not only saved, but has gone beyond accepting the gift of salvation to willfully being under Christ’s authority and direction. This person knows the Lord as a personal friend and Savior, and is developing a meaningful and growing relationship with Him for himself and those he’s responsible for. The apostle Paul calls this the spiritual state.
Because underlying compromise is a deeply felt commitment to self. The Second Chair person has God on the tip of his tongue but self on the throne of his heart. Unless that root commitment changes, attempts at spiritual breakthrough won’t bring lasting effects.
In some ways, the person in Chair Three may have a simpler life than either of the first two Chairs. He may have decided to live as if God doesn’t exist. There’s no higher authority to answer to, and no competing influence to tug him one way or the other. His decisions are based without apology on what he wants, period.
After Joshua reviews the entire saga of God’s goodness to Israel, he throws down the challenge of a lifetime: “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (24:15, NIV).
When the enemy tribes proved difficult to remove, the elders decided to call off the battle and put the Canaanites under tribute. No doubt this seemed like a terrific plan: no more fighting, no more death, and plenty of money rolling in. Soon the Israelites and their pagan neighbors were on good terms, and soon after that, both sides began giving their sons and daughters in intermarriage agreements.
But what they had grown up with were parents who lived in peace and plenty. And what had shaped their understanding of God was compromise.
As I describe the habits and views of these three, I predict that you are going to feel a growing kinship with one of them. Their thoughts will sound like yours, their dreams and priorities and problems like yours. In fact, by the end of this chapter, you’ll have no doubt which of these Chairs has your name on it.
One of her favorite questions is, “God, what do You have for me to do today?”
When he prays, Ernie sometimes imagines himself as an unimportant person standing in a great throne room: he’s hoping the king can hear him, but there’s quite a bit of distance, a big crowd of more important people, and a lot of echoes, so he’s not sure. He tends to pray the same things over and over again. Generally, he wants God’s power to help him succeed, keep him and his family safe, multiply his investments, and “bless this food to our bodies, Amen.”
He believes God gave us our inner desires for a reason and we should follow them unless they collide with the Ten Commandments.
She has a nearly unshakable confidence in God’s wisdom to know what’s best for her, His goodness to desire it for her, and His strength to make it happen.
Now you can see why Ernie can promise to read his Bible more, or try to persuade his teenagers more, or attend church more—but nothing will change … unless he faces his self-centered, rebellious heart of compromise.
An overwhelming percentage of children of First Chair parents will come to the point in their lives when they voluntarily choose to trust Christ for their eternal salvation. I’m equally convinced that the vast majority of children of Second and Third Chair people will voluntarily reject the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal savior.
By now, you realize that which Chair you choose will affect not only your life, but the generations to come.
But friend, even if you’re sure by now that you’re wedged firmly in Chair Two, it’s possible for you to experience the kind of breakthroughs that will get you and keep you seated in the First Chair of faith—and it’s possible for your whole family as well.
That’s why I’ve titled this chapter about Second Chair Christians, “The Pain of the Man in the Middle.” The middle chair is a painful place to call home. Second Chair Christians are neither unrestrained, guilt-hardened pagans nor unfettered, guilt-free Christians. By their own choice, they’re caught in a twilight zone. They’ve traded the joy of following God with a whole heart for the “wisdom” of cutting their own deal—and they’ve ended up, perhaps without knowing it, as heirs of the king who live like beggars.
and the percentage of those who end up here is so high. By far the highest percentage of today’s church-attending Christians are, in my opinion, stuck in Second Chair living.
And now I want to add another identifier: •compartmentalized
So for every new situation we encounter, we tend to add another drawer to ensure complete appropriateness and safety.
It’s handy if you live in fear, and pure genius if you have lost all hope that there is a genuine, God-created real you anyway.
I have to admit that twenty-first century America seems custom-made for living out of different drawers. Think about it. We hardly know the family next door. We commute to a church miles away, often walking in and out with near anonymity. We work with one crowd and play or pray with another. The opportunities for a little undercover activity are almost limitless. Since no one knows you in any other context, you can reinvent yourself for each one.
From personal experience I can tell you that the most unhappy, frustrated, stressed, and disillusioned people in the world aren’t non-Christians as you might expect, but Second Chair people who know Christ yet who fight Him and His leadership for years and even decades.
To find out if we’re caught up in Second Chair living, we should ask ourselves a most telling question: “Who and what do I love most?” By love, I don’t mean warm feelings. I mean driving passion, daily motivation, overarching interest, and priority.
When you commit to the Lord, you become committed to what He is committed to. That is why First Chair believers love people first.
Mormons and new agers also do this (see eg Kate the soup kitchen girl). The key is the motivation.
What drew Solomon’s heart away from all the promise of First Chair living to end his life in the pursuit of pagan gods? I’m convinced that possessions, pleasure, and power came to control his life. He thought he was wise enough to ignore David’s final words of advice:
The first is the person who started out in the First Chair, then carried on by living mostly on the memory of his conversion (without an ongoing, lively relationship with Christ as Lord), then gradually slid into compromise.
Parental faith must become personal faith for spiritual growth and blessing to be possible.
So, perhaps like Wally and Bill in the opening anecdote, the Israelites made a choice: Take the best of both worlds. Straddle the line.
The second way you might find yourself sitting in the Second Chair is that you grew up leaning on the First Chair—and someone moved.
First Chair faith looks at the difficulty of a commitment and calls on the resources of the all-powerful God. Second Chair faith looks at the difficulty and measures what seems practical. Second Chair faith never conquers giants. Second Chair faith never moves mountains.
If you are like so many other struggling Christians I’ve talked to at moments like this, you may be a wounded prince or princess who is carrying a proof around in your heart or memory every day that God is not reliable. That He’s not loving or strong. That proof is an unresolved hurt or disappointment, a perceived failure, or very real grief that keeps your heart and will locked up.
I can tell you from personal experience that letting go of your personal agenda is perhaps the hardest thing you will ever do. But by your will and effort, and carried forward by God’s tremendous power at work in you, your grip on the old, compromised way of life will lessen. One finger at a time you will let go to God.…
These days, you’d never recognize Johnny. He’s still a whiz at business, but what comes first for him is serving the Lord. If you were to ask Johnny which master brings the most meaning, satisfaction, sense of significance, joy, and blessing, he wouldn’t hesitate. He’d smile, ask you to sit down, and unreel his favorite fishing story. The one where the Lord of life reached down and caught his heart.
In our quest for spiritual breakthroughs, we too will have to face the question of who’s in charge in our life and whom and what we really serve.
The bottom line in any committed relationship with God is this: Who will be master, and who will be servant? Or put it this way: Will I allow God to be God in my life?
And face it, our call to complete surrender in God’s service has zero in common with our right to pursue the American Dream.
We may experience different breakthroughs—in our prayers, in serving others, in knowledge. But the overriding breakthrough that gets us from Chair Two to Chair One hinges on our decision to serve Him.
Friend, let me take you to my favor trophy spot for growing Christians—Matthew 6:33. So many seekers (spiritual fishermen) wander through Bible waters pointing to a good principle here, a strong character value there. Somehow they expect to be transformed. But they never find the secret of serving God—and the spiritual breakthrough that it promises. It lies there just under the surface for every seeking heart. Jesus says: “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.”
In the same way, we seek God where He can be found—in the Bible, in the words of others, in prayer.
“His kingdom” defines for me what I am to seek or to achieve. And there’s not much wiggle room here. Think of the kingdom as the King’s agenda.
You can’t miss the two most important objectives that Jesus puts on the agenda for His kingdom (see especially Matthew 28:19–20): 1. To evangelize everyone in the world with the wonderful gospel of Jesus Christ, so that they will believe on Him and receive salvation. 2. To disciple all believers in the world to obey all that the Bible teaches so that we are all conformed fully into the image of Jesus Christ.
If Jesus was so clear about what it meant to serve him, why do so many of us still fall away, unable to make that leap?
