God is relentless with his people. He is relentless with his pursuit, with his love, with executing his plans, with his outpour of grace, goodness, joy, life, and I could go on and on. Specifically, right now, the Lord has shown me that he has been relentless to take back his throne in my heart.
Looking back in my life, there is a theme. I bowed down my heart and gave it away to idols, choosing to put anything and everything before the Lord because I didn’t believe he was worth it. He wasn’t tangible to me, he wasn’t wise to me, he wasn’t love to me, and because of all of this, he wasn’t practical to me. Therefore, I gave away the space he should have occupied and filled it with what I foolishly believed was tangible and practical. I was losing my life over and over by choosing these things and not seeing the value of God being seated in the place he deserved, on the throne of my heart.
He saw me doing this and warned me by conviction, by speaking through people, and by his word, yet I persisted head on. The great thing though was that he is even more persistent. He was relentless to take back his throne and throw everything else off.
In Genesis 19 the Lord saves Lot and his daughters from the destruction that is pending on his city. Three angels appeared to Lot, urging him to get his stuff together and leave before they were destroyed. But the Scripture says that Lot “lingered”. Crazy, right? He was in no hurry to move after being warned about disaster, but the Lord doesn’t give up, he isn’t okay with Lot lingering. It continues saying, “So the men seized him…by the hand, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him out and set him outside the city.” After reading that, my eyes were wide open to exactly what God has done in my life. I had been warned about the disaster pending if I didn’t throw out my idols, yet I lingered in my sin until the Lord seized me and removed them himself. And why? Because he is merciful and he wasn’t okay with me lingering either. He isn’t just merciful to me, but he is merciful to you and all of his children. He is relentless and will seize us when we need to be dragged out of our sin because he is a good Father. He loves moving us closer to him and he will bring us outside of the city, into a safe place.
I don’t want to linger anymore. I want to be serious about receiving warnings and obeying them before I dare to replace God with anything else in my heart. If I am honest, there are days when I still don’t know if he is worth it, but I still want him on his throne. He belongs there and nothing is more practical than God occupying the space that belongs to him.
