Is Your Mind Stayed on God?

    From My Utmost for His Highest

You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You —Isaiah 26

What was it like to enter the throne room of a king like Alexander the Great or Xerxes or Nebuchadnezzar?

I imagine it to be protected by huge golden doors. Guards would be everywhere and the court would be full of people looking on and leaning in to hear the conversation at the throne. I imagine a long red carpet leading to a giant throne where the king would sit.

It would be beautiful, but also a place of fear because…

To play this out, you’d have to remember who you are and who the king is. In Esther 4, she said, “All the king’s servants and the people of the king’s provinces know that for any man or woman who comes to the king to the inner court who is not summoned, [Xerxes] has but one law, that he be put to death, unless the king holds out to him the golden scepter so that he may live.”

We don’t have a very good parallel today, but in those days, nothing was above the king. Property was yours until the king gave it to someone else. Your children married, ate and slept because the king allowed it. He had the ability to change everything—to give a kingdom—or to crush a thousand year house with his word.

This may be shocking, but I think of this image and try to put myself into this posture when I pray. I’ll imagine the reverence and care I would take in approaching a King to which I owe gratitude for every single thing I love and Who holds within His hand the power to resolve anything I may need.

Now this is where the image breaks down because no mortal king would also have perfect wisdom to know even those things that I do not need or perfect love to want the greatest things for me even before I want them for myself.

Chambers’ devotional is so rich today and I’ve only scratched the surface of it, but this exercise has been extremely effective, for me, in coming to place myself in the presence of God.

And one more thing. If you think this too harsh a vision of the God you know, consider those that stood in that throne room and how they fared. If the opportunity ever arose, none of us would enter in casually. But, sometimes, even knowing this, I still do.

Still, I’m always better able to see when I remember where and Whose I am.

I love you.

#thegreatcefuldance