“He is the head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the first-born from the dead; so that He Himself might come to have first place in everything.” Col. 1:18
“But He said to him, “A certain man was giving a big dinner, and he invited many; and at the dinner hour he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come; for everything is ready now.'”
“But they all alike began to make excuses.” Luke 14:16-18
In this teaching Jesus is trying to point out the tendency to allow other good things to get in the way of the Great One.
If you read on in the passage you will find that one character had bought land, another oxen, and the third had married a wife, with the result being that they each very politely said “please consider me excused.” Not one of these things is wrong in and of itself. There is nothing wrong with land. Nothing wrong with oxen. Nothing wrong with marriage. So what’s wrong then? Well, as good as they are, they prevented these three individuals from being satisfied with the priority of eating a kingdom meal. They took first place, that’s all. But that’s EVERYTHING! As the first passage reveals, Jesus did all He did that He “might come to have first place in EVERYTHING.”
William Barclay writes, “It’s possible to be a follower of Jesus without being a disciple; to be a camp-follower without being a soldier of the king; to be a hanger-on in some great work without pulling one’s weight. Once someone was talking to a great scholar about a younger man. He said, “So and so tells me that he was one of your students.” The teacher answered devastatingly, “He may have attended my lectures, but he was not one of my students.” There is a world of difference between attending lectures and being a student. It is one of the supreme handicaps of the Church. It is tragic to think that in the Church there can be many distant followers of Jesus and too few real disciples.”
Chuck Swindoll said it best. “Whatever is in first place, if it isn’t Christ alone, it is in the wrong place. Life is a lot like a coin; you can spend it any way you wish, but you can spend it only once. What are you spending it on?”
