Daily Manna · Day 99 · April 9
Seated in Heavenly Places
“And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus:”
A man sits down at the back of a room where everyone else outranks him. He keeps his coat on, because he has half decided to leave early.
Many of us bring that same posture into prayer without noticing. We wait to be spoken to. We apologise for taking up space. We open with a paragraph explaining why we are not really in a position to ask for anything.
Paul has just described what we were, and it is not flattering: "dead in sins." He never puts it as doing badly or drifting far away. He says we were dead, and that settles any question of what we brought to God. Then come three verbs, all of them done to us by God and all of them already finished. He "quickened us together with Christ," He "raised us up together," and He "made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus." Earlier in this letter Paul used the same words, "heavenly places," for where God set Christ "at his own right hand." So the seat we have been given is beside Christ, nowhere near the door.
Four verses later, Paul blocks the obvious misuse of this: "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." We are what God has made, and He has prepared good works for us ahead of time. So this seat is not a place to lounge. It is the place from which God's work gets done in us and through us.
So the promise is plain. Nothing that happened this week moved that seat, and nothing you failed at this month cancels it. You never held it because you earned it, so nothing you do or fail to do can lose it. It is yours in Christ, and that means it is as safe as He is.
What keeps you at the back of the room with your coat still on? Is it a doubt that the seat is really yours, or a fear that it came with conditions you might still fail to meet? Paul answers both in this one chapter. The seat was given by grace, and the work comes after it, prepared by God Himself. So take your coat off. Come and sit where God has put you, and pray from there.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 99 is Cast It on the Ground (Exodus 4:2).