Help! I Put God First On My Prioirty List, and He Has Taken Up All the Space

Help! I put God first on my priority list, and He has taken up all the space.

Yeah, I know - you’re probably wondering why that’s even a problem. Well… let me explain. About 12-13 years ago, when the Holy Spirit was dealing with me seriously, literally panel-beating my life to fit His own plan, I started thinking about this whole idea of “putting God first” on my priority list. I thought, “God cannot just be first on my priority list or on my daily things-to-do list. If He’s first, what comes second? I mean… what is close enough to God to come after Him?” And then I thought again, “Is there anywhere in the Bible where God is called ‘First’ in something without also being called the One who ends it?”

So, with my then little, but useful Bible knowledge, I did a quick check:

• First AND Last – Revelation 22:13

• Beginning AND End – Revelation 22:13

• Alpha AND Omega – Revelation 22:13

• Author AND Finisher – Hebrews 12:2

Now yes, Hebrews 5:9 calls Him the “Author of eternal salvation” without immediately mentioning “Finisher,” but the writer didn’t even waste much time, by chapter 12 he had already fixed that. So yeah… nowhere. Nothing.

“Hmmm…” I thought. “So if I put God first on my priority list, I can’t just leave Him as first and then move on with other things. I kinda have to put Him as last too.” Well, it seemed to me that He’s all-encompassing. If He’s First AND Last, then everything in between is basically sandwiched by Him. Right? Okay… I see.

But even that explanation didn’t fully sit well with me. I knew something was off; I just didn’t know where.

I kept imagining my priority list as a “scale” of preference, where the “heavier” or more important items go to the top. And then I imagined weighing GOD — the Almighty, Commander of the Lord’s Army, the Rock, King of all kings, Master of Heaven and Earth, Great and Marvelous One (you know what I mean)… and my imaginary scale would just flash: ERROR, then dash-dash-dash, then it'd go Beep. Beeeep. Beeeeeep. Haha!!

The more I thought about it, the clearer it became: God cannot be weighed. He cannot be compared. He cannot sit on a list beside anything else. If I put Him on my priority list, He will take up the entire thing. He does not share. He either has all of me, or He doesn’t have me at all.

Months later, that year, I read in John C. Maxwell’s book, Life@Work, that if you put God first on your daily to-do list, you won’t get around to doing anything else. He will take up all the space, all the time - everything.

And I said, “Aha. Exactly.” So instead of putting God as first, I put Him in the center; the very core.

Max Lucado, in It’s Not About Me, talked about how when God looks at the earth, He doesn’t see me or you; He sees Jesus. And he described Jesus as the Center “C” of life. I didn’t fully get that until I started taking piano lessons seriously.

See, the Middle C on the piano keyboard looks like every other white key… but it is not on the same level as every other key. All 35 other white keys and 25 black keys on my five-octave keyboard know it. The Middle C itself knows it. Without it, the music is either too high or too low. Without it, balance is almost impossible. The Treble Clef revolves around it; the Bass Clef revolves the opposite way. It’s literally the key of all keys. And it knows.

My piano tutor, when he was giving me lessons about the middle C, thought he was giving me music lessons. Little did he know he was unlocking a spiritual revelation that would stay with me forever.

Jesus is my Center ‘C’. I don’t have to put Him as number 1 on my list, finish reading my Bible and praying, and then “move on” to numbers 2, 3, 4… and last.

No. I don’t! I can carry Him into everything - or better still, He can carry me into everything He wants me involved in. He can sit in the center, and everything can point to Him and flow from Him.

He can be the author to finisher of my faith.
He can be all-in-all in my family.
He can be Lord and Master over my relationships.
He can be First to Last in my career.

He is everything from everything to everything in my life. He isn’t just first on my list; He runs through the entire list, from number 1 to number last.

So yes… away with the priority list! I’ll put other things on it, but not Jesus. He doesn’t belong on that list. He rules over everything in my life anyway. And He knows He does. He is my Center ‘C’ Jesus, and I absolutely love calling Him that.

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