Your Life - Like a Big, Beautiful, Wonderful Mansion!

 

Your Life is like a Big, Beautiful, Wonderful Mansion!

 

     I believe that the Christian life can be illustrated by the idea of imagining your life as a big, massive, wonderful mansion with many, many, many rooms.

   These pictures are just a few examples but try and think of one with a large number of rooms and each room represents a different aspect of your life.

        In this illustration, the first step of your walk with God involves Him knocking at your front door.  In the book of Revelation 3:20, it states “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hears my voice, and open the door, I will come into him and will sup with him, and he with me”.  The Lord Jesus does not force His way into your life, He gently knocks at the door of your heart.  He speaks through the voice of your conscience, through the voice of your Christian friend, or through the voice of an enthusiastic preacher.  It’s up to you, as the old painting shows – there is no handle on the door from the outside.  You must invite Him into your life, but once you do that, you will experience the most awesome, wonderful, fulfilling, fantastic life that could ever imagine.  Just like the line in the movie The Matrix when Morpheus tells Neo just before he takes the red pill “You can stay in wonderland and I can show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes”.  There is no limit when you invite Christ into your life.

        There are some people that would equate opening the door of your life to Jesus as just the salvation experience and does not bring in the aspect of His Lordship.  It is like the groom standing before the Minister and says to his new bride “I now take you to be my lawfully wedded… cook!”  The Bride may say “I might cook for you, but I need to be your wife and not just your cook”.  Some people ask Jesus to be their savior, but nothing more than that.

        The next step then is to realize WHO you have just invited into your house!  He is not just the most moral, the holiest, the most loving, the most powerful, the most giving person who has ever lived, but He is God!  Yes, you just invited the Lord of the Universe into your house.  If you stop and consider that for a moment, you will realize that there is only one place for Him.

        I think a lot of times, we invite Jesus into our heart and life and then ask Him to sit in the corner while we try and direct our lives.  We only rely on Him for advice, but we are mostly in charge of the direction that we are going in.  We somehow think that even though He created us – we know better how to run our lives on our own.  The Lord humbly sits there watching us struggle, watching us desperately trying to find the joy that our heart desires.  What we may not realize is that our lives would be far better if we would ask the Lord to be in control.  We need to let the Lord direct our lives, as Carrie Underwood sings in her song “Jesus take the wheel”.  She sings “Jesus take the wheel, Take it from my hands, Cause I can't do this on my own I'm letting go So give me one more chance, Save me from this road I'm on,  Jesus take the wheel”.

        The next step of our illustration is for us to allow the Lord to sit in the seat of authority of our lives.  I am not sure about your house, but at my house, there is a very comfortable recliner in front of the T.V. and that is where I generally sit.  Let that recliner represent the spiritual center of my life.  I need to get up from that prominent place and let Him sit there.  I might even want to give Him the remote control… but that illustration comes a little later.  Allowing the Lord to sit in that easy chair and in control of the house is what the Bible refers to as allowing His Lordship in our lives.  Paul also calls this attitude in Romans chapter 8 when he talks about being “spiritually minded” or “carnally minded”.  To be carnally minded is someone who has invited the Lord in his life but has not surrendered control and is still living for the desires of his carnal or sinful nature.  When we let this happen in our life, we will not experience the joy and peace that God has intended for us to experience.  Campus Crusade for Christ illustrates this principle with the following circles.  On the left, the circle represents a carnal person who still has Self on the Throne and the black circles show the disarray that can happen as a result.  The right circle illustrates the person who has allowed the Lord to direct their life and as a result – their life has more fulfillment, joy, and meaning.  To be honest, I think that a lot of times we go back and forth.  I think that over time we need to learn how to do it less frequently and with less intensity.  I think that being spiritually minded is to live with the attitude that you want the Lord to direct your life and you want your life to be pleasing to Him.  To be carnally minded, may mean that you are not letting the Lord influence your actions, decisions, or behavior… you are defaulting to your own nature to direct you.  The more than you prioritize the direction of the Lord in your life – the more that you will experience His joy and peace and blessing.

       

   Now that we have discussed inviting Jesus into our Mansion and allowing Him to sit in the place of authority, now we can discuss what happens for the rest of our lives.  The rest of our life can be illustrated by what we would normally do when a family member or close friend comes over to our house for the first time.  We want to show them around. 

   I recently added a very large addition to my house, and I am frequently inviting people over and show them all that I have done.  After I have greeted them at the door and welcomed to my home, I want to give them the royal tour and that is exactly what the Lord Jesus does with the rest of our life.  When we started this illustration, I asked you to imagine a big, massive, wonderful mansion with many, many rooms.  I suggested that because I think that there are many, many aspects of our lives that can be compared to the rooms of our house.  Let’s look around a little bit.  Before we talk about how each room can represent a different aspect of your life, let’s talk about what the Lord generally wants to do as we show Him around.

   I would suggest that there are a couple of things that He will want to do.  The first is that He will want to explore an area of your house and bring it into His light.  Sometimes we want to keep certain parts of our life hidden, but if He is our Lord then He will want to shine the light of His Spirit into every corner.  The second thing we should ask is how the Lord can be honored by various areas of our lives.  For example, if we are letting him look in the Living Room, we might want to ask how we can allow the Lord’s influence in the T.V. programs that we are watching, or the music that we are listening to, or the books that we are reading.  In the bedroom, we might ask what websites He would be pleased with us looking at.  If we are letting Him look in the den, we might want to ask how we can allow His influence in our social life.  It is here that we need to understand the importance of reading the Bible and knowing what it says about various aspects of our lives.  When the Bible is clear on a particular subject, then we don’t need to question it, we just need to apply it.  I think that another thing that the Lord wants to do with a particular area of our life is to bless it!  That is the wonderful fruit of revealing a present hidden area of our life to God.  Once He is ruling over it – it will become an area of wonderful blessing.  A final thing that I would mention here is that the Lord would then want to use an area of your life to bless and help others.  As you have allowed the Lord to bring more and more of your life and mansion under His control and influence – you become a wonderful example to others of what God can do with their life.

   Now that we have laid down the general rules, let’s start the “Royal Tour” of your house.

                                

   Look at this floor plan and imagine different rooms of the house and how each room might represent a different aspect of your life.  Which room represents your dreams and aspirations?  Which one represents your marriage, or dating life, your entertainment life, your job, or where you have your most private thoughts?  There may be a lot of different ways of classifying your life by different rooms.  In the following chart, I have made some suggestions as to what different rooms might represent and some verses from the Bible to look at to know how you might allow the Lord’s influence in a particular area.

   I do not think that you should look at this chart in a hard, legalistic way as you struggle to bring your life under the Lord’s control, but as a way of realizing the wonderful blessings that may come as you allow the Lord to influence each part of your life.  I pray that as you open one area after the other to Him, you will feel a sense of His overflowing love as He shines His light in every corner of your Mansion!  Your life IS like a big, massive, wonderful Mansion and under the influence of Jesus Christ, it will become a great light shining on a hill for all to see.

 

Written by Lee Malden – lmalden@hotmail.com   2020