The Scramble for the Best Seats

by: Lou Lotz

What an embarrassment for the host of the banquet: the guest of honor somehow winds up in a cheap seat at the back of the room, while some self-important nobody sits beaming at the head table. But the host quickly puts things right. The guest of honor is brought forward. “Friend, move up higher.” The interloper must surrender his seat.

Many are the ways people scramble for the best seats at the table of life: There’s self-promotion. Often the finest people spoil the finest things they do because they are over-eager for credit and praise. There’s fault-finding, that harsh, unkind criticism that is invariably a backhanded bid for recognition. Let’s recognize our envious fault-finding for what it really is: a scramble for the best seat; an attempt to exalt ourselves by devaluing others, to heighten our stature by lowering theirs.

We seldom succeed at this. People invariably see though us and recognize our motives. Life never says to the critical and the jealous, “Friend, move up higher.” He who exalts himself never stays long in the seat of honor.

And how petty and small our ways of self-promotion seem when we compare them to the ways of Christ, who said: “The greatest among you shall be your servant” (Matt. 23:11). God help us to see that the best seat is the seat of service.