Something keeps you moving. It gets you out of bed in the mornings. It narrates your hopes and dreams. It defines your values and informs your motives in all you do and say. It’s often invisible or subconscious, and at times can act as a puppet master or a judge.
Call it your Alpha, or your First Life. Some people call it “Lord,” “boss,” or “Prime Mover.”
Regardless of the name, the good part is that you can decide who or what your Alpha is.
Meanwhile, despite what you may be reading in the latest edition of the Not-My-Home News, you have been included in a cosmic Master Plan for all time. God has His own Alpha, and invites you to enter into that experience with Him.
“He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything” (Colossians 1:18).
“He Himself,” of course, refers to Jesus Christ. And because He is the first to rise from the dead and remain alive (to this very day), Paul says He is our First Life… our Alpha.
The resurrection of Jesus initiated and launched movements in history in both the seen and unseen worlds that are beyond our comprehension. But the purpose is all the same – that He would have first place in everything. That word is often translated “preeminence.”
While this has a massive, cosmic feel to it, in another sense it has a simple, every-day sense to it as well. “Everything” means everything. Do I give Jesus first place? Do I treat Him as if he is alive, the firstborn from the dead? Or do I treat Him as though He is still in the tomb?
Giving Jesus first place means making Him the first consideration, giving His will the first priority, honoring Him as the highest honor. Jesus goes first. He is Alpha.
But how does that translate in practical terms?
It reaches into the daily choices of my life. God’s ultimate intention is not some abstract, philosophical construct. He intends for Jesus to be my “First Life.” As He was first to emerge from the grave after death, He is to be my “First Life” today.
I feed my relationship with Him as my First Life.
I protect and defend my relationship with Him as my First Life.
I order my day and my other relationships around Him as my First Life.
I reduce the size and scope of every other area of my life so that anyone could see, up close or from a distance, that He is my First Life.
To have Christ as my First Life means that He looms large over every decision, every truth claim, every competing priority, everything. It means there is nothing in my life that denies Christ the preeminence. Nothing. Not career, not money, not pet sin, not talents or gifts, not goals or ambitions, nothing.
When I do seek the preeminence of Christ as my First Life, I am bringing myself into alignment with the will and purposes of God. And since all of creation and eternity is moving that direction, I have an easier time of it. However, since the world, flesh, and devil resist that, I can also anticipate opposition and loneliness, failure and foot-dragging, temptation and hostility.
My Alpha.
My First Life.
We’ll spend a lifetime unpacking what that means to bring our daily lives into alignment with His preeminence. But we aren’t left to our own strength or strategies. The same God who raises the standard inhabits those He calls to live up to it. And every demand placed upon you as a follower of Christ is placed on the Holy Spirit who lives inside of you.
He’s just waiting for you to let Him go first.