Acts 5:31 “God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior.”

After a team wins the Superbowl, where does the Most Valuable Player from the winning team get to go? Cue the music for When You Wish Upon a Star.  “I’m going to Disney World,” right? When a college or professional sports team wins a championship, there is usually a trip to the White House involved, too. Some place where you can enjoy a little R and R, a place of honor in the spotlight–those are the right places for the victors.

If you have worked your way to the top of your field, if you have proven yourself the best person to lead in your area of expertise, what do you get? A corner office? A chair in the boardroom? Again, those are the right places for those who have distinguished themselves in their careers.

If you have redeemed the entire world from their sin, if you have drained all the fear and all the power out of death, if you sacrificed your life to do so but then took it back again, where is the right place for you? Of course, only one person has ever been able to pull off a feat like that. And there is only one appropriate place for him to be– at God’s right hand in heaven.

That’s where we find the one we call our “Savior.” That title–Savior–isn’t just a badge of honor. It is a term of endearment. It says such wonderful things about him. Before I need to know anything else about him, I need to know that his unfathomable love for me led him to rescue me from hell and save me for all eternity.

The Apostle Peter, the man who said this about Jesus, often referred to him as “Rabbi, teacher,” while he was on earth. And Jesus was that. He still is. He has much to teach us about life and love, and God and our future. But we do not follow him primarily as the wise sage or guru who shows us some superior philosophical system of living. He is our Savior.

The crowds of Jesus’ day sought him out as a Compassionate Healer, a miracle-working troubleshooter who could make sickness go away, settle the weather, and feed their empty stomachs. And Jesus still has the power to make our earthly existence a little less painful. We still pray for his merciful intrusion into our physical needs. We pray for health. We pray for rain. We pray for enough money to cover the bills and put food on the table, and rightly so.

But for us, Jesus is not mainly the distribution manager of heaven’s warehouses. He is our Savior. When you come to understand how utterly helpless you are to make amends for all your sins; when you come to realize how spiritually poor and penniless you are to pay for their guilt; when you come to see how relentlessly death is pursuing you, is there anything else you want him to be but your Savior– the one who rescues you from the eternal doom from which you cannot rescue yourself?

There is no higher pedestal on which our Savior could be placed than God’s right hand in heaven. There is no one who deserves it more. There is no one we could possibly prefer to rule our world.