11/17/2025
Power Without Conscience?
I ran out of room for this vignette in Sunday’s sermon. Remember the quote that could be the headline for Ahab and Naboth: “All that’s needed for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.” The following reinforces that truth.
At a leadership conference, the CEO of a mid-sized company shared a simple practice that changed their culture.
In every meeting, she kept one empty chair at the table. “That chair,” she said, “represents the person not in the room—the employee who doesn’t feel safe to speak up, the customer who will be affected by our decisions, the community our work impacts.”
One day a manager complained, “We can’t keep worrying about that empty chair—it slows everything down.”
She replied, “It’s supposed to slow us down. Power without conscience moves too fast.”
That’s what Ahab forgot. His power wasn’t for him—it was for others. Every one of us has an “empty chair” somewhere: someone affected by our choices, our silence, or our compassion. The story of Ahab reminds us: When God gives you a seat at the table, don’t forget who else is supposed to be there.
Should we keep an empty pew or an empty chair in worship? It could be a reminder of those who aren’t here yet. The lonely, the doubters, those who don’t have the ‘right kind of clothes,’ the grieving, the shamed, and the sinners who were just like us before we came to know the living Christ. Think about it. You know I am.
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The Clothes You Wear
Sunday I talked about Joshua the High Priest having his filthy clothing replaced by a cleaned and beautiful garments. I also used the illustration of a boy becomes a dragon—who ‘wears’ dragon scales—and is stripped of those scales in order to be restored to a boy. In fact, I could have done the whole sermon around all the clothing imagery in scripture.