August 17, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The message of Deuteronomy is one that the church desperately needs to hear today. These final words of Moses given to the children of Israel as they prepared to enter into the Promised Land serve as a warning, an encouragement, and a charge. Through them, God exposes the idolatry of our hearts and calls us to give all of our love, worship, and devotion to Him alone in every area of our lives! Moses warns the people that when they enter the land there will be things that compete with God for their attention, their affections and their worship. We, too, have hundreds of things that compete for our hearts each and every day. In this book, God teaches us how to properly respond to the amazing grace He has given us by giving Him our undivided allegiance, our whole hearts and our whole lives. Over the next 34 days, let\u2019s seek this ancient way together as a church!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here in this chapter we see the greatest of all commandments, according to our Lord Jesus. Verses 4-5 say this: \u201cHear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.\u201d This command to love God to the fullest extent with every fiber and every aspect of our being is the foundation for our lives as Christians!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Moses also exposes the sin in our hearts and the proclivity he have to forget about God when we do not feel nor see our immediate need for Him. He warns the people of Israel that, after they are at rest in the land and have their fill of good things, they will be tempted to forget God. The past 40 years they had been entirely dependent on God for their day-to-day food and water, but now they were going into a place where they would have abundance, and abundance always introduces a danger of forgetting God. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Surely many of us face this exact problem! We feel as though we deserve what we have received because we have worked hard for it, that the plenty that we have is our own, and in our abundance we forget our need for God and His grace! This kind of thinking inevitably leads us away from the Lord and into idolatry. Are we really aware of our absolute dependence upon God?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Part of the problem is that we tend to view idolatry only as giving ourselves and our hearts to bad things; Moses is warning us here that we can easily make idols out of the good things that God has given us! Whenever anything rules our hearts and motivates our actions more than love for God, that thing has become an idol, no matter how good it may seem to us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our proclivity to forget our need for God whenever we don\u2019t feel our direct need for or dependence upon Him exposes our need for His grace to intervene. Not only do we need to be daily reminded of our need for God and of His gracious provision, we need hearts that are ruled by love for Him above all else!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is only in loving God above all else that we will ever learn to obey Him, to depend fully on Him, and to live out our love for Him in love towards others. Give to Him His rightful place of love and worship in your heart today!<\/p>\n\n\n\n