All your heart, soul, and understanding…
With regard to the relationships of His disciples with Himself, Jesus says to love God with all our heart, soul and understanding, to keep His Father’s commandments, and to obey His teaching.
But the Pharisees, having heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, were gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, demanded, tempting him, and saying, Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law? And he said to him, Thou shalt love [the] Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy understanding. This is [the] great and first commandment. Matthew 22:34-38 DARBY
If ye shall keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love, as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. John 15:10 DARBY
Ye are my friends if ye practice whatever I command you. I call you no longer bondmen, for the bondman does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things which I have heard of my Father I have made known to you. John 15:14,15 DARBY
We could discuss these verses for hours. We spent a week a couple of summers ago talking about loving God with all our heart, soul, and mind.
Loving the Lord with all our heart, soul, and mind shouldn’t leave room for idols. But, here in America, I think we struggle daily with idolatry. In his book Gods at War: Defeating the Idols that Battle for Your Heart, Kyle Idleman suggests these idols:
The god of food
The god of sex
The god of entertainment
The god of success
The god of money
The god of achievement
The god of romance
The god of family
Yes, each of these things can--and very often does--become an idol in the life of a believer.
In another book very much worth reading, Jerry Bridges discusses sins we tend to minimise and overlook:
Anxiety and frustration
Discontentment
Unthankfulness
Pride
Lack of self-control
Impatience and irritability
Anger
Judgementalism
Envy and jealousy
Sins of the tongue
Worldliness
He calls these, as he titles his book, The Respectable Sins. As you read the list, you probably thought yes, those are sins. Why is Les sharing this list? Too often, they are the sins we overlook in our own lives. They aren’t as “bad” as the things we call sin and are often too willing to point out in others, especially in the lives of those who are not believers. In these days of constant unrest and uncertainty, how often are we impatient? Irritable? Anxious? Judgemental?
I hope you get the point. I don’t want to spend much time developing this last reminder. I do want to say, that as we have worked through my list of reminders, we saved the most important for last.
The presence of idols and the “little” sins in our lives keep us from having the relationship we need to have, the relationship He desires us to have, with our Father. Until we have the vertical relationship right, there’s not much point working on the horizontal relationships.