Loving God Above All Else Protects Us From Idolatry
We’ve been exploring what it means to love God above all else. This core value is important because nothing else can fulfill us like God our Father and Jesus our Lord. God alone is worthy of our complete devotion as the source of all life and love.
Yet we live in a world aggressively vying for our allegiance. Subtle idols creep into our lives and hearts when we’re not vigilant. That’s why the very first commandment warns against putting anything before God.
Exodus 20:3 “You shall have no other gods before Me.”
Not only because God is truly worthy of our love, faithfulness, and worship, but we are vulnerable to whatever we love more than God.
This is why Jesus said we cannot serve God and money or God and anything else. They will always compete for dominance in our lives. At some point, you will be forced to choose one over the other.
This is why Jesus said we cannot serve God and money or God and anything else. They will always compete for dominance in our lives. Eventually, you will be forced to choose one over the other.
Calvin wrote, “The human heart is a factory of idols, continually creating them.”
He’s right, you know. We love God, but we find that we also love Amazon Prime Day. We worship God, but we also worship success, fame, control, grandchildren, America, ourselves, our desires, entertainment, comfort, wealth, and beauty.
We love God, but we find that we also love Amazon Prime Day.
This is where loving God, above all else, protects us.
Loving God over everything else keeps us from capitulating to a world that tells us what to value and how to act. Love for God protects us from compromising to earn other’s approval. Love for God strengthens us to say no, I won’t do that. Like Daniel’s friends who said they would not bow down to the idol that everyone else worships.
When our identity, worth, and joy are rooted in Jesus Christ and the Father’s love rather than the shifting approval of others, we can more readily choose to remain faithful.
As believers, let’s guard each other from the deceptions of this age.