For thousands of years, we humans have been prone to missing the basic point God wants us to understand. He chiseled his desire for us into stone,
20:3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Is there a better articulation of the basic desire of God’s heart toward us anywhere??? We recognize this as the very first of the Ten Commandments. I believe after God etched this one with his finger, he reconsidered and added 9 more just so we might understand what the implementation looks like, given our struggles to see spiritually. Jesus, who had 20/20 spiritual vision, clearly understood the point.
22:37 And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. 22:38 This is the great and first commandment.
Thankfully, our God is all about the HEART! He searches the heart (Ps 139:23, Rom 8:27) and fully knows the person. He doesn’t get hung up on behaviors he doesn’t understand. He never comes to the wrong conclusion. He never misjudges anyone. He knows the clumsy desire of our heart to love him!
Yet we so easily miss the point. We put all of our focus on appearances, on what we see and hear. We are so often wrong about what is important to God. And we are wrong about other people. Sometimes we’re so arrogant that we think we know them better than they know themselves!
We don’t see the heart, all we see is what’s going on at the surface. We take great offense at displeasing behaviors (and we think God does too!), rather than seek to understand the heart that motivated the behavior, or perhaps the heart that is obscured by the behavior.
It is so easy to miss the heart. Meaning we’ve missed the point, once again.
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