God Before All

As Mister Bill and I prepare for a trip, there is great consideration of what "stuff" we cannot travel without. Make no mistake, we have different opinions about what should go and what should stay! It's quite profound and [somewhat] sobering to think about the "things" that we love. Friends of ours are in the storage rental business; while there are valid reasons to store items, it's interesting to hear of the things stored away for seemingly nothing more than a reluctance to part with them. In his book, Knowledge of The Holy, A. W. Tozer writes, "Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry." It is idolatry - loving other things more than God - that causes the human heart its greatest grief. To love God most - that is, more than things (our stuff) - brings a freedom like nothing else. There's nothing wrong with having things until suddenly those things ... have us - we are compelled to hold them tightly, so tightly we squeezed out what matters most. To God's children, John wrote simply: "Little children, keep yourselves free from idols." (1 John 5:21 ESV). Tozer continues, "Let us beware lest we in our pride accept the erroneous notion that idolatry consists only in kneeling before visible objects of adoration." In our car will be various [yes] useful things, a little of home-away-from-home. Every Believer must consider where God is in what we love: is He among our things or is He above our things? In obedience to God's words in Exodus 20:3 of having no other God before me, it must always be ... God before all.