Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ Matthew 22:37 NLT
One of the greatest struggles I have as a flawed being is to retain the proper order of things as established by God. As a follower of Christ, He deserves the highest place, the rightful place, as Lord in my life. Nothing and no one should ever usurp that. Yet there exists this inner pull, this intrinsic lure to initiate a paradigm shift where self becomes the focal point.
In his book, New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional, Paul Tripp states, “The idolatry that defeats us is usually not the worship of formal religious idols, but of a whole catalog of God-replacements, the chief of which is the self. So I am in desperate need of a Redeemer who not only can protect me from external idols, but who can rescue me again and again from me . . . The question is not if we worship, but what we give our hearts to worship.”
What God values is the attitude within our hearts and minds. To love God above all things – our self included – is the kind of worship He desires.