Loves we choose over God

Does God take priority over your life? Do you treasure Him above anything else in your life?

If you’re still considering what you even think of God, then that answer will be an obvious ‘no’. But, if you call yourself a Christian and you do “all the Christianly things” and yet you don’t know the answer to that question, it’s also probably a ‘no’. 

I’ll elaborate on what that priority looks like. What we prioritize in our life are things we ultimately love the most, which will guide us through life. This also applies to what we fear the most in life. 

For instance, let’s say that being successful is the most important thing in your life. Now the idea of what success looks like differs between people. It could be climbing the ranks in a career, living a comfortable life with a happy family, or being a good or respected person. Someone who values this success above all else will also likely seek validation in their work towards that goal. 

Everything in their life will move towards this end goal. What they spend their time, thoughts, money and dreams on will be tied back to fulfilling their success.  

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with any of these dreams. It’s good to work hard, to be a good parent and to desire to be a respectable human being. In fact, you’ll notice that all of these desires come from God. He created us to have good desires. He gave us good things. But since we live in a world that is run by sin, it tampers with everything. It clenches its gnarly claws in all the good things God gave us. So, we get distracted by those good things and make them ultimate things for us. Things we love and even fear more than God. 

When we start to depend on those good things more than we depend on God, they turn into our loves or idols. We begin to trust that it offers something better than waiting on God’s goodness. It’s better than God.

There’s a difference between being distracted by other things and being driven by them. Think of life as a path, one that stretches to God that leads to life with Him. And then all the other paths, which take myriads of different forms, all of which end in the same place: heading towards a life without God, run solely by sin. We could call this death or hell. There’s no way to follow a path leading towards God and a path leading towards sin. You can either be moving towards God or not. 

“Let your eyes look straight ahead; fix your gaze directly before you. Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways. Do not turn to the right or the left; keep your foot from evil.” - Proverbs 4:25-27

Your life may look meticulously similar and run perpendicular to that of someone following God. “Doing all the Christianly things”, it looks almost identical. But if your focus isn’t God at the end, if He isn’t the ultimate love you are choosing, then you’re headed somewhere else. 

Have you let other desires take precedence over God? Do you care about knowing God more, or about pleasing others more? Do you care about living the life you want and being known for what you believe in or do you care about living a life for God?

We don’t follow God perfectly. Sometimes we look back towards sin, we fall down again and again. But if we keep our eyes on our ultimate love: God, we will always be moving forward, no matter how slowly. 

Timothy Keller said in his book Reason for God, “It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you.” We may be slowly crawling or even stumbling our way over to God. But so long as He is the object of our affection and our faith, we will move and grow closer to Him.

As a Christian, we will always be growing. But if we want to get off the ground, and stop crawling we need to keep our eyes on Jesus. And He will be faithful, even if He has to carry us through to the end.

But what if you don’t want to crawl to Him? You want to walk steadily to Him, run even. That’s the motivation behind writing these blogs, to ignite a desire to move past the fundamentals of following God and grow deeply in a relationship with Him.