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One of the most well-known Mosaic Laws in The Ten Commandments is Exodus 20:3(NKJV), “You shall have no other gods before Me.” Those of us who were students in Sunday School learned that Heavenly Father is a jealous God, and for most of us, this sufficed as the answer to why we shouldn’t engage idolatry in any way, shape, form, or fashion. We were satisfied with the reality that idolatry is a very bad thing because it is a sin that displeases God. Although this commandment is written very simply, Heavenly Father never intended us to treat it lightly. As we mature in Christ, our understanding of Exodus 20:3 must increase exponentially. The more it does, the more we will witness greater fellowship and intimacy in our relationship with God, in Christ through the person of the Holy Spirit. So, let’s unpack this a little bit.
The psalmist said in Psalm 138:8(NLT), “The Lord will work out his plans for my life— for your faithful love, O Lord, endures forever. Don’t abandon me, for you made me.” God has plans for our lives. He tells us in Ephesians 1:11 that we’ve received an inheritance from Him, and He chose us to be His very own. He did this way before we passed through our mother’s womb. This verse also tells us that God makes everything work out according to His plan. He has engineered every detail about each of us from start to finish. So, there can be no doubt that we fit into the blueprint of His perfect design. We can look at Christ and see our start and our finish. Heavenly Father wants this truth to set ablaze a hunger in us, so that we will never stop seeking to know more about Him; because the more we know about Him, the more we know about ourselves.
It’s not about acquiring more knowledge just for the sake of having it. There’s lots of tremendously educated believers in the Word, but when it comes to applying what they know…crickets! They’ve got a lot of Christ knowledge in their heads, but hardly any of it in their hearts. God tells us in Galatians 5:16 to walk by the Spirit. To do this, you and I have to practically apply the Christ knowledge we have acquired to our everyday lives. We have to walk it out, so to speak. This is how our faith is increased.
The Holy Spirit has to be the dominant influence in our lives. We’ve got to be able to hear the voice of God and respond to it with a “Yes, Daddy, I’ll do that.” This is one of the reasons idolatry is so very dangerous; it keeps us from recognizing and responding to God’s directives. Idolatry is the sin of loving and honoring something or someone else more than we love and honor God; it’s placing something or someone above our commitment to our relationship with Him. Jesus Christ told us in Mark 12:30 that we must love God with all our hearts, all our souls, all our minds, and all our strength. We must love Him with all that we are. This is what it takes to truly walk with the Lord through His Spirit. It’s the level of commitment necessary to not only discover the purpose for which God has created us, but to begin to truly walk in this purpose.
So often we cry out to God, begging Him for more. We want greater intimacy and to see the fulfillment of His promises in our lives. We desire to step over the stuff that is causing the hiccups that we dislike so much, and we want to reach for the goodies on the top shelf. It’s the stuff we’re trying to step over that must be walked through. We have to walk through it in order to develop closer intimacy. The closeness that is developed with God as we walk through the very things that we’ve ignored is necessary for us to go higher in our relationship with Him. There are wounds that need to be healed, patterns that need to be corrected, and things we need to surrender and crucify so that we can walk in the liberty our sonship offers.
There needs to be room in our thinking for the possibility we’re holding on to things that are getting in the way of intimacy with God. Some of us are so desirous of a particular blessing that we’ve made our desire an idol, because we place it before our desire to please God and pursue our purpose in His Will. Heavenly Father loves us more than we can ever know. He doesn’t want us to be in condemnation, quite the contrary, He wants to help us to remove the things that interfere with where He wants to take us. When we give Him free reign to do this, we will open the door for Christ to come into our hearts in a greater way. He will reveal another dimension of himself as he takes us to a new level in our relationship with God.■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
“A New Level in Our Relationship”, written by Reverend Fran Mack, edited by Kim Times for Sundie Morning Sistas ©2020. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord! SMS is dedicated to inspiring and encouraging Christian Women through the Word of God.
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