“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” Deuteronomy 6:5
If you love the Lord with all your heart, soul and strength, He’ll have the highest place in your affections, the highest claim on your life and the highest priority over your check book. If I love Christ like this, how will it impact my family? Will it hurt my children?
This is a very real question. You love the Lord and want to serve Him. You want your life to count for Him, but you also have a family. You love your children and you want to be a good mother, a good father. What does it look like to love the Lord with all your heart, soul and strength when you’re married and when you have children?
Calculating the risk
“The little ones that you said would be taken captive; your children… will enter the land.” deuteronomy 1:39
Forty years earlier God called their parents to enter the land, but when the spies returned they reported that there were giants there. So, the parents turned back and for the next 40 years they wandered in the desert. Why did they make this decision?
We get a fascinating insight into their thinking here. When the spies came back and said, “There are giants in the land,” the parents said, “This is far too great a risk. We have little children. What’s best for them? Our children could be taken captive...”
If they’d put the Lord before their children, they’d have grown up in the land of milk and honey. Instead they put the children before the Lord, and spent their lives in the desert. If they’d gone in, some families would have lost sons and daughters—obedience always has a cost. But putting the children first was a great miscalculation.
Alignment, not priority or balance
“Oh, that [they would] keep all my commands always, so that it might go well with them and their children forever.” deuteronomy 5:29
Align your life around one consuming passion for the Lord. This is not the same as prioritizing. People sometimes say, “God first, family second and ministry third,” but you can’t separate loving from serving God. Christ claims all of your life, not part of it.
