1 Chronicles 29:18
NIV
O Lord, God of our
fathers Abraham, Isaac and Israel, keep this desire in the hearts of your
people forever, and keep their hearts loyal to you.
How Important Is Loyalty?
I realize that I am now kind of an old-timer and
loyalty means a lot to me. I am loyal to
vanilla ice cream. I am loyal to
McDoubles. I am loyal to Northern
California beaches despite how cold they are and loyal to our local jazz
station. I am loyal to khaki pants and button down collars and hair gel. I am
loyal to my friends and loyal to the denomination I joined years ago. I am even loyal to our cat even though she
wants nothing to do with me except when she is hungry. I saw this recently in the news and perhaps
you also noticed it. The dictator of
North Korea, Kim Jong-un ordered the execution of one of the country’s vice
premiers for slouching during Jong-un’s speech because it was to the North
Korean ruler a sign that the vice premier was not thoroughly loyal to him. If it were asked what single human quality is
most valued in North Korea probably “loyalty” would be at the top of the list
above creativity, ingenuity, compassion or integrity. How important is loyalty to you? How important is loyalty to God?
What if God demanded of you the same sort of loyalty
Kim Jong-un demands of the people in North Korea? If you were to quantify your loyalty to God
on a scale of 1-10, what value would you give it in terms of your interest in
the Bible, your keeping of the ten commandments, church service attendance, your
financial support of God’s Kingdom, the value you place on your moral purity or
how often you bring up God and the Gospel in your normal conversations? Loyalty is of course practical and not some
abstract idea and if we have read much in the Bible, we would see that God
cares very much about loyalty but rather than using the term “loyalty” He
speaks more precisely of “love”. Jesus
said that the most important of all the commandments of God is, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart
and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Matthew 22:37 NIV)
How do you do that?
If you were honest, if that was the test of your loyalty, would you have
to be blown up if you lived in North Korea because you would fail? The problem you face when it comes to loving
God is your heart! You can’t count on
it. Jeremiah the prophet, speaking for
God spells out your dilemma. The heart is deceitful above all things and
beyond cure. Who can understand it? (Jeremiah
17:9 NIV) How can you love anyone with
all your heart if you can’t trust your heart to love and you have no idea what
all is in it? Because you have so little
insight into your own heart, you can be fooled into thinking you are better
than you are. All a man's ways seem right to him, but the Lord weighs the heart. (Proverbs
21:2 NIV) Because you don’t know what is
in your heart, you cannot be certain of what you will do or how you’ll react to
situations you face. You can convince yourself
that you are good but only God knows all that is in your heart. Search
me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. (Psalm
139:23 NIV)
Two examples illustrate this. Genesis 4 in the beginning of the Bible
provides us a fascinating case study that reveals how complicated the human
heart is. When Cain killed his brother
Abel there was no clear explanation for his action. All we know is that when God approved of the
offering Abel brought but was not complimentary of Cain’s, Cain became angry
and it showed on his face. Cain invited
his brother to meet him out in the field and there Cain killed Abel. Could jealousy alone have provoked such
anger? Was there something else that
pushed Cain over the edge? What was
stirring in Cain’s heart that drove him to murder? Who can explain this senseless rage? All Cain had to do if he really wanted to
please God was straighten out whatever was wrong with the sacrifice he
offered. Something else within his heart
inflamed him with anger so intense he killed Abel.
Another example that is difficult to explain is
Solomon’s transition into paganism. He
was the son of the one God called “a
man after my own heart”. (Acts 13: 22 NIV) Solomon orchestrated the building of the
great Temple of the Lord and famously met with Solomon by way of a dream and
promised the young king wisdom beyond anyone’s on earth as well as riches and
honor which is exactly what he had. When
Solomon dedicated the Temple to God, a great cloud filled it and the priests
could not do their work because “the
glory of the Lord filled his temple.” (1 Kings 8:11 NIV) Fire even came down and consumed the
sacrifice Solomon offered on the altar.
God a second time appeared to Solomon at night and warned the king in
gave terms not to turn away from worshiping Him and going after the false gods
of the pagans but that is precisely what he did. As
Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart
was not fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart of David his father had
been. (1 Kings 11:4 NIV) What
could lead to such a dramatic shift in loyalties? How could Solomon walk away from such
dramatic appointments with God and become a spiritual traitor? It was Solomon’s heart that was the problem.
James the brother of Jesus asked an important
question but also gives the answer. What causes fights and quarrels among you?
Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? (James 4: 1 NIV) The Apostle Paul in Romans 8 provides a
dynamic explanation of what is really going on within. Those
who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that
nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their
minds set on what the Spirit desires. The
mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and
peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law, nor
can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God. (Romans
8:5-8 NIV)
There are three terms in this passage that must be
explained. The first is “mind”. This is essentially what other parts of the
Bible call “heart”. It is who we are for
eternity whether we have the body or don’t.
The second term is “sinful nature”.
This is the operating system of our lives outside of Christ. The sinful nature is the controlling force of
our life if God is not in charge. The
third term is more a phrase—“the mind controlled by the Spirit”. This is the condition of our heart when God
is working actively within it. Our
heart, filled with the clutter of a billion memories, the damage caused by
countless sins, the good and bad of all our relationships and everything we
think and decide about God and the world about us, is operating either without
God or with Him and we decide what it will be at any given moment. What the King James Bible calls the “carnal
man” is life under the operation of a heart in chaos. There is no order to the heart without God;
it is a baffling and convoluted wreck that can be kind one moment and cruel the
next, corrupt and selfish and generous and moralistic all at the same time. Anything can spring out of the heart
controlled by the sinful nature because it is wild and corrupt.
However when the Spirit of God begins to take charge
of the heart, order is established. The
Bible calls this “life and peace”. It is
the condition of the heart when from the heart comes honesty and you can count
on it, kindness and it is consistent, generosity and purity and goodness become
normal and expected. The memories that
once caused so much pain and bitterness lose their power to wreck the heart
when Christ is at work in it. Life and
peace is not a goal we set for ourselves but it is the end game when the Spirit
of Christ is given full sway over the heart.
An account from the Bible that often goes unnoticed
will illustrate the difference between the two operating systems of the
heart. In Acts 11 is the recounting of
the Apostle Peter’s defense of his strange decision to go into the house of a
Gentile family and share the Gospel with them.
From the time he came out of his mother’s womb Peter had been taught to
avoid at all costs non-Jewish people. Do
not eat with them, do not marry them, do not touch them and do not enter their
homes ever. In fact, Peter’s conscience
was organized around the complete disdain of non-Jews. Then one day while napping, Peter had
essentially the same vision three times.
In his own words Peter describes them.
I saw something like a large sheet being let down from heaven by its
four corners, and it came down to where I was. I looked into it and saw
four-footed animals of the earth, wild beasts, reptiles, and birds of the air. Then I heard a voice telling me, 'Get up, Peter.
Kill and eat.' "I replied, 'Surely not, Lord! Nothing
impure or unclean has ever entered my mouth.'
"The voice spoke from heaven a second time, 'Do not call anything
impure that God has made clean.'
(Acts 11:5-9 NIV)
Almost immediately after these visions three
messengers arrived inviting Peter to come and explain Christianity to a Roman
centurion and his family. Everything in
Peter’s heart went against this. He had
been taught to despise non-Jews and certainly had from experience plenty of
reasons for staying away from Roman soldiers.
His heart certainly would have been against going with the men to the
centurion’s home but his heart had within it more than the sinful nature
operating. The Spirit told me to have no hesitation about going with them.
(Acts 11:12 NIV) So Peter went. Can we see a clearer example than this of how
the presence of God in the human heart can completely alter the way a person
operates? Memories, bad experiences,
poor teaching and sinful habits do not control us when we have the Spirit of God
putting our hearts into order. Yet like
Peter, you must never argue with or ignore the Spirit of God within you when He
directs you. We will be amazed by what
God does within our hearts when we let the Spirit make decisions for us. Every time we give the Spirit control in a
matter, when we are loyal to Him in us, we become more like God and less like
what we would be if our hearts remained broken by sin and all the evil found in
this world.
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