You know, I go to church just about every Sunday or at the least attend online if life gets in the way. Despite my best efforts I have found that I haven’t put forth my best effort in learning and growing from the wealth of truth that I have access too. So, here are my take away points from this past Sunday’s message at McLean Bible Church.
The Frontline teaching Pastor, John McGowan spoke on the topic of, ‘Watching your Heart.’ From the start, I appreciate the challenge of the topic. If watching our hearts were easy, then we wouldn’t have Christians and Christian leaders having extra marital affairs. We wouldn’t have Christians and Christian leaders stuck in pornography. We wouldn’t have Christians and Christian leaders putting their jobs, money, sports, tv, life style or any of a hundred other things – before God. The convictions that come just from simply exploring the topic are heavy as are the implications.
John spoke from I Cor 10: 1-11. While speaking from this passage John posed three questions that I will probably take the next several days to answer.
Question #1 – Do I crave anything in my life more than God?
To be continued……
Good things to think about. Our pastor has preached on similar topics lately causing me to ask myself the same question. I’m finding that the answer is harder to come up with than I thought. Still pondering it.
I think the implications from it are heavy because the world is continually trying to pour us into their mold. One paraphrase of Rom. 12: 2 is “stop letting the world press you into its mold” and I think we see this in our lives everyday everywhere we go, what we see, hear, read etc. All the more reason to “guard our hearts for from it flow the issues of life”. (I am still looking for this reference, I can’t remember where it is and it is probably my paraphrase!)
I am amazed as I was looking for this reference ALL the Biblical references that exist about our heart. I say all of this because I think everything goes back to a heart issue. What we crave in life depends on the condition of our heart. I’ve done some thinking on this myself lately as my Dad went through all the issues with his heart and I was thinking of the implications spiritually and that mankind can “do” no procedure to our heart to change it! Only God, His Spirit, His Word and our obedience can change our heart.
Proverbs 4:23 is the verse I was looking for I think. And, the Greek actually says that in Romans 12:2 ~ “Stop letting the world press you into its mold.” That would imply that it is an admonition because they were doing just that! Love your blog and the discussion!
I have Proverbs 4:23 in the upper right hand corner of the home page of my blog. I just figured you were going off of that. Everything you said is certainly true, but I’m not really going for the “types” of things that we may or may not crave. Those are subjective grey areas (such as what we read, see or hear). Those types of things are personal choices that may affect one person spiritually and not another. The question that John posed was in the light of, what is there in my life that I simply crave more than God. The example that he used was having a nice ice cold coffee drink with whipped cream and chocolate on top. Some people crave coffee and love coffee and their day is not complete until they have it. Following that, he brought out a low fat blueberry smoothie that was significantly healthier and better for you. The true coffee lover wouldn’t have wanted this even though it was better. His point being, most of the cravings that we have in life aren’t necessarily bad things, but they rise to a level of importance by our devotion to them that they begin to dethrone God in our lives.
Anyway, all of that to say, although the content around us and how it affects us will vary from person to person, we all have things that we love – sometimes more than God.