"With My Whole Heart" (MP3 Audio)

"With My Whole Heart" (Deuteronomy 6:5)

Many of you have heard me say that very few Christians can get past the first commandment. It is the first commandment because if you can keep this commandment, you are more likely to keep the other commandments. Likewise, as long as you have difficulty with the first commandment, you will most certainly fail at trying to keep the other nine.

For the Old Testament people of God, the commandments formed the basis of their relationship with the Lord. The commandments were both the center and circumference of their covenant relationship with God.

If you kept the commandments, you would live and have peace (Deuteronomy 30:16; Isaiah 48:18) because you honored your relationship with God. Now the first of the commandments is Israel’s introduction to God. It is the strongest statement of monotheism in any organized religion. This commandment requires complete devotion and sole fidelity to God.

Friends, it is hard for us to be completely and solely devoted to anything or anybody; let alone someone that we can’t see, someone who may not answer when we call Him, and someone with whom we have not had any prior experience. In fact, when we first meet the Lord, there is no room in our lives for Him, let alone sole space in our sinful hearts.

When God meets us, we only have room in our hearts for sin. So when we first meet God, we do what comes naturally as Christians: we start repenting. We come out of adultery (the seventh commandment Exodus 20:14). We stop stealing (Exodus 20:15), the eighth commandment. We attempt to love our neighbors (Leviticus 19:18). We put aside our idols, to the extent we can (Exodus 20:4-6). We honor our parents (Exodus 20:12). We start coming to church regularly (Exodus 20:8-11).

Even though we go to work on being good moral people, we still have never done anything with our whole heart. The first commandment tells us to love the Lord with all our “heart, soul, and strength.”

Later in Israel’s history, the heart would become known as the seat of human personality. A person’s actions are said to proceed or come from the heart (see Matthew 15:18-19; Jeremiah 17:9).

It is also the heart that God sees and will judge (1st Samuel 16:7; Jeremiah 17:10). This is what the first commandment addresses: what drives each of us? What is it that we are focused on most in this life? Consider the following three points.

1. Very few of us have consistently done anything with our whole heart.
2. a. We are described as double-minded (James 1:8).
3. b. Even in our worship, we are “tossed to and fro with every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:14).
4. There are dozens of commandments that Christians can’t keep until they learn to keep the first one.
5. a. If we are unsaved, or unsure about God, the Bible says that we are to seek Him with our whole hearts, only then will we find Him (Jeremiah 29:13).
6. b. The Psalmist told the Lord in Psalm 119:10: “I seek you with all my heart.”
7. c. If we can’t keep the first commandment, how will we keep Colossians 3:23, when we go to work? There we are commanded to work “with our whole hearts, as unto the Lord.”
8. For God to have our whole hearts, some other things must be removed from our hearts.
9. a. Jesus said: “If you love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15).
10. b. Our loyalties cannot be split (Matthew 6:24).
11. To know God, is to give Him our whole hearts.
12. a. God bestowed His love on Israel. He loved them before He asked them to love Him back (Jeremiah 31:3).
13. b. God has had His eye on us from our earliest existence until this very moment (Psalm 139:13-16).
14. c. God has drawn us to Himself with His lovingkindness (Jeremiah 31:3).
15. d. God loves us, not based on our strength or our beauty, but on His love for us (Deuteronomy 7:7-8).
16. e. He loved us while we were sinners (Romans 5:8).
17. f. Once we realize what the Lord has done on our behalf, it would seem only reasonable that we give Him our whole hearts (Romans 12:1-2).

“Christ First, Christ Only, Christ Always”