You shall have no other gods.  Sounds easy, right?  Worship the one true God and you’ve got all the other commandments in the bag.  Who is God?  We teach that God is three in one; three persons who are all coequally eternal, uncreated, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.  At the same time God is not a three headed monster or a weird thing with three rotating faces.  God is three separate persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (or Ghost for you old timers).  So we teach that if we fear, love, and trust in God above all things, we’ve got it nailed.

Do we fear, love, and trust in God above all things?  I can’t count how many people I know or who I have heard with cancer.  I’ve ministered to people with Alzheimer’s or diabetes.  What happens when your youth, your energy, yoru ability to walk or drive, what happens when that is gone?  Is it easy to love God then?  I know people who have lost their homes around here.  They’ve sold their old ‘cuda that was in the garage for years.  Money is tight.  They wonder how they’re going to make the next payment or get groceries.  Do you trust God then?

What do you trust for peace?  Does it come in a bottle?  What do you fear the most in this world?  Does it involve a graveyard?  What gives you a sense of relief at the end of the day?  Is it in your bedroom?  In this world it is easy to fear, love, and trust the wrong stuff but those things are not God.  They all crumble and shift with time.

Christ entered into this changing world.  Miraculously born as fully human while fully God.  His life was pointed in one direction, the cross.  There God died for our lack of fear in God.  He died for our lack of trust in God.  He died for our lack of love for God.  God knew that we are fallen humans and so He literally took matters into His own hands, for you.

That eating disorder, that struggle with gambling, that messy divorce, all those things that drive us to fear, love, and trust in the wrong stuff, give them to Jesus.  Fear, love, trust in Him alone because He is God and you are not.  In Christ you are forgiven.

Rev. Jaime Nava