God is more interested in us getting to know him, instead of going through the motions

A common misconception is that God has a massively long list of boxes we must tick. He does not. He would much rather we seek him and get to know him personally, through prayer and reading the Bible. 

He does not want us to merely go through the motions of attending church, and so on, just to tick the boxes. 

This is evident in several parts of the Bible. You can see this from the prophet Hosea, and later, from Jesus himself. 

In the book of Hosea, God says:


For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

Hosea 6: 6

It is clear from the above that God does not just want us to go through the motions, but rather he wants us to seek him and know him personally.

Yet the ten commandments exist, and of course if we truly believe in God, then we truly believe in the ten commandments. So do these commandments then become a set of boxes that we need to tick? The answer is that all of the commandments stem from a love of God, as you can see in the scripture below:

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Matthew 22: 34 -40

So loving God and getting to know Him personally is what God wants. The ten commandments stem directly from a love of God.

If you found this post interesting, you might also like these related posts on this blog:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Do Atheists Shout So Loudly When They Believe the Stakes are Lower?

When it comes to religious matters, we Christians believe our very souls are at stake.  Atheists do not believe there is anything so serious at stake.  Anyone would therefore expect that Christians would shout their message the loudest, since they believe there is the most at stake.  However, it seems that both 'shout' similarly loudly.  Why is that?    Both camps genuinely believe that their version is the underlying truth (although of course, both cannot be right).  Therefore, both camps have the truth at stake; they think of themselves as campaigners for the truth.  In addition, Christians believe our souls are at stake.  Why then do atheists shout so loud when they believe there is less at stake?   This is a question which is difficult to answer.  However, we should be aware that Christianity can actually benefit from these loud shoutings of the atheists.  Why is that? It is because the atheists give us spec...
Read more

Do You Expect God to Match Up With YOUR Specifications?

"God isn't real if I don't believe in him" "I can't believe in a God who lets X or Y happen" The above are sentences which are heard frequently.  Curiously, these people seem to think that if God doesn't match up to THEIR specifications, He can't be real.  I think the root of this is the lack of ability we humans have to 'prove' or see the existence of God (or from the opposing viewpoint, to prove a lack of existence). The difficulty with which we can detect spiritual things compared to the ease with which we can detect the physical world makes it very easy for us to think we make the rules and that if God doesn't appear to follow 'our' rules (expectations), He can't be real. Consider a hypothetical creature of spirit visiting Earth for the first time.  This creature has no way of directly measuring anything physical.  Although unable to sense gravity itself, it realizes from reading minds that humans have measured...
Read more

Why did God make Adam and Eve knowing that they would fall?

One of the more difficult theological questions is: Why did God make Adam and Eve knowing that they would fall? Reading the Bible helped me get a little more information on God and on how free will was really important to Him (click here for my earlier post on that topic). But, this is where it got tricky. If God knows everything, then why did he make Adam and Eve, knowing that they would lead themselves into temptation at great cost to them and to the rest of humanity? C.S. Lewis's theological writings offer an excellent perspective on this. He believes that man redeemed through the death of Jesus is somehow intrinsically better than unfallen man . "For God is not merely mending, not simply restoring a status quo. Redeemed humanity is to be something more glorious than unfallen humanity would have been..." - C.S. Lewis, Miracles 1947, in Chapter 14 "The Grand Miracle". This viewpoint falls in line with two Biblical readings: So He told them this parabl...
Read more