What does God want from us? People have been asking that forever. People have tried to work to answer this with their lives throughout time. They worship harder and they serve more and we get bigger and bigger churches and we follow more and more rules. And all the time we have this nagging sense that God still isn’t happy with us. We get more frustrated and more guilty feeling and still we cry out, “What does God want from us?”
This passage has some ideas:
Fear (“revere” might be a more accurate word for our time) the Lord.
Walk in obedience to Him.
Love Him.
Serve Him with all you have.
Observe God’s laws.
Circumcise your hearts (check with Apostle Paul for specifics on what this means)
Don’t be stiff-necked anymore.
Love foreigners.
Serve God.
Cling to Him.
Take your oaths in His name, not that of another god.
Boiled down, it means to put God first in your heart (Love Him) and your life (serve and obey Him). The problem with doing more and more to try to please Him is that usually we do “more and more” not for Him but for us. We do more to try to get Him to love us more so we’ll feel better, safer, more loved. It is when we learn to put God first, even above our own wants, hopes, and plans, that we begin to realize we are loved already, that God has “set His affections on us”. It is our love that God wants, not our success or our fame or our accomplishments.
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