Sex, Donuts and God

Matthew 22:35-37 One of them… asked him a question… “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And 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.”

Every day, I look at the numbers for this blog’s performance.  I can see which blogs do well and which ones tank.  I assume that it is usually the title that hooks a reader or loses them. Titles like Sex and Lust perform well, while titles like God Above All are snoozers, at least according to the numbers.  I am therefore tempted to title every blog something like: Sex, Drugs and Rock n Roll.  The more salacious the title, the more likely any of us are to read it.  Sex sells and I am apparently buying.

Therein lies the question and lesson for me.  What catches my eye and what distracts me?  When asked what the most important commandment was, Jesus answered, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  My preoccupation with God is to be above and beyond anything else in this life.  It is to consume and invade every part of me.  To know and love God is to be my ultimate goal in life.

If I am unaware of what may be distracting me from that goal, I need to ask, What is keeping me from fulfilling Jesus’ commandment?  Am I loving God with all of me?  If not, why not?  What is distracting me?

For me, it is the basic appetites of my flesh.  Once it was drugs, but thankfully, that is not much of a daily temptation anymore.  Now, it is the routine things: sex, food, pride, selfishness and materialism.  None of these things may be particularly bad in and of themselves.  I need to eat something and sex is not wrong.  It is just when my appetite for money or reputation starts to control me that I lose sight of that which is the most important.

When the appetites of my flesh nature run my life, they cause ruin as they distract from God.  Even if the only injury they ever cause is to distract me from God, this is still profoundly destructive.  The one who appears to be fantastically successful at life with no obvious faults, may find that being successful itself, is the very thing that keeps him or her from pursuing God above all.  Success can be just as disastrous of a defect as drug addiction if it keeps me from loving God with all of me.

Putting God above all does not mean I must become a mountain-top monk.  I can learn to do the most complex or mundane activities with my focus on God instead of me.  I can learn to make every decision asking what God wants instead of what Scott wants.  I am still terrible at it, and I need to keep relearning it. I still have my blind spots.  So, daily, I need to ask if I am following my appetite for sex, donuts and stuff or am I following God?  I find God and life only when I pursue him above all.

The Seeds of the Spirit is a daily blog based on a walk through the New Testament.  Written from the perspective of my own addictions, it explores the common defects of our flesh nature and the solution, our spirit life.  If you find it helpful or interesting, sign up for the blog as a daily email, tell your friends and like/share it on Facebook.