The preacher stood before an audience of thousands and, via TV, who knows how many more.

His words included truth, but they were singularly devoid of life. Indeed, what should have offered listeners a deep, fresh breath of air instead seemed to suck the oxygen right out of the atmosphere.

A huge screen displayed Deuteronomy 13:1-4, as the preacher read aloud:

If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a sign or wonder, and if the sign or wonder spoken of takes place, and the prophet says, “Let us follow other gods” (gods you have not known) “and let us worship them,” you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer.

The Lord your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. It is the Lord your God you must follow, and him you must revere. Keep his commands and obey him; serve him and hold fast to him.

Then, the preacher launched into a sermon on loving God.

The checklist method

The preacher urged people to love the Lord with all their hearts. Yet, tragically, he himself did not know how to do it. He did not know what wholehearted devotion to God looks like.

“You cannot love God if you don’t …”

He could only offer a checklist: pray, read your Bible, witness, do not forsake the assembling of yourselves together (here, in this building), serve God (here, in a role we sanction).

“You cannot love God if you don’t do these things,” he said.

AND YET, we cannot explain wholehearted love for God in terms of checklists. We cannot cultivate such love by keeping rules, even seemingly pious rules.

“I tried keeping rules. It didn’t work.”

The Christians in Galatia tried it. Paul wrote to stop them. He said:

Rule-keeping does not naturally evolve into living by faith, but only perpetuates itself in more and more rule-keeping. Christ redeemed us from that self-defeating, cursed life by absorbing it completely into himself.

[The point of the Old Testament law] was to show us the futility of devising some religious system for getting by our own efforts what we can only get by waiting in faith for God to complete his promise.¹

Paul knew from his own experience the hopelessness of the checklist method:

I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn’t work. So I quit being a “law man” so that I could be God’s man. Christ’s life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God.

Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not “mine,” but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I am not going to go back on that.

Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God?

I refuse to do that, to repudiate God’s grace.²

A challenging choice

The preacher said: Checking the right boxes equals loving God.

The Spirit of God and the Word of God say: No. Never.

What love for God can look like

Paradoxically, when you love the Lord, you may indeed do much of what the preacher listed. In the process, you will do something the preacher did not mention: You will love people too. 

Your Lord will draw you to:

• Talk with him.
• Walk in authentic relationship with others who know and love him.
• Hunger for his word and learn to know his voice.
• Delight in serving him.
• Delight in showing honor to people created in his image, and treat them well.
• Live in such a way that people begin to glimpse who God is.

AND YET, when you obey your Lord out of love, your choices may look quite different from what the preacher’s list implies – and from any list your church leaders might make. Indeed, the more you pursue God, the more often he may put you in a position where, to follow him fully, you must buck your church system.

The Lord your God is testing you to find out whether you love HIM with all your heart and with all your soul.

How the decoy can ensnare us

Herein lies a huge challenge. If doing things a certain way has, in your mind, become enmeshed with Christ and his Word, you will be tempted to think God’s voice is counseling rebellion, and the voice of Religion is God’s. If everyone around you is checking certain boxes, and insisting that you do the same, you may find it incredibly hard to obey the Lord. You may feel guilty when you do.

You may feel pressed to accept the checklist method as logical, prudent, right. Isn’t this godly pastor telling you so? Doesn’t everyone around you seem to agree?

You may decide that any voice urging a different course must not be God. You may try to settle back into your church culture’s boat, and to keep rowing in sync with everyone else. Initially, you may feel some relief.

But any church system that requires people to conform in this way is quenching the Spirit, and will throttle your life. And while everyone is focused on keeping everyone else in line, no one may notice you’re all rowing together toward a cliff.

Paul cried out to the Galatian believers, desperate to stop them from making the plunge:

Did someone put a hex on you? Have you taken leave of your senses? Something crazy has happened, for it’s obvious that you no longer have the crucified Jesus in clear focus in your lives.

Are you going to continue this craziness? For only crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was begun by God.

It is not yet a total loss, but it certainly will be if you keep this up!³

A divided heart

I know firsthand the tragedy behind the tragedy in that preacher’s life.

The day he read Deuteronomy 13:1-4 aloud, he did not see himself in the passage. But he is there. He has done the very thing these verses warn against. Instead of following God fully, he has followed a believable, wooing voice that has left him with a deeply divided heart.

For a long time, that same voice divided my heart.

Snakelike, it whispers: Loyalty to the church system that offers you belonging, status and power equals faithfulness to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, misguided loyalty has so encroached into the preacher’s heart that he has no idea what love for God looks like. Yet he does not admit as much. Oh no.

He stands behind his pulpit, before thousands. He quotes Scripture. He looks very winsome. He sounds very Christian. And he urges whosoever will to embrace “a rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion” that requires them to abandon everything personal and free in their relationship with God. He tells them that’s what it takes to love God.

A hidden idol

In the 1960s, A. W. Tozer wrote:

There appears to be no limit to which some of us will go to save our idol, while at the same time telling ourselves eagerly that we are trusting in Christ alone. It takes a violent act of renunciation to deliver us from the hidden idol; and since very few modern Christians understand that such an act is necessary, and only a small number of those who know are willing to do, it follows that relatively few professors of the Christian faith these days have ever experienced the painful act of renunciation that frees the heart from idolatry.⁴

When we give to another any of the adoration, trust, service, or honor that rightfully belongs to our Lord, he uses a strong term to describe what has divided our heart. He calls it idolatry.

Only when we confess that what we have confused with God is not God – and quit living as if it is – are we freed again to love our Lord and to receive his love for us.

The God who loves us

The God who is love does not point his finger, command love from his people and then stand back with his arms folded, to see if we get it right.

He pours his love into us,
and then calls it forth from us.

In the process, he uncovers every allegiance that competes for his place in our hearts. He knows what a painful, violent act it takes to uproot such allegiances.

His grace and power are sufficient
even for that.

Dear one, beloved by God:

If a preacher you admire (even one with a TV ministry and a huge social media following) urges you to love Christ, notice what else he says and does. Notice whether he is actually urging, “Let us follow the systems we have created, and the people who hold status and power in them, and the checklists we have attached to them – and let us worship them.” If so, do not listen to that preacher.

The Lord your God will know if you succumb to the pressure to be loyal to a system, while telling yourself eagerly that you are trusting in Christ alone.

He will know, and he will show you, if you are willing to see. And he will make the way out, if you are willing to go.

Follow him. Revere him. Obey him. Serve him. Hold fast to him. With everything in you, love him.

---

This post is based on, and quotes from, portions of Chapter 7 in We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church. On May 17, 2024, I updated the formatting and headings.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

See also

• Journey to a divided heart
• Witchcraft in the church – Manipulate. Intimidate. Dominate.
• When Christian leaders reject God
• Sort of like frog gigging: How religion kills rest
• A spirit like Caleb’s – fully following God
• Bucking the system: Shunning, submission and Jesus

Footnotes

1. Galatians 3:12, 13, 22 MSG. ↩︎
2. Galatians 2:19–21 MSG. ↩︎
3. Galatians 3:2–4 MSG. ↩︎
4. A.W. Tozer, Man: The Dwelling Place of God (Camp Hill, PA: WingSpread Publishers, 1966, rev. ed. 1977 by Zur Ltd.), 88. ↩︎