Choose God First.

 What does it mean to put God First?

Mat 22:37  Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. 

Mat 22:38  This is the first and great commandment. 

The FIRST command. LOVE GOD.

What does it mean, to love God? We choose to love. Love is a choice. Love isn't some emotionally charge, physical reaction, a feeling, but a choice! 

You can be mated to someone and not love them, marriage doesn't automatically mean love. Being physically active with someone doesn't mean love. Love is a choice! We CHOOSE to love one another. No one is forced to love someone. If you pretend to love someone, that's your choice. No one can make you love them, not a single person can force that on another. You can be ordered to act like and talk like you love someone but each action and each word could be fabricated, a lie, not truth, not love. How many parents mouth the words of love to children but have no real love for them? A mother is told she'll automatically love her newborn, but that isn't true. A mother will choose to love her newborn, or not. Yes, there are maternal factors of hormones that can mess up brain chemistry and interfere with the choices we make, not just between mothers and newborns but in a lot of life's facets. A choice for me might be easy to make while for another it could be something that takes a long, long time, if ever to make. We have knowledge and with that knowledge we make decisions. We choose even to not make a choice. We choose to love. Even after we're raised to believe we owe love to those who share our bloodlines, we choose. We like to say family first before others. This isn't always the case. Some people have absolutely horrendous family members and why should a person be forced to love them simply because they're family? We aren't forced to love. We choose. We choose to love the seemingly unlovable. We tell ourselves we have to love our family members, we make that choice often to our own detriment. How many people have chosen to love a family member who has hurt them, when they know if it were any other person other than family they would cut off all ties with them? We can choose to love the unlovable, there is nothing wrong with making that choice. God did.

When God chose to love us first, He was choosing to love creatures that had the potential for great hatred of Him. God was choosing to love the seemingly unlovable. God was choosing to love those who would break His heart over and over, and over again in countless ways. 

What does it mean to love God? It means we CHOOSE GOD. When we choose God, we choose all that He is and He is love. He chooses us. 

As God chose us unlovable, detestable, people He showed perfectly how to love the unlovable. God chose to love His professed enemies giving them ample opportunity for enough knowledge to make a choice for Him or not. 

1Jn 4:19  We love him, because he first loved us. 

He chooses us for ETERNITY! No exemptions! We are all CHOSEN for eternity! We all have received the GOLDEN TICKET FROM GOD. HEAVEN HOME FOREVER. 

We are chosen by God for ETERNITY and that doesn't mean we aren't going to suffer horrifically right now. God offers HEAVEN ETERNITY, God doesn't not offer supplications answered now so life might be lived in a way endurable to you. You pray for a roof over your head and that roof is taken away. You pray for a life of a loved one to be spared, and you watch them suffer and die. You pray for just enough to live comfortably, and you are often very uncomfortable wondering day to day where your next meal will come from, where the means to stay living an acceptably livable life are. You pray for pain to be taken from you only to feel it increase. You pray for the good fortune for others, just to witness life torture them making them life lives of extreme discomfort. You pray for an innocent child's life and they slip away to death's sleep. You pray for so much, you make supplications to God and you want Him to hear your supplications and grant your requests how you perceive them to be best answered. God hears every word you think, every prayer prayed by you He has heard, but He did not promise you comfort now…

2Co 6:5  In stripes, in imprisonments, in tumults, in labours, in watchings, in fastings; 

2Co 6:6  By pureness, by knowledge, by longsuffering, by kindness, by the Holy Ghost, by love unfeigned

2Co 1:7  And our hope of you is stedfast, knowing, that as ye are partakers of the sufferings, so shall ye be also of the consolation. 

2Co 1:8  For we would not, brethren, have you ignorant of our trouble which came to us in Asia, that we were pressed out of measure, above strength, insomuch that we despaired even of life: 

2Co 1:9  But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead: 

2Co 1:10  Who delivered us from so great a death, and doth deliver: in whom we trust that he will yet deliver us

Whipped, imprison, despairing of life itself all wrongfully, all unwarranted and yet choosing to remain Christ's! 

This world PROMISES temporary tortures - the minimum to the extreme and all in-between for all of us. Prayers or no prayers those tiny to extreme tortures will beset us all. A prayer, a supplication, a praise, a worship, a glorying, a beseeching, we cry out in agony and in joy to our God. We know He offers us ETERNITY A HEAVEN HOME after all is said and done with our temporary to eternity life.

We choose- and God must be FIRST CHOICE, not once, but ALWAYS.

If we do NOT have God first, then any attempt to put others second will fail. If we put others first before God, we fail them and us.

God FIRST, the spiritual FIRST, the heavenly FIRST. In EVERY and in ALL situations GOD NEEDS TO BE FIRST.  

When God is first, then others will be second, and we will be last.

God first is eternity all else is temporal.

God help us to this end, to this finish line, to be winners of eternity through our Savior, Jesus Christ now and forever! Amen.