Matthew 10:37
“If you love your father or mother more than you love me, you are not worthy of being mine; or if you love your son or daughter more than me, you are not worthy of being mine.”
When I was a kid I always hated it when someone would say “if I had to choose God or you I’d choose God”. Not necessarily just to me, but the whole phrase. It’s not like I ever questioned it or thought it was wrong, there was just something that bothered me about it.
A couple of months back my girlfriend Melissa wrote a theological piece about how God shouldn’t simply be the most important thing in your life, but should be greater than the sum of each other thing. She said that saying “God is my first priority” allows for you to live far too much of your life apart from God.
Did I just jump around there? I was talking about love and then I was talking about priorities. Well, honestly the reason they are pushed together is the solution to these problems in my mind comes from the same place. Let’s go back to love. All of a sudden in Matthew 22 Jesus is asked about the greatest commandment. “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.” Well, there you go. Love God. I can love God. That’s easy…
But wait, Jesus isn’t done there. He continues, “a second is equally important: Love your neighbor as yourself.” Now here’s where the conundrum begins. The second command is equally important. Thus is you love God, but you hate your fellow man, that is no better than hating God and loving your fellow man. Of course what I’ll argue here in a second is that both things are equally impossible. Back to commandments, Paul says that if you break one commandment you’ve broken them all. It’s true, sin is sin. So if you treat a guy on the street poorly, that means you are guilty of blasphemy against God! You’ve broken all the commands!
I don’t think you should love God more than you love your son or daughter or mother or father. Doesn’t that contradict the verse I quoted? Actually no, read it again. It says you can’t love them “more”, it says nothing about equally. But shouldn’t God be your “number one”? The one above all others? Yes we should, but let’s explain how this works.
God is an infinite being. He has an infinite amount of love to around and he can dispense that love infinitely. He loves each and every person on Earth with his perfect infinite love. We as people are finite (limited) beings. There are limits on the things we can do. Each person on Earth has a finite amount of love they can dispense. Nobody has an infinite amount of love. Now when I talk about amount I’m not talking as in a specific value (ie. Ten love units). You don’t lose love by giving it out. What I mean is that the limit for human love is 100 %. You can’t love anything more than fully. But it IS possible to love something fully. We could argue about whether that has ever happened, but that’d be beside the point. Thus the most we can love God is with 100% of ourselves. We are called to give that. Everything.
Now here’s the tricky part. We’ve given God 100% of our love. How much are we called to love everyone else? 99%? Just think about that. Don’t we have to love fully? Don’t you see that the only biblically sound answer to that question is to give 100% love to the people around you. Thus both God and people get 100%. You don’t love one more than the other…
…However there is a catch and here’s where simple wording comes into play. Part of what love really is and involves is receiving. I believe that without being loved, you cannot love. Love is not a natural state of being. It is a response to the love that is given. Even loving someone who doesn’t love you is still a reaction to knowing how it feels to be loved. We as Christians know that everyone is loved by God, thus love is possible to everyone. When people talk about loving God above every other thing, what I think they are really referring to is they are loved more BY God than by any other thing. Thus where do you get your love? An infinite source of love is more powerful than a finite source of love. The love you give others is more powerful if you first love and are loved by God.
So basically it boils down to this: God is the source of our love. God should be the source of our love. Pick one of those.
Now putting God in the first priority can be looked at. Should God be our first priority? Yes, but what other priorities can we have? If we say that we will give God 70%, we are keeping 30% for ourselves. That would still be giving God first priority. Then comes the question: What does it mean for God to be a priority? Does it mean sitting and reading the Bible? Is it a time-based percentage? Is it based on what you think about most?
I think most Christian schools fail because they have a false sense of what giving God priority means. They feel that they will teach you science, math, social and then throw in some Bible. Bible is not a throw in. Essentially the problem is spiritualizing certain things and despiritualizing other things. How can you say reading the Bible is giving yourself to God and riding your bike isn’t? What if you are only reading the Bible, because you are forced at gunpoint? What is you are reading your bike as part of a fundraiser to help orphans? The truly spiritual things can be almost anything. We are to give up our entire lives to God. Calling God a priority or ranking him in order of importance is stupid. God shouldn’t have a priority, he should be THE PRIORITY. He shouldn’t have a place in the order of importance, because he should represent all that is important.
Thus it is the same with priority as it is with love. Everything that is right is God’s. The fact that 2 + 2 is 4 is truth. Truth is from God. Thus Math (as much as I hate it) is from God himself. God isn’t some far away being without a point in this world, but instead he is personal, taking interest in us sleeping, eating, laughing and many other regular events in our life. Most of us would like something simple to tell them they are doing a good job. “I pray for eight hours a day” versus “I pray ten minutes a day”. It isn’t that simple. Whether you are making God your priority isn’t measurable, it’s not concrete, but you’ll know it in your gut. If you want to know, you’ll find out. Just let go and do it.

(I apologize if at points I make no sense. It makes sense in my head)