Deuteronomy 6:1-9 | True Integrity | Alex Culpepper

One of the most powerful pictures or images that scripture uses is the picture of the sea. The idea of the sea is that, hey, out there in the waters is chaos, right? So if you were to reflect on Genesis chapter one, Genesis chapter one uses this picture of the sea and before even, even the first day of creation. Creation, you know, is formless and void and chaotic. And then the word that's used is, well, there's waters, right?

But the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. And so it's this picture of chaos and disorder. And then God introduces order into the chaos. And then, you know, that picture gets repeated throughout the Old Testament. But then the New Testament, interestingly enough, picks this picture of the sea up and says things like, hey, you need to stand firm so that you will not be tossed to and fro by the waves of every wind of doctrine, right?

So that image of the sea and being pulled in different directions. The apostle James, in his letter to the church, he writes about, hey, if anybody lacks wisdom, you should ask God for wisdom. But let the one who asks ask in faith. Because the person who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is tossed to and fro doesn't know which way to go. And so this idea of the sea is chaos, right?

And if we're in the middle of kind of chaos, waters that are going all sorts of different directions and blowing all over the place, how do we keep from drifting? Well, you need an anchor. You need something that helps you stand firm in the midst of the sea. What does an anchor do? Well, you throw it over the side and it's got a rope that's tied to your boat and it goes all the way down to the bottom and it grabs onto the sea floor and then it just stays there and it kind of becomes like a center of gravity for your boat.

So that as all the water is going all the different directions and the current is pulling in all sorts of directions, you're boat is staying right where it is, right? And you may not even be able to see that because you see the waters going around. But you're standing firm, you're staying in place. Everything else is pulled by the chaos. But people who have an anchor stay steady.

They have a place to return to. They have a point of gravity. So today we're finishing a series called A Shepherd's Voice. And in this series, this is Moses under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, giving God's people guiding tools for when they step into the land that God has promised them. God is giving them A land, right?

This is a gift to them. And Moses isn't able to go with them. And so he gives guidance in the book of Deuteronomy and speaks to them as a shepherd. Right? He gives them tools that they can use that are going to guide them like a shepherd would guide sheep when they get into the land.

Today, we're going to put our attention on the most crucial statement in the Hebrew Bible. Like, for literal millennia, the words that we read today have utterly confronted and reframed how the rest of the world understands spiritual reality. For 3,500 years, the Hebrew people have recited this phrase. They still remember, recite it today. It is the prayer that they pray most frequently.

It's the thing that they keep coming back to. It is their spiritual anchor. The true thing that they say when they don't know what else to say, they keep coming back here. This grounds their reality. It is the thing that keeps them from drifting when they go about and the chaos waters are all around them, especially when they go into the land.

And, oh, they're going to discover the pen. Pagan worship of false gods. They're going to have this anchor to make sure that they don't drift. That's why Moses gives them these words that we look at today. He gives them a foundational truth to anchor them.

And so this morning, we're going to read something that a lot of Jewish people refer to as the Shema. The word Shema simply means listen right here, pay attention to what God is saying, and we're gonna read it together as an anchor for our faith. And so I would actually have you. I'm gonna have you stand up, and we're gonna actually recite this together. And this is the way that it's gonna happen.

So I say the part that's in bold, the line that's in bold, and you repeat back to me the part that's in italics up there. Do you understand? Say yes, please. All right, Great. Thank you.

So hear, O Israel, Amen. You shall love the Lord your God.

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.

And you shall talk of them when you sit in your house.

And when you lie down, you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and keep them before your eyes.

Hear, O Israel, would you pray with me, please?

Holy Spirit, this truth that we place our attention around the this morning is holy is a truth that is set apart.

God, we are so familiar with stuff like this. I pray that God, by your supernatural power, that you would disrupt our familiarity.

God that you would again, by the power of your spirit, help our hearts to become convinced and convicted at how much we need to allow our lives to sink in to this reality.

God, may you allow me to decrease. May you allow the clarity and the power of your word to increase in this time for the sake of your glory. Because when you speak, your word returns things. And I ask that you would return things in your people this morning. May we understand the gravity of what we're dealing with when we sit with these words.

Thank you, Holy Spirit. We ask this in Jesus, mighty name. Amen. Amen. You can be seated.

So I'm going to give a little bit of context for the passage that we just read and the verses immediately prior to it. Starting in verse one of Deuteronomy, chapter six, it says this. Now, this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules. So Moses is setting out with them. He's saying, I'm getting ready to tell you what the Lord wants to tell you, right?

I'm getting ready to tell you the things that you have to obey when you listen to the Lord. This is the Lord your God, commanded me to teach these things to you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over to possess it. So verse two says, I command these things to you, that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son, and your son's son, or your children and your children's children, by keeping all of his statutes and. And all of his commandments, every word that he gives you, that I command you today, all the days of your life, that your days may be long here. Pay attention therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them.

That it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you in a land flowing with milk and honey. So I just want to pull us back to verse two. That you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son, and your son. Son, your children and your children's children. So we need to talk a bit about the fear of the Lord before we get into this, because the fear of the Lord kind of sets the stage for the Shema.

Normally when somebody will teach on the fear of the Lord, this is what they will teach to you. They will teach that the fear of the Lord is not like a terrorist, right? After all, most of the time, when God is showing up in a space, the first word that he's saying is fear not, right? So that's significant to note, right? So the fear of the Lord is not like a terror.

They will teach that the fear of the Lord is speaking of a holy reverence and awe for God. And I say amen to that, right? It is speaking of a holy reverence and awe for God. I would tell you one thing that America needs, one thing that place that we live needs, one thing that our nation needs is more of a holy, rich reverence and awe for God. And I would even tell you that one thing the church in America and Christians in America need is a holy reverence and awe for God.

But holy reverence and awe is like, when we say those words, it's still separated a little bit from our understanding, right? We remove them from ourselves. We say, oh, those are big churchy words and we'll leave them out there. And I want to make this more tangible for us so that we understand exactly what, what God is telling us when he tells us to fear him. So I'm gonna give you a concept.

It's called a decision making chain of command, right? And I'm gonna ask you the question, what is at the top of your decision making chain of command? And what I mean is like, what is the one thing that in every decision that you make, you want to make sure that this gets upheld, right? That you don't sacrifice this because what you won't risk shows what you really fear, right? When God says to fear me, he is saying, would you put me at the top of your decision making chain of command, right?

So for some entertainment or amusement might be at the top of your decision making chain of command. Like, do you know what a materialistic society that is driven by distraction really fears? We fear being bored. We are afraid of being bored, right? So for some, that's at the top of the chain of command, right?

For some, at the top of your decision making chain of command might be reputation, right? So you say, I'll sacrifice my time or I'll lay my family on the altar or I'll skip church or I'll neglect my personal health or I'll sacrifice my time with the Lord. As long as I get the applause, right? If I can get the applause, I can lay everything else down on that altar. For some, personal comfort is at the top.

For some, money is at the top, right? And maybe it's not in a sense that you always like have to have more of it. Maybe it's in a sense that you fear you just won't ever end up with enough, right? And so you sacrifice everything else on the altar of just trying to make sure you don't fall behind for some family is at the top. But God's call is to fear him.

And essentially what he is saying is this. He says, don't lay your relationship with me on an altar to anything else. Don't do it. Don't, don't. Don't sacrifice who I am in relationship to you and who you are in relationship to me.

Don't sacrifice that to anything else. So can we talk about the faith of Abraham for a second? I just mentioned that thing about family there. Isaac was Abraham's promised son. Now I want you to know Abraham did not have the scriptures that we have today.

Abraham did not know the number of things about God and his character that we know today. God did not reveal all of the things that we know to Abraham. On the day that he met Abraham, all God did to Abraham was speak and say, come with me. Follow me. And Abraham obeyed.

And so in Genesis 22, God gave a command to Abraham. He told Abraham to go up onto a mountain. And he said, sacrifice your son Isaac to me. And Abraham, for his obedience to begin following this command is commended for his faith because he took his son up the mountain and he obeyed to the point where the knife was raised over the top of his son. And then God showed Abraham that he was not like all of the other gods.

God told Abraham to stop when Abraham had gotten to the point of obedience of raising the knife above his son. And then God provided another sacrifice. There was a ram there in the thicket who could be sacrificed in honor to God. And ultimately God sent his only son to be a sacrifice. And so there are a bunch of things that we now know because time, like God, has more revealed himself through the length of time, and he's given more of his word to his people.

Like we now know that child sacrifice is an affront to God, right? So we test any voice, any, anything that we hear from God by the scriptures. And if God ever says again, hey, go sacrifice your child, we know that that's not true because that's not the God who's in revealed in scripture. But God has shown us that. And Abraham didn't know that at the time.

But the point is, Abraham feared the God who spoke to him because the God who spoke to him is a God who kept his promises. And so he trusted God to the point that Abraham was willing to lay anything else on the altar to God because he knew that God was trustworthy. That's what it is to fear God insofar as you do your best to understand who God is to pay attention to his voice. Whatever he calls you to put on the altar to him, like you put on the altar to him. And you don't remove.

You don't take your relationship with him and put it on the altar to anything else. And Abraham is commended for his faith in this. So verse two goes on and says that you may fear the Lord, you and your son, your children and your children's children, by keeping all his statutes and commandments. So how you ask the question, okay, I want to make sure that I keep the Lord in the place of decision making authority in my life. How do I do that?

You keep his commandments. You follow his instruction. In the case of Israel, the instruction is this law that I command you today. And guess what the law supports. You know, the law supports healthy families.

And the law supports hard work in the land. And the law supports the love of your neighbor. And the law supports a healthy society. And so the result of fearing God and obeying his commandments is long days and a full life. This is what God is saying.

If you would just keep me in the place that I belong, then it's going to go really good with you. So now Moses. Moses is about to give them the first command in the series of commands that he wants to deliver to them. The first. The first thing, right?

And they're going to take this to keep implementing it into their lives. This is the first commandment Moses has to give them after he says, it's time to fear the Lord. Right? Put the Lord in the highest place. He says in verse four.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Now, that word one certainly means what you think it means, right? It is a contrast to the rest of the world because all of the other rest of the world worships multiple gods. Israel worships one God. We learned as a world that there was only one God from Israel.

Right? Like, this is where we learn this lesson. Okay, so what does the word one mean? Because it's more than just what I said. The word one in Hebrew is the word echad.

Right? And what echad means is one whole undivided integer. Now, I know it's been a long time since you've been in math class. I get it. I understand the word integer means number, right?

Okay. So when you were in math, you figured out how to make integers go together and divide apart and all of that stuff. And so I just want to ask you a question. What is one divided by one? Oh, good.

All right. That's a good thing. I'm glad we on the same page there. So this is saying he, he's the lowest common. Like, he cannot be fractioned out into parts, he cannot be divided up into different motives.

Like he is one being, he is one character. He is fully aligned with himself. He's not double minded about anything. He is not fickle about anything. He is always only ever fully who he is.

He's one character, right? He doesn't change with the times or with the seasons. He is consistent. So I want you to think about the word integrity with me. The word integrity comes from the word integer, right?

One, one, one thing. We get that word integrity from there. And so when we speak of integrity, we speak of someone who is trustworthy, someone who speaks a word and keeps it. Someone whose actions match the things that they say. Someone who is the same in public as they are in private.

Private. Someone who will do what they have always done when they are pressured to do otherwise. This, this is really, I mean, we should understand when God, Moses said, God, tell me your name so that when I go back to your people, I'll be able to tell them the name of the God that sent me. When God speaks his name to Moses, this is essentially what he's saying. He says the name literally means, tell them I am who I am.

I am who I am. He's saying, tell them that you're not going to find in me duplicitous motives. You're not going to find in me that I am somehow incomplete. I am fully complete in myself. I am who I am.

This is what the word Yahweh means. This is when you see capital L O R D in your Bible, this is what it's saying. This is the name of the Lord. I am who I am. And so when it says, listen, O Israel, I am who I am is one, right?

He's one thing. Like he is full and complete in himself and he needs nothing else outside of himself in order to be complete. Like all that, all that we observe in this world, that we have the sense that it lacks perfection or it lacks integrity, or we notice things in this world that are maybe disintegrated or disintegrating, right? All of that is such because it simply has been broken off, separated from the one who is one.

And so we do have to address something with this because I believe that this creates a bit of confusion. And if you ever end up in a situation where somebody's like, well, I don't fully understand the Trinity and I think that's a weird Thing. This creates a challenge, right, Because God calls himself one, but we have a doctrine that says God is three in one. And so does the Trinity compete with God's oneness? I tell you, no, it does not.

Right. It protects it. In fact, there's a guy on YouTube, I just draw your attention to him. I trust. I've not heard one thing that he said that I like.

I think that's a little off. No, he is very trustworthy in the things that he says and that he teaches. He is a defender of the faith, an apologist. His name is Wesley Huffman, and he does a great job with this kind of stuff. And so if you ever are like, okay, I don't fully get this, write down the name Wesley Hupp.

Look him up on YouTube. He's just got a lot of great material. So I get why a person would raise this question. And I kind of just want to give you a simple way to make sense of what the Bible teaches in relation to what it means that God is three in one. So first of all, God is one in being.

That's what he is, is one. He is one in being and three in person. Or the way that I've heard it said is that God is one what, and three whose Father, Son, and Spirit. He is not three different gods. Right?

Because if you have three different gods, then you have three different wills and you have three different purposes, and those things can potentially be in conflict with each other. And there is no conflict within God's being. So he is also. He is not one God taking on three different forms, like, oh, over here we see him as Son, and over here he's playing the role of Father, and over here, he's playing the role of Spirit. He is not one God who's taking on the shape of three different gods.

He is one being, eternally existing love and union within himself as three persons, Father, Son, and Spirit. So God is one being, one in being, three in person. So one way that you can think of it is three roles, one essence, one will, one power. So what happened at Jesus baptism? Because I think it clearly displays this reality.

Jesus. So Jesus gets baptized in submission to the will of the Father. The Father speaks from heaven and says, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. And the Spirit comes and descends down onto Jesus and unites Jesus and the Father. And so as you think of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you cannot understand any one of the persons without the other two.

All three persons together make sense of each other. The Son clarifies Who the Spirit is and what the Spirit does. The Spirit shows us how the Father binds himself to the Son. The Father kind of enacts his will through both Son and Spirit. The Father gives all authority over to the Son.

The Son rules from his throne in submission to the Father. This is who God is. Three roles, One essence, will and power. Number three. This is the most significant one.

This makes sense. When God says, like I am love. This makes sense of this. The three in one is love. Love requires relationship.

You cannot love without relationship. It requires that you have another to love or to be loved. So if God is one, we're saying that God is complete in Himself. He doesn't need us. He doesn't need anything else.

And if God is love, it must mean that he must somehow have at least one other to love within himself, apart from us, because he is love. And so God is one God, fully himself, fully relational, fully sufficient, apart from anything else, and fully love. And that is not some problem that we have to solve. That is a mystery that should cause us to fall before our faces, to fall before God on our faces and worship him in awe and wonder at who he is. So verse 5 of Deuteronomy, chapter 6 says.

This says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. The primary way that you are called to relate to God, because we're talking about, don't sacrifice your relationship with God on the altar to anything else. The primary way that we are called to relate to God is with our affections, with our love. Now, this shouldn't be surprising for us, right? God, his intent for all human beings is for us to be connected to, to him in relationship, right?

He made us so that our hearts would rest in Him. He is complete in Himself, but we are incomplete unless we are resting in him, right? Our affections are meant to be for Him. And so I just want to put this out there in front of this. A God of true integrity calls for love of true integrity.

But you want to know something about yourself. You are one in one person, and you are pretty prone to be divided. You notice it says heart, soul, and might you have a heart that goes one way.

God is one. But you have a heart that goes over here, right? And you have a self. That's what the word soul means in this context. It means you have a self, like your whole person.

Like your heart's going over here and your whole person is going over here. And you then use your might to fight for things that neither of those things care about. And notice that he doesn't just say, love God with your heart, your soul, and your might, but he says, with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your might, because your heart can be divided and so can your soul be divided, and so can your strength be divided. They all are moving in different directions. And so this call is, God is one, and the only way that you are going to be integrated is if you love him with every fabric of your being.

And so there's value in looking at each of those. I would love to spend time digging in. What does it look like to love God with all of our heart and all of our soul? But in particular, I want to look at just one of these before we move on. There's this call that we would love God with all of our might, the idea, all of our strength, right?

And then there is a question of saying, what are you willing to fight for?

What are you willing to expend your energy on? What are you willing to pour yourself out in pursuit of?

How many of you know that you have got to fight to love God? Yeah, you get it every day. Every day you get like social media notifications or you've got another crisis that pops up in your life or some other spiritual attack that's coming around or some other disrupted relationship. Every day you've got 15 more things to get done than you had to get done the day before. And you wake up and you go, okay, I got to get the day started.

I got to get things focused. And do you know that you have to fight to ensure that you can love God? It's the only way it's going to get done. And goodness God, we need a bit of fighting to love God in these days. We need a bit of fighting to keep God in the right place in our hearts.

We need a bit of fighting to honor Jesus as king and lord over everything, and not just some things. And so Jesus says these words when speaking of his return. He says this and it's a little frightening. He says, nevertheless, when the Son of man comes, will he find faith on the earth?

Jesus is saying, I can imagine a world where people stop loving God with all of their might.

People give up and stop loving God with every fiber of their being. And they allow themselves to drift and give themselves over to being pulled in 10 different directions. So how do we fight? How do we employ our might, our strength?

Verse 6.

And these words that I command you today, what I have just said, it should be on Your heart. You need your heart to be filled with God's command. But if you remember what Pastor Don came up here and taught us last week, you know that in order for that to become a real reality, the hearts that we have right now are not sufficient. The hearts that we have in ourselves are not sufficient. We have hearts of stone.

We have dead hearts.

And so we need new hearts, right? We need. We need hearts that Ezekiel says are sprinkled with clean water. We need hearts that Jeremiah says are purchased with the blood of a new covenant. We need our hearts of stone taken out of us so God can give us a heart transplant and put in us a heart of flesh so that he can write on it, so that he can put his word actually in our person upon us.

We need hearts of flesh. We need God to put His Holy Spirit in us so that we might be, as the apostle Paul says, a letter from Christ written not with ink, but with the spirit of the living God. Not on tablets of stone, but on tablets, human hearts. So how do we get there, right? If we're not there, if we're not walking with the Lord, or if we haven't come to him, how do we get there?

Well, we got to start with a realization that because we are disintegrated, right? Because we are decaying, because we are dead, because we are split in so many different directions, that that is kind of. That's our existence. That's what we earn, right? We get death.

And in that death and in our disintegration, we are hopeless and helpless. And then you know what? We tell Jesus that we're hopeless and helpless. And we say, jesus, we need you to send the Holy Spirit and bring us to life. And then we daily ask the Holy Spirit to fill us.

And then we rely on him like our life depends on it because he is the only life that we have.

And then we give him space to renew our hearts from the inside out.

Okay, so there's more to the passage, but I'm going to move us into the so what because the so what's are going to walk us through the rest of the passage this morning. So what? How do I pursue integrated heart? Well, certainly we start in the place of surrender. But then, I mean, goodness, the book of Deuteronomy is incredibly practical, right?

We think it's like just a list of commands. And obey this and don't obey this and this command that Moses gives here. It is tools for a people who had hearts of stone to maybe get some of God's word etched on their hearts. But how much more then for us? Can it be useful if we have the spirit of God, Right?

So what number. How do we pursue an integrated heart?

Number one. Our hearts are shaped when we teach those we love. So chapter seven says, you shall teach these commands the things that I command you today. You shall teach them diligently to your children. So when you teach something, just let you know, like, what it means to be a teacher.

You teach something and you're connected to the people that you're teaching, you feel a responsibility to live up to the things that you teach in an ideal world, at least. And so learning, you know what, learning deepens as your engagement increases. So if you're passive in the learning process, meaning you're kind of just sitting there and you're, you're listening or you're trying to pay attention, but sometimes you're not really super engaged, if you're passive in the learning process, you get really low retention of the information, right? But then if you're active in the learning process, meaning, like, you're probably taking notes, probably you're putting things in your. You want to write down things either on your phone or in your calendar, because you would say, I want to remember this, I want to hold on to this.

Or you're like, you're just actively engaged with your ears and your eyes and you're paying attention to everything. Or, well, then you're going to get a bit more retention than just the passive engager. Right? But teaching leads to the highest level of internalization of the material being taught. Right?

So these stats aren't verifiable. I am 67% sure that these stats are entirely made up. Right. But it has been said that you remember 10% of what you read, 20% of what you hear, and 90% of what you teach. And, yeah, those are probably off.

But the idea is teaching something enables you to retain it and own it at a much deeper level than if you simply heard it.

And so I would just say that, like, our relationship, Andrea and I are our relationship with our kids. Like, we teach our kids the value of obedience, certainly. But we also teach, like, we teach our kids repentance, and we teach our kids reconciliation, and we teach our kids forgiveness. And when we pray for and with our kids, we also pray with them primarily the first thing that we are praying for above anything else, not God. Would you make them obedient?

Although that's valuable. We pray for what they love, the thing, goodness. I hope they remember this every night when we pray the thing that is in my heart more than anything else for our prayer time. God, would you help these girls come to love you more than anything else in the world? And would you help us love you as a family more than anything else in the world?

And I feel a greater impulse to love Jesus when I let my kids listen to me pray for them to love Jesus.

Number two. Our hearts are shaped by our reflections and meditations. So verse 7, you shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you're walking down the road and when you lie down and when you rise. So the question here is, what captures your attention? What are you bringing up in your conversation?

What do you spend your time dreaming about and mulling over in your head? Like, what do you speak about in your home? What words or phrases or subjects do you keep coming back to time and time again? So, like, if you talk about fantasy football a lot, I love you. If you love fantasy football, if you talk about fantasy football a lot, your heart is going to give fantasy football a fairly high place.

If you're thinking about the next episode of the TV show that you're watching, your heart is going to love the TV show and give it a high place. If you spend your nights stressing about money and figuring out how can we move this and how much more time do I have to spend in doing this? Your heart is going to prioritize money.

And if you speak of love for the Lord and what Christ has done for you, and you wonder at what he's doing in the world, and you dream of what he could do in and through you and in your neighborhood and in your community and for your neighbors and in your workplace. And you imagine and you put yourself to praying, Lord, would you let your kingdom come and your will be done? And you sit at the dinner table and you ask each other, what would it look like for God's kingdom to be a more present reality here? If you do that, your heart is going to lift high the name of Jesus.

So notice in here, in particular, your first and last thoughts of the day. I just say if you, if you can't do anything else, right? Because there's so much practicality here. There's a lot to try to remember if you can't do anything else, at the very least, if you can place thankful attention upon God when you wake up and say, lord, thank you that you've given me life, you've woken me up, you've saved me in Jesus, you've done great things for me by your spirit. Right.

And then you maybe like open your mouth and tell someone else what he's done for you. And then you do the same before you go to sleep. And I don't mean you have to go, like, evangelize somebody. Like, talk to your spouse, talk to the person who lives with you in your house. Just say, you know, God is so good to us.

Have you spent every day telling at least one person, God is so good to us? Goodness, your heart, it just would gravitate towards that. So. And do the same thing before you go to sleep. Like I said, number three, I would say our hearts are shaped by then.

Routines and memorials. It says, you shall bind them on your hand and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. The literal word is a phylactery between your eyes. The idea what they would do to obey this command is kind of crazy, but they would put take a little box, and they take the shema and write it on a piece of paper and wrap it up in a really tiny scroll and they put it inside the box and close the box and then they put like a band around it and strap it around their heads. And so as you leave today, outside in the foyer, there are going to be little boxes.

No, it's not true. It's not true.

Yeah, right. No, it says bind them. Bind them is just this call is a call to take, like an intentional action to do something that you memorialize, right? When you create an object, you're memorializing something. When you're putting that object on you, you're paying attention to it.

You guys remember when your mom told you to tie a string to your finger because you forget stuff all the time? Not you, just me. Okay, good. Yeah. So, like, you remember, right?

Things, objects that you put on yourself. You wear a wedding ring to remind yourself who you're married to, if you're married, and the room, right? And so, like, how do you memorialize the Lord giving them the space that he needs, right? What alarm are you going to set on your phone? What unchangeable rhythm are you going to put in your calendar and make sure that you do whatever you do to make sure that that doesn't get sacrificed out of your calendar?

Like, are you really, really willing to fight to love God? So I just want to tell you, like, I'm not giving you rules.

This is not about some code or law that you now need to follow. I'm sharing with you what Moses shared with Israel because he cared about their hearts, right? And he's saying if you're Going to keep God in the right place, then these are things to do in order to shape your heart, in order to keep him in that place. And as your shepherd, I care about your hearts. And more than that, Jesus, your shepherd, cares deeply about your hearts.

So what are the patterns of your life that are gonna memorialize him and give him the space that he deserves? And then finally, our hearts are shaped by what we post and publicize. So you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, meaning everybody who passes by your house, they're going to walk by and they're going to read, listen, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and your soul and your might. Right.

So again, like, let's broaden out this application. What describes the bulk of your social media posts? What do you put on display in your home? What do you put on display in your neighborhood? I'm just praying that the Lord would show us, like, what can we put outside of our house besides just like, a flag or something that would show, like, hey, we love Jesus and we want to create space for you to love Jesus too.

Right? So I'm asking the Lord to show us that that's kind of the next step. But, like, how do you mark yourself in relation to other people? What do you expend energy hoping that other people will grasp about you? Right.

When they read what you write, or when they hear what you speak, or when they watch you take a stand, are you making every effort to ensure that it's aligned with God's kingdom? So that's the insight that Moses gives, like, we're going to get God's word on our hearts, and this is what he tells them. So then finally, in my second. So what I just say here, are you anchored or drifting?

I just want to tell you, no matter what your response is to this question, it's not a question that's meant to induce shame. It's an invitation. We have a God who gives us space to confess, who pours out forgiveness when it comes to when we come to his feet, who lavishes grace upon us through the cross of Jesus, the blood of Jesus is powerful to conquer everything that would keep us from the Lord.

It's actually realizing, like, how deeply and wondrously loved we are by him, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. There's, like, we can expend our energy, and it's good. And I'm telling us to fight and we should be fighting, and you're gonna fail. And you know what changes your heart is that when you fail, he says grace.

And then you experience the love of your father and the welcome that he has for you. And your heart learns to love the Lord, your God.