The Christian's Highest Affection

Last night my daughter screamed at her little brother. I mean, she let him have it at the top of her lungs! I had just returned from a conference and had brought her a little box of special soap and he broke the cardboard box that her soap had come in. And when my wife intervened, my daughter yelled at her as well. Over a soap box. At that point, I intervened. And after the intervention was over, I sat down with her to talk about what had happened.

"Why are you so upset?" I asked. "Because Haddon breaks my stuff and doesn't respect it," was her reply. Even though she wasn't yelling anymore (she never yells at me--one of the perks of being dad, nobody yells at me no matter how angry they might be), I could hear in her voice that the anger remained.

"It's just a box, honey. And your brother is only three years old. It isn't worth getting so upset that you yell at your brother, and it certainly isn't an excuse to raise your voice to your mom."

"But it's important to me," she said. "It is special because you gave it to me and he wrecked it even when I asked him not to."

And there it was. The little box was important to her. She valued it and she had turned on her little brother and her mother in unbridled fury because of the level of importance she had assigned to it. She had elevated her affection for that object over her affections for her family members and when something had happened to this little thing she so valued, she snapped. And she sinned.

We do the very same thing every time we sin, because sin, at it's root, is the preference of something over God. We were created to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. We were created with the purpose of desiring God over everything else. The psalmist wrote,

"Whom have I in heaven but You?
And besides You, I desire nothing on earth...
But as for me, the nearness of God is my good;
I have made the Lord God my refuge,
That I may tell of all Your works." (Psalm 73:25, 28)

This is the intent when God created us. This is the way things ought to be. Sadly, this is not the way things are.

Ever since the Fall, man has been supplanting God's rightful place in our lives with other things. When Eve gave into the serpent's temptation and ate the fruit, she desired something more then she desired God. Her desire for God was to be demonstrated by her obedience to His command, but in her disobedience, she demonstrated that He was not her greatest desire. This pattern has been repeated ever since.

And so it is with every sin. We sin whenever we desire something more then we desire God. When we yield to the temptation to sin, we are elevating the pleasure experienced in connection with that sin over the value of God in our lives and the joy that comes when things are in their proper perspective. We are declaring that we do not believe that God's nearness is our good, and we are putting our faith in something else. Sin is the unseating of God from the throne of our lives. He is displaced and replaced. And He will not share His glory with another.

As a Christian, I must learn to understand sin as God sees it. I must learn to see that for me to desire anything more then I desire Him is to sin against Him. This means that I must constantly be aware of the enticements around me, especially those that are not sinful in and of themselves, but can become issues of sin if I elevate them above God. In this series of posts, it is my hope to address how the Christian can do battle with this enemy that continuously seeks to unseat God from His rightful place as our highest affection.