Many Lovers

This past Sunday I had the opportunity to preach at a small church in Dobbins, California. The message which the Lord gave me came from Jeremiah 2:1-13. It was an indictment from God against the church. The things which the Lord gave me out of that included the understanding that many believers today have many lovers besides our Lord. We talk often about how we love God and how we follow Him, yet our lives still seem to mirror the culture we live in. The divorce rate in the church is as high as it is in the world. We have as much trouble with infidelity and addictions in the church as people outside the church experience. The bottom line of the message was that we have given ourselves to other things that have no eternal value and we have strayed away from total commitment to our Lord.
Then the Lord took me to Jeremiah 3:1-5 and the message continues. In this passage I see God saying again that we have many lovers. Yet, even with all these lovers that we have, we keep coming back to God, as though He is simply one of our lovers. We continue to profess that we love Him only, but our behavior and activities during the week proclaim that we truly don't love Him. God does not want to be sharing His lover with a bunch of lesser lovers.
So, God then turns and points us to where we hae been violated. The place is described as a bare height. The picture is that there is nothing of any value there. It is simply a high place, but nothing grows there. There is no fruit and no life in that place. It is a place of emptiness and barrenness. We will never find fulfillment in the things of this world. They simply not not have enough to offer. In fact they have nothing of eternal value to give to us. When I spoke this past Sunday, I described some of the new idols that we have here in America. I spoke of our lover called entertainment. Entertainment is so prevalent that we have to take it with us everywhere we go. I spoke also of our lover called recreation. Our play time and hobbies take our time, our money and our energies. We are even willing to sacrifice our children to this lover, believing that they need to enjoy everything life has to offer. Our failure though, has been that we are not teaching them how to walk in the Spirit, or how to have wisdom. I spoke also of our lover called materialism. We heap to ourselves things upon things, yet they never satisfy. We always seem to need something bigger and better, or newer and flashier.
The important thing to note in this passage is that in verse 3 God says that our devotion to all these other lovers is the reason that the showers of blessing have been withheld. We pray for God's blessing in our lives and we want to be blessed by Him in so many ways, yet God says, "I can't bless you right now". Revival in our churches and in our nation will not come without a total abandonment of all our other lovers so that we can devote ourselves solely to the one lover who has promised never to leave us. It is not enough to put God as number one in our life. That just means there is room for number two. God doesn't want to be our most loved. He doesn't want to be our greatest love. He wants to be our ONLY love.
We keep calling out to Him like He's our friend. We want God on our terms. We want to do church our way. We want to call the shots. But, following Christ does not give us the option of doing it "our way." God is not going to tolerate being just another lover. Either He is our all in all and there is no other, or God will withhold everything we say we want. Revival and intimacy with our God comes with a price. That price is total allegiance to Him.