Word for Today, Sun, 10 Sep 2006, The Most Important Thing
Posted by: masinick <masinick@...>
Dear friends,
My friend from Digital Equipment Corporation (the late DEC, now part
of Hewlett Packard) might remember that I used to talk a lot about
the Most Important Thing in my days in the UNIX Engineering Group
at Digital. I used M.I.T. as a very silly way to bring a powerful
illustration about what really matters most.
Stephen Sha and I used to get ready for lunch around 11:30 in the
morning, and the first thing we had to do before going to lunch
was make a quick visit to the Men's room. Hard to eat until you
"take care of business". Stephen and I had a good relationship
and we used to like to joke around a lot. He'd tell me that
Chinese people - short Chinese people at that, were the brightest
people in the world, and likely to last the longest because if
something ever fell out of the sky, it would hit the heads of the
Chinese person last - especially short guys like him.
You can see that we enjoyed light hearted things to break up our
day. But I also saw this as an opportunity to talk about what
really is the Most Important Thing.
Do you know what the Bible says is the Most Important Thing
and where you can find it? Read Matthew 22:34-40, and find the
cross reference to the original Law in Deuteronomy 6:5: "Love the
Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with
all your mind". Leviticus 19:18 contains the second most important
Law, which clearly follows from the first: "Love your neighbor as
yourself". Jesus tells us that all the Law and all of the Prophets
depend upon these two laws - in other words, they are the most
important thing.
To cement it down, we KNOW that God loves us. The well quoted
John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that He gave us His own
and only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should
not perish but have everlasting life" lets us know how much God
loves us - even to take on human form, live among us, with the
specific intention of dying a violent death, like a Lamb led
to the slaughter.
Ancient Jews understood this, for the blood of the Lamb was used
as the sacrifice to atone (or pay the price) for sin (doing wrong
in the sight of God). Jesus was the literal sacrificial Lamb, the
perfect, unblemished, unpolluted sacrifice - the only One without
sin.
You see, God wants what is best for us. God has given us freedom
to choose right from wrong. He desires that all will come to Him,
seeking what is right, but realizing that we've fallen short.
God desires to redeem us for His own, and Jesus is the redeemer.
It's not that God wants us not to have fun or that He wants to
enslave us with a million rules. On the contrary, over time it
has been men who have created their own Laws. The main law of God
is the Law of love. It is a principle which guides all other
principles. It comes down to doing what is right in the eyes of
God. The things God asks are good things, to seek Him first in
all things, to be kind to one another, tender hearted, full of
thankfulness toward God for what He has done.
We have developed some of these concepts before in previous messages,
but it is a good time to get back to the fundamentals of the faith.
Therefore, we will revisit this topic again and expound upon it,
filling in many of the missing details.
Yours in Christ,
Brian
--
Brian Masinick, masinick at yahoo dot com
Home page: http://www.geocities.com/masinick/
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