The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Today you hear or at least you often hear people referring to the great commandment or as I'll say as the master taught us or some such, euphemism. And you say, well, what is it? And they'll say answer very glibly.
Well, and the way they'd say it, express it will vary, but it amounts to this, love your neighbor as you love yourself. Well, of course, the master never gave us any kind of a commandment like that. Here is what our lord said, neither myself nor my neighbor comes first. God comes first. God.
And that's the point I want to leave with you this morning. It's it's not easy to keep God first. In that reading from Hosea, we had in there about not creating gods. Now it's very easy to create our own gods and to fall down and worship them. It's very easy.
It's very easy. Almost inescapable. You take a man trying to make a living for his family, things are getting rough. He hasn't any time to think except where how can I make ends meet? How can I whatever be the problem?
How can I resolve it? He's absorbed in it. How could he not be? How could he not be absorbed in it? It's his business.
It's his duty. But it's very easy to forget god there. That even there, even there, we have to be sure we are not creating our own gods and falling down and worshiping them. It's very difficult to keep God first. Now, in our own religious life, there are many many channels, there are many factors, there are many elements of it, and the good Christian keeps them all together.
That's the problem. For example, as regards public worship, coming to church, going through some kind of ritual, going through rubrics, having all the surroundings of religion, call them trappings because that's all they are, trappings. Trappings. They are the ways and the means for what? Notice, they can easily become ends in themselves.
We can easily create our own gods and fall down and worship them. It's not easy to keep God first in everything. It is not easy, And yet that's what he says. And it's going to God in a personal way. Notice, we can't go to God collectively.
Religion is not collective. We need our fellow human being to be good Christians, absolutely. I cannot serve Christ without loving my neighbor and myself, impossible. But as Clive Staple Lewis says, if the spoke to the bicycle wheel are lined up with the hub, they will be lined up with one another. If they're not lined up with the hub, they won't be lined up with one another.
And so the constant struggle of the Christian Christian is to hold his whole life together, to give everything its proper importance but to keep alert, to keep alive, to keep his eyes open and his heart and his mind and his will open to the essentials of religion and you cannot avoid them. It is going to God with my love, with my knowledge, with my will. This is the essence of religion. It is going to God with my whole self, but I must be extremely aware that I do not set up my own gods and fall down and worship them. We've got to jerk ourselves out of the the routine things and ask ourselves, why am I doing this?
What significance is this? Why am I reading this book? Why am I going to church? Why am I saying this prayer? What is the meaning of this ceremony?
It's very easy to let all of these things become ends in themselves. Little gods, little gods. Very easy, almost inevitable, almost not quite but almost. So it's a it's this constant struggle that religion is a personal thing, is the raising of the mind and the heart to God to acknowledge him, to love him, to tell him we're sorry for our sins, to beg his need in our desperate situation. You learn this or we used to in our first catechism.
We used to call it the penny catechism. You cannot improve on it and you cannot escape it without putting up your own little gods and bowing down and worshiping them. And today when our blessed lord is asked, what is the greatest commandment and the first, the man answered the scribe. Notice he's a scribe. He said, the first is God and my first duty is to God, to nothing else.
The second is to myself and the third is to my neighbor. It's a trilogy. The name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit. Amen.