“You shall be careful therefore to do as the LORD your God has commanded you. You shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left.” DEUTERONOMY 5:32 You must choose how you will live. To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and might is to align your life around one consuming passion for the Lord. Aligning is not prioritising. Aligning your life around a single passion is not the same as prioritising. People sometimes say, “God first, family second and ministry third.” But you ...
Jan 29, 2024•2 min
“And as for your little ones, who you said would become a prey, and your children, who today have no knowledge of good or evil, they shall go in [to the Promised Land]. And to them I will give it, and they shall possess it.” DEUTERONOMY 1:39 Moses is speaking to God’s people on the verge of the Promised Land. Forty years earlier, the parents of this generation sent out spies who returned with the report: “There are giants in the land and the cities are fortified. This is far too great a risk. We...
Jan 28, 2024•3 min
“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” DEUTERONOMY 6:5 In the first of the Ten Commandments, God says, “You shall have no other gods before me” (5:7). What does that mean? The answer can be found in Deuteronomy 6:5: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” You might be wondering, If I love the Lord my God with all my heart, soul, and might, what will be the impact on my f...
Jan 27, 2024•2 min
We love because he first loved us. 1 JOHN 4:19 When you see more of God’s love for you, then you will love Him more. Bishop Ryle told a story about an Englishman traveling in America. During his travels, he met an American Indian who talked with great enthusiasm about Jesus Christ… The Englishman is rather reserved, as they tend to be, and so he says to his new friend, “You are always talking about Jesus Christ. Why do you make such a big deal of him?” The Indian knelt down and gathered some lea...
Jan 26, 2024•3 min
Jesus said, “Simon… do you love me?” JOHN 21:16 Can you picture the risen Lord Jesus Christ looking deep into your soul and asking you this question? “Do you really, really love me?” “I chose you. I redeemed you. I went to a cross for you. My body was broken for you, my blood was shed for you. I awakened you, breathed life into you, gave you faith and repentance.” “I made a covenant with you. I watch over you. Before a word is on your tongue, I know it completely. I have loved you with an everla...
Jan 25, 2024•3 min
“You shall love the LORD your God… with all your might.” DEUTERONOMY 6:5 The word might or strength in Hebrew literally means “much-ness.” Love God with all your much-ness. It means your substance, your possessions—all that God has given you. Jesus spoke with a man (see Luke 18:18-25) who had lived a moral life. He felt that he had kept all the commandments—no murder, no adultery, no stealing, and he cared for his parents. The man thought he had kept the law, but he missed the whole point of the...
Jan 24, 2024•3 min
“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul…” DEUTERONOMY 6:5 What does it mean to love God with all your heart and soul? Love God with all your heart. Love God with all your affection. Don’t ever think of your salvation as some kind of business transaction in which Jesus does certain things and you do certain things, and it is all settled with a simple handshake. Christ shed His blood for you, and He did this because He loves you. The relationship He brings you ...
Jan 23, 2024•2 min
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” DEUTERONOMY 6:4 Whenever you see the word “LORD” in capital letters in the Old Testament, it is because the divine name is being used. When God appeared to Moses in the burning bush, He revealed Himself as Yahweh which means “I Am” (Ex. 3:14-15). Yahweh is usually translated into English as “LORD.” But there is general agreement that the name Moses heard from the fire was Yahweh. So, we can read Deuteronomy 6:4-5 as, “Yahweh our God, Yahweh is...
Jan 22, 2024•2 min
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” DEUTERONOMY 6:4 Moses is speaking to Israel, and he describes the LORD as our God. They are God’s people because: God chose them. “The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth” (7:6). They are God’s people, not because they made God theirs, but because God made them His. God redeemed them. “Has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself fro...
Jan 21, 2024•3 min
“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.” DEUTERONOMY 5:6-7 The Ten Commandments lay out what loving God and loving your neighbour looks like (5:6-21). The first four commandments tell us what it means to love God: You shall have no other gods before me (5:7) You shall not make an idol (5:8-10) You shall not take the Lord’s name in vain (5:11) Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy (5:12-15) The las...
Jan 20, 2024•3 min
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” DEUTERONOMY 6:4-5 One of the best-known passages in the Old Testament says: love God “with all your heart” (6:5) and keep His commands “on your heart” (6:6). We are talking about a personal, spiritual relationship with Almighty God, formed by faith and characterised by love. The Gospels tell us about an occasion when a teacher of the law asked ...
Jan 19, 2024•2 min
“I stood between the LORD and you at that time.” DEUTERONOMY 5:5 Here is an easily overlooked reason to cultivate the fear of the Lord. Fearing the Lord will lead you to seek a mediator. When God came near on Mount Sinai to give the Ten Commandments, the people cried out, “This great fire will consume us. If we hear the voice of the LORD our God anymore, we shall die” (5:25). So the people said to Moses, “Go near and hear all that the LORD our God will say, and speak to us all that the LORD our ...
Jan 18, 2024•3 min
Here are three more things that will motivate you to cultivate a proper fear of the Lord. Fearing the Lord will elevate your worship. “Therefore, let us be grateful…and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe” (Heb. 12:28). When the fear of the Lord is lost, worship is trivialised and adoration is replaced by entertainment. But when people become gripped with a massive vision of the glory of God, and when God’s people can say, “We have seen the glory of God in the fac...
Jan 17, 2024•2 min
How can we cultivate the right kind of fear? Here are three things that will motivate you: Fearing the Lord will give you wisdom. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Psa. 111:10). When God carries weight in your life, you will be on the path of wise decisions. How does God view what I am doing and saying? Without this fear, you will make the wrong decisions, and choose the wrong paths. Fearing the Lord will keep you from sin. “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fe...
Jan 16, 2024•3 min
With you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared. PSALM 130:4 We usually think of fear and love as alternatives. Where there is fear, there is no love; where there is love, there is no fear. But love and the right kind of fear are inseparable companions. Fear is like cholesterol. There is a bad kind, and if it goes up, your health will get worse. But there’s also a good kind, and if it goes up, your health gets better. So, we want to cultivate the right kind of fear. We want less of the bad...
Jan 15, 2024•2 min
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. 1 JOHN 4:18 We know that perfect love casts out fear, but what is the kind of fear that love casts out? The fear that keeps you hiding from God. When Adam sinned, he hid from God. He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid… and I hid myself” (Gen. 3:10). The fear that kept Adam from God was better than not fearing God at all. It was far better for Adam to hide from God than to walk around the garden as if nothing ...
Jan 14, 2024•2 min
“Oh that they had such a heart as this always, to fear me and to keep all my commandments, that it might go well with them and with their descendants forever!” DEUTERONOMY 5:29 The fear of the Lord is better described than defined, and there may be no better place to begin than in Deuteronomy 5. This chapter begins with Moses recalling how he had given the Ten Commandments to the people of God. The whole event was terrifying. Try to imagine it—darkness, the blast of trumpets, the sound of a voic...
Jan 12, 2024•2 min
“Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life.” DEUTERONOMY 4:9 Repentance and faith are not only what unbelievers do to become Christians. Repentance and faith are what believers do to live the Christian life. God calls us to a life of repentance and faith—that is, a life in which we sustain an ongoing struggle against what is in us by nature, by laying hold of what Christ has f...
Jan 11, 2024•3 min
“Not with our fathers did the LORD make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today.” DEUTERONOMY 5:3 As a new generation stood on the verge of crossing the river Jordan, which way would they go? Would they follow what was in them by nature, or would they receive what was theirs by grace? You need to know that your life is being shaped by two great events that happened before you were even born. What’s in you by nature goes all the way back to the garden of Eden. What can be i...
Jan 10, 2024•3 min
“The LORD our God made a covenant with us...” DEUTERONOMY 5:2 What hope did the people have of getting into the Promised Land? And what hope is there for us? Where can we find the power for a fresh start? In Deuteronomy 5, we see something wonderfully strange: “Moses summoned all Israel and said to them… ‘The LORD our God made a covenant with us at Horeb’” (5:1-2). Now the people were probably thinking, “Moses, don’t you remember? Most of us weren’t even born, and the rest of us were just little...
Jan 09, 2024•3 min
Then you answered me, ‘We have sinned against the LORD. We ourselves will go up and fight, just as the LORD our God commanded us.’ And every one of you fastened on his weapons of war and thought it easy to go up into the hill country. DEUTERONOMY 1:41 God told His people to go into the land of Canaan, but they were afraid and refused to go. Then, once the people of God realised that they had messed up, they decided to try and put it right. They would fix their disobedience, with a new effort to ...
Jan 08, 2024•2 min
You would not go up, but rebelled against the command of the LORD your God. DEUTERONOMY 1:26 Our sinful impulses affect not only how we relate to God but how we relate to circumstances, God’s truth, and our human condition. By nature, we resist the truth: Moses said to the people, “Do not be in dread or afraid of them. The LORD your God who goes before you will himself fight for you, just as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes, and in the wilderness…” (1:29-31) Moses is pleading with the pe...
Jan 07, 2024•3 min
Not one of these men of this evil generation shall see the good land that I swore to give your fathers. DEUTERONOMY 1:35 What was in the nature of the parents was also in the children. And what was in these people is also in us. By nature, we rebel against God: “Yet you would not go up, but rebelled against the command of the LORD your God” (1:26). Our corruption goes deeper than a few sins and mistakes. By nature, we resent God. We resist His authority over our lives. By nature, we want to asse...
Jan 06, 2024•3 min
“Yet you would not go up, but rebelled against the command of the LORD your God.” DEUTERONOMY 1:26 Every adult who came out of Egypt in the exodus eventually died in the desert. None of them entered the Promised Land. So, everyone who entered the Promised Land was under 40 years old and had been born in the desert. This was a young nation with no one over age 60 except for Moses, Caleb, and Joshua. So when Moses says, “The LORD our God said to us in Horeb, ‘You have stayed long enough at this mo...
Jan 05, 2024•2 min
“The LORD our God said to us in Horeb, ‘You have stayed long enough at this mountain. Turn and take your journey, and go…’” DEUTERONOMY 1:6-7 To move from being a person with a faith to a person with a mission, you must also break free from your fear of the future. God was calling these people to do something that none of them had ever done before. Moses told them that they were going to live in houses. How do you do that when the only thing you have ever known is sleeping in a tent? Moses told ...
Jan 04, 2024•2 min
In the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month, Moses spoke to the people of Israel according to all that the LORD had given him in commandment to them. DEUTERONOMY 1:3 The generation that died in the desert believed in God. They had experienced God in the miracle of the exodus, but they acted in unbelief. Warren Wiersbe said, “Unbelief wastes time.” Forty years were lost through fear and unbelief. So, the great question in Deuteronomy is: How can people with a faith become people ...
Jan 03, 2024•2 min
“Now rise up and go over the brook Zered.” So we went over the brook Zered. And the time from our leaving Kadesh-barnea until we crossed the brook Zered was thirty-eight years, until the entire generation, that is, the men of war, had perished from the camp, as the LORD had sworn to them. DEUTERONOMY 2:13-14 After 38 years in the wilderness, the last of the fighting men of that generation died, and God finally told Moses to move forward. That brought God’s people right to the threshold of the Pr...
Jan 02, 2024•3 min
“Go in and take possession of the land that the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to them and to their offspring after them.” DEUTERONOMY 1:8 God had given the Promised Land to Abraham and his descendants. However, three generations later (Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph), there was a famine in the land, and the family to whom God had given His great promises left for Egypt, where they eventually became slaves. That dark era of oppression lasted 400 years. Then the...
Jan 01, 2024•3 min
These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel beyond the Jordan in the wilderness...DEUTERONOMY 1:1 Deuteronomy is especially for three groups of people. Deuteronomy is for those trusted with leadership. When he sits on the throne… he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law… he shall read in it all the days of his life that he may learn to fear the LORD his God by keeping all the words of this law (17:18, 19). This is a book for everyone who leads. It is for fathers, mothers, e...
Dec 31, 2023•3 min
“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” JOHN 8:12 If you follow Jesus, you will never be in total darkness. He may lead you through some dark places, but the darkness will never be all-consuming. One day He will lead you through the darkest valley, the valley of the shadow of death. But even there, He will walk with you. His light will shine in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it. Follow Jesus, and you will be ...
Dec 31, 2023•2 min
