It is humbling to know that the entirety of the Law is wrapped up in two commands from God: to love the LORD with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Later, Jesus would say that we should love our neighbor as He loved us – raising the stakes, if you will.

At the same time, keeping the Father’s commands is how we demonstrate our love for Him (John 14). And His commands, you see, are fully wrapped up in loving Him and loving each other.

Sadly, in many cases we are guilty of actually scorning those that God asks us to love – no, not those outside the kingdom, but those IN the kingdom! Often, this scorn is over issues elevated to an importance that does not exist in the Scripture.

Scorn for a brother or sister in Christ…!

Can we really afford to treat each other in ways we KNOW are sinful over issues that remain in constant and irreconcilable debate? Is that the goal of New Testament Christianity?

If we learn absolutely nothing else from our journey through the Old Testament, it should be clear that the only thing that is important to the Creator is the dedication of our hearts to Him – and Him alone. That, of course, is not just a verbal exercise, but is exemplified in a genuine and sincere service to the King and His kingdom.

Remember, even Jesus himself admitted that the hypocritical Pharisees knew the Law (Matthew 23:1). It was the condition of their hearts that earned the Lord’s disdain.

I know a lot of good Christians are concerned about the November presidential election and I’m right there with them. I sometimes wonder, though, whether the country would really be the better for it, whether the cause of the Kingdom would be any better served, if everything turns out the way we’d like.

When we have “our people” in power don’t we tend to relax a bit? It’s an unstated assumption, I think, that if we can just get our party in, the group that we think best represents our values and makes policy accordingly, then it can turn our country around and reverse our culture’s moral decline. When this happens, when it goes the way we deem as “ours,” the sense of urgency seems to ebb. It’s a natural tendency. (We show it in our fellowships even. We hire a team of qualified ministers, then kick back in our designated pew, write our weekly check and leave the rest to our professionals.)

This all ties in with something I wrote recently about how political action is truly powerless to bring change in the place where change must occur if it’s going to work its way through the culture – the hearts of individuals.

Make no mistake. I shudder to think that a President of the United States could believe it is morally acceptable to take a premature baby who has survived an unsuccessful abortion, even as it cries for its mother, its tiny lungs filling with new air, and toss it aside to die. For a President to hold this position, invoking the so-called “right” to choose as including its protection, the practical consequences may not be great. We’ve so perfected this cruelest of expedients that it seldom fails the first time. What does this belief say, though, of a candidate’s underlying worldview? It’s frightening. Chilling, really.

But again, God often gave wayward Israel the bad leaders it deserved, men who indulged their own and the people’s lusts for all manner of pagan excess, even child sacrifice. As a nation, we’ve become practiced in similar rituals. We sacrifice our children to the god Choice. The altars are built by black-robed men, but to our own specs — all to ringing chants of “rights” and “freedom.”

The point: If we don’t like our leaders, it may be that we’re getting our just desserts as a nation. As Christians, we should certainly pray for our country. Come November, we should go to the polls and do our duty as good citizens, voting as our consciences guide us. Then, whether we get the outcome we want or otherwise, we should forget about it. Put it out of our minds, for all practical purposes, rejoin our brothers and sisters and get on with the hard task of taking Christ to a country that no longer knows its right hand from its left.

Because it’s in the trenches of everyday life, not the marble halls of power, where souls are won and cultures are changed.

God is Lord…Lord of all…heaven and earth. There is nothing that is outside His reach or vision or power. He is before all things, the start and the finish, and everything in between. Nothing happens to you, in you, through you or around you that He doesn’t know. And, there is nothing He can’t control. He is, and He is Lord.

Do you believe this? It’s easy to nod your head at this screen. I did as I typed the words. But, do you live by it?

If God is in control, if He is truly Lord – specifically, Lord of my life – why do I feel stress? Why do I worry? Why do I race through each day and forget to count the blessing of it? Why do I battle the same temptation again and again and again…alone?

The sun rises at God’s command. It sets because that’s what He decides. He blesses what He blesses and He punishes what He punishes; this is the lesson in Israel’s fall. He is, and always is, Lord. He just wasn’t their Lord.

Is He your Lord? Are you accepting His command over your life, your specific situations? He is Lord over your problems at work. He is Lord over your strained relationship with your child. He is Lord over your finance and your marriage. He is Lord.

He is Lord. You need only to declare it.

“Rest in Peace. You will be missed.”

Teenagers scrawl various sophomoric proclamations on their car windows with shoe polish, but I noticed a couple recently of a more sobering sort – memorial messages to fallen classmates. Some kids apparently had died in a tragic car accident and their friends honored their memories with a few words in white shoe polish on their windshields.

The thing about shoe polish, of course, is that it doesn’t last. It washes away after a while and is gone forever. Most of the statements that can be made about our lives, truth be told, are little more than shoe-polish epitaphs – remarks that are doomed to fade away because they have little significance in the eternal scheme. The only statements about us that will really matter in the end are those describing our relationship to the eternal.

Enoch’s epitaph was simple and moving: He walked with God. That’s the only kind of epitaph, the only summing-up statement, that can transcend its ephemeral medium and last through all tomorrows.