Today, you and I are confronted with the same God confronting Moses and the people of Israel: "Hear, 0 Israel!: The Lord is our god, the Lord alone!" (Deut. 6:4 NRSV) There we have the matter in a flat-out statement. And what a claim it is! In Moses' time there were many so-called gods to worship. But, if the Lord is one, then, the other gods, real or imagined, have to go—or at least take a back seat to the one who is really in charge.

We might say: "Oh, that was just Moses talking," and take his opinion with a grain of salt. After all, we have a right to our opinions, don't we? Well, sure, we do! But think about this: the testimony of the Psalmist echoes what could well be the conclusions of any or all of us:

          When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
                    the moon and the stars that you have established;
          What are human beings that you are mindful of them,
                    mortals that you care for them?
          Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
                    and crowned them with glory and honor.
          You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
                    you have put all things under their feet,
                    all sheep and oxen and also the beasts of the field,
                    the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
                    whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
          0 Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! (8:3-9 NRSV)

The truth is, any way you turn, God meets you, whether by the witness of a believer or by the testimony of all that you sense from the world or the universe about you.

But that is not the end of the matter. We can't just turn aside as if it makes no difference that the Lord is God or that God is Lord. We cannot walk away from that with a shrug. Listen to Moses as he continues: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." (Deut. 6:5 NRSV) Isn't it fair to say, if God is our Creator and Lord, then he can demand our love, our total love? Surely he created us for a purpose, and it makes sense that if this purpose includes our loving him, then he can rightfully expect us to love him.

I can imagine some young person wondering about what it means to love God at all, to say nothing of loving God with all that is within us, heart, soul, and strength. That is a big order! Now this is not all that this means, but God has given his people, including you and me, a practical way of showing our love to him. The Ten Commandments give us ways, in several real life, human situations to express our love to him. And we shouldn't be surprised that we, when we obey the commandments, also show a proper love for ourselves. The commandments were not given to us to enslave us, but to free us for what is good and helpful and creative. Have you noticed that the Ten Commandments not only point toward God, but also toward the people about us and our attitude and behavior toward them. Jesus said, that the commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," is as important as the commandment to love God. The Apostle Paul went so far as to say that "the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’"(Gal. 5:14 NRSV)

Now some of what I have been talking about may seem fairly easy. After all, surveys show that about 95 per cent of the American people believe in God. They may not all mean the same thing when they say that they believe in God: they may say that they believe in "a higher power" or in "a supreme law of the universe" or something else different from the words most use. These ways of talking about God may only touch the hem of God's garment, but they are still saying something positive and can lead to an understanding that touches the heart and that fires the imagination with glory.

But the more personal God seems to us to be and the more God seems to know and feel and act, the more God is open to blame when things go wrong for us. As long as you think of God as one might think of Ole Man River, who just keeps rollin' along, then you can be spared some painful thoughts, some rage, and you may be able to grit you teeth and let it go at that. But no! God has revealed himself as a God of love. Prophets and psalmists and especially Jesus showed and taught that God loves us. The apostles and Christians after them have gone the world around saying that God loves us, and they have pointed to the cross, God's gift of love that ought to prove forever that God loves all of us with an everlasting love.

But sometimes, the closer we get to this love and the more deeply we feel it, the more we may be tempted to doubt that God really loves us when things go wrong—when tragedy strikes; when war, a flood, a tornado, or an airplane disaster takes the homes or lives of innocent people. Forever etched in my memory, is the image of a man pictured on the cover of a magazine I saw not long after an earthquake. The grief-stricken man stood on the rubble of a house in ruins, his clenched fist lifted toward the heavens. Recently I read the confession of a physician who has brought comfort and hope to thousands by her books—books that underscored the reality and certainty of the life to come. After all that she had said and written and believed, she cursed God when one dear to her died. But that was not the end of the story. The God she had cursed helped her through, and she continues her work of faith and hope.

Has it ever shocked you to read in your Bible the angry, bitter complaints against God hurled by a prophet or a psalmist? Some of the best people who ever lived have at times found it impossible to love God at all, to say nothing of loving God with all their heart, soul, and strength. Do you remember that the prophet Jeremiah as much as called God a liar because it seemed to him that God let his enemies have their way with him? But the Lord said to him, "If you turn back, I will take you back, and you shall stand before me...And I will make you to this people a fortified wall of bronze." (Jer. 15:19a NRSV)

Perhaps the more subtle temptation, the temptation that keeps tugging at us is the temptation to idolatry. Idolatry in our day? No, not the bowing down before images like the one that King Nebuchadnezzar commanded the people to worship. Not the altars to dozens of gods like those that filled the landscape and grieved the heart of the Apostle Paul as he looked about him in ancient Athens. Not that kind of idolatry. What are the idols that people give themselves to right here in our own nation, in our own community? What are we drawn to love with all our heart, all our soul, and all our strength? Power, that's an idol. Pleasure. Money. Beauty. Popularity. Family.

But what's wrong with power? Authority can keep people from hurting each other. Or pleasure? We are made to enjoy things. Or money? We need it, and we can do great good with it. Or beauty? We thrill to the colors of a sunset, the majesty of the mountains, the wonder of the stars at night. Or popularity? It's better to be liked than ignored or rejected. Or family? Even the Bible tells us that God has set the solitary in families. So what's the problem? All of these things I listed are, in their proper place, good. It's really a matter of what should take first place, isn't it?

So, a totally consuming demand is made of us: first, to recognize God for who he is—the one and only Lord, and then to love this God with all that is within us, a challenge that seems almost impossible for us to meet.

You and I really need to make up our minds to let God be God. Like it or not, God is going to be God anyway. I like what Chad Walsh said, "The fact that the creeds are true is no reason for assuming that God can and will work only through those who believe them to be true. God roams; He breaks; He enters; He is not above using an alias; He chooses and stations His witnesses where He will." (Behold the Glory, quoted in Edmund Fuller, ed., Affirmations of God and Man (New York: Association Press, 1967, p.19)). Still, we pray in the words of the hymn, "O thou who changest not, abide with me!" We can trust this God of whom Moses spoke: "The Lord is our God, and the Lord alone!"

Why do we dare trust this God? For myself, I can say I trust God because of what I see in Jesus Christ. Jesus said to one of his disciples, "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father." (John 14:9b NRSV) Follow Jesus along the dusty trails of his native land, and see and listen to him as He reaches out to people of all kinds, to Jew and Gentile alike, to the good and the bad, to little children and the aging—accepting them, loving them, forgiving them, and setting them on new and better paths.

If God is like Jesus, then I can love God, no doubt about it! Whether I love God with all that is within me, that is another matter. However, the command is there; the challenge is always before me. I have a choice to make, and that choice, that decision to let the reality of God make me what I ought to be is what it means to love God. How wonderful! It is a cup that overflows, spilling over with grace and concern for my neighbor. Remember, Jesus put a second commandment right alongside the commandment to love God: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." That love shows for sure our love for God.

Lydia Talbot: Dr. Cox, we now know why are you are Professor of Preaching at Southern Baptist Seminary and why you are a judge for the Best Sermons award sponsored by 30 Good Minutes. A compelling message. You say in your message that we are "wired for God." Does that imply a special receptivity, though?

James Cox: Yes, that is indeed what is implied. This was a statement by a physician whose book or part of a book was excerpted in Readers Digest magazine. That’s where I first encountered this phrase.

Talbot: Now you told me a moment ago that at the seminary you have learned so much from your students. How is that?

Cox: Well, in the give and take of discussion, in the evaluating of what they have done in their practice preaching, in some of the essays they have written, they have contributed to my own understanding and appreciation. There is such a wide variety of individuals that it helps to gain an appreciation for differences and how all of us working together—if we have a common goal— can with our own individual characteristics make our personal contribution.

Talbot: You made a decision years ago to leave your local congregational work as a local minister of churches to do what you’re doing today. You’ve been at Southern Baptist Seminary since 1959. What has that decision about?

Cox: That decision was whether to continue in the pastorate or to teach what I had been doing. There was a friend of ours who expressed it this way to my wife when they were talking about my leaving; he said to her, "He has been retailing it up until now and now he’ll be wholesaling it!" So my wife, who enjoyed the pastorate so much, felt better about our leaving and was comforted by what he said.

Talbot: Dr. Cox, your message referred to the Ten Commandants as not enslaving us but freeing us to be free, to be good and helpful and creative, as you put it. What was that revelatory moment for you when you saw it that way?

Cox: It would be hard to pinpoint that time. I think it has been a growing appreciation to see that God is not certainly against us, but God is for us. There was a Scottish minister who used the phrase—it was the title of a sermon—"The Explosive Power of a New Affection." If you love someone then you are going to try and please that person.

Talbot: Thank you so much for providing that message for us, Dr. Cox. It’s been a delight to have you here.