It is my intent, following on the heels of the very heavy topics of the Ten Commandments and choose you this day, to pursue a lighter theme to the blogs for a while. Of course, it is my intent that it be less intense, but God sometimes takes my words and ideas places I don’t plan.

In a way, the idea of dreams and memories is the direct opposite of “this day”. Rather than the present, living in the now, dreams look to the future and to possibilities, memories review the past for lessons learned and encouragement.

Scripturally speaking, God gives dreams to offer something to look forward to. Two passages I recently read in the Bible are relevant. First, in Genesis we have the famous dreams given to Joseph. Are the dreams true? Yes. Will they come to pass? Again, yes. But not in the way that young Joseph imagines. He needs to be an older, wounded, tried, and improved Joseph before those dreams can come to fruition. Our dream might not be something we see in our sleep, but a hope that God has woven within us. Sometimes, oftentimes it seems, that hope, that goal, that dream takes way too long for our human nature. We know it is a longing God gave us. We know it’s something good, but still we wait. Or as Proverbs 13 says, Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life. Dreams can make us so hungry for the future where they are true, that we forget about living this day. But at their best, they give us purpose today as we look to tomorrow.

Before I get to the second Bible passage, I’d like to revisit a time that this concept became real to me.

Not long after I surrendered my life to Jesus, I went into officer training for the Air Force. Never in my wildest teenage dreams would I have seen myself in the military. I wasn’t that strong physically, nor did I have stellar stamina or endurance. Then, there was that whole following the rules thing. (Again, not my forte.) But I felt very strongly that this was what God wanted me to do and where he wanted me to go.

I spent over a week crying myself to sleep every night. Not only did I miss my husband immensely, I felt so weak and tired at the end of each day. I was absolutely convinced I would embarrass myself and wash out.

Then came vaccine day. I dreaded it for a couple of logical reasons. One, I’ve always hated needles and anything to do with them. I get woozy when the doctor takes my blood or even thinking about the process. Two, I’ve had multiple bizarre reactions to medications over my life. Lots more by this point, but had already had several scary medication scenarios up to that point.

I gritted my teeth as we went through the line. Somehow, I was still vertical on the other side. My arms hurt, but otherwise I didn’t seem any worse for wear. We then went onto the parade field to drill for about an hour. I was still good.

Heading into the classroom, the blast of air conditioning felt lovely against the sweat and the aches. But then, as I took my place, a wave of nausea slammed into me. “I don’t feel so…” I managed to say to Captain O’Dell before I keeled over.

Passed out, I had a wonderful dream. All three months of training were over and I was graduating. Gary was there; my parents were there. Not only that, my training flight was winning top honors. When I mentioned to one of my flight mates that I didn’t deserve the accolades, he said, “Teams only win on the strength of their weakest link.”

Then I came to both disappointed and eager. It wasn’t over yet. I’d barely begun. But according to the dream, I would see the end. And that gave me strength.

I have to wonder if Joseph looked back on his dream and said to himself, that day will still come. God promised.

Sometimes, God assures an answer but hints (or says directly) that the wait will be long. This is the intent of Jeremiah’s words to those in captivity. You will be there for seventy years. The promise of your return to Judah is certain, but not soon. Those dreams can be harder to hold onto which is why we need the memories.

But as this post is already too long, I’m guessing that’s next week!

And God spoke all these words, saying:

 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

 “You shall have no other gods before Me.” (Exodus 20:1-3)

Today, we wrap up the review of the Ten Commandments. Specifically, we are looking at how I broke every single commandment, biblically speaking, if you look at how Jesus interprets them, before I became an adult.

But, I’d like to make the case that God could’ve just issued this command. Technically, the other nine commands and all the explanation of the law is to remind us of this one fact: you shall have no other gods.

Sin, if you get down to it, is having other gods. When Adam and Eve chose to disobey, at that moment, before they bit into the fruit, they were choosing themselves as gods over the Creator.

And, any of the posts before in this series technically has ways that I violated this command. But I remember clearly the moment I willfully and intentionally chose other gods.

When I was in eighth grade, the world stunk. I don’t mean the world at large, necessarily, but my world. The junior high I went to was scary*. We had bomb threats at least once a month. Several of the “popular” young men were known to force themselves onto some of their classmates. My sweet grandmother was very sick. My mom and I yelled at each other more than talked. And my best friend had just moved away mid-year.

Since I was in eighth grade, I was attending confirmation classes. Every week, I learned something new about God. One week, the focus was prayer. “Our God is a God who answers prayer,” Pastor Bernard stated emphatically.

Never one to accept anything immediately, I decided to test that. I asked for prayer for my grandmother to get past the current round of ailments. “Give her a few more years,” I begged.

She died two days later.

Obviously, God didn’t answer prayer. The tension, fear, loneliness, and much more catapulted my reaction to God’s apparent lack of concern into an outright rage.

Fine. If God doesn’t want to answer my prayer, I don’t want God.

I don’t remember if the pastors or teachers noticed my change in attitude at the confirmation classes. If I could’ve skipped them, I would have. I told my mom (probably yelled the words, to be frank) that I didn’t want to be confirmed. “I don’t believe a word of it!” She told me that no daughter of hers was going to embarrass her by not being confirmed when it was time to be confirmed.

I went. I stood at the front with all the others. But whenever we said our vows or the creed or anything about God, I put the word “not” in front of it.

Refusing anything to do with God personally left a void in my heart and mind. Into that void, a spirit guide stepped in. He would give me the advice and the attention God wouldn’t.

But that kettle of worms is a whole other story with many loops and swoops before God wooed me back nine years later.

Even if I hadn’t broken any of the other commandments, I broke this one an intentional and aggressive way at fourteen.

When I humbled myself before God those nine years later, I knew I had no righteousness to offer. I knew the Bible well enough to know I had broken commandments and that the price of broken commandments was death. Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.

But the very God who I thought hated me at fourteen, loved me so much that he gave his blood to pay for my sins.

That in truth is the main point behind the commandments. You, frail human, as much as you might want to do it on your own, cannot. You can’t keep even one command: have no other gods. Today, you may choose the god of pleasure over choosing Me. Or you may choose the god of self when my Spirit prompts you to do something you don’t want to. But you will choose wrongly at some point. And because you do love Me, you will seek My face until you know what it was that separated us and you will confess it.

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us. (1 John 1:8-10)

My prayer is that today I live a bit closer to Him. Today, may I sin just a bit less.

*This was definitely related to the students more than the school itself. My sister attended the same location two years later and it was a much calmer experience for her.

“You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.” (Exodus 20:4-6)

To the Western mind, the idea of creating a statue or miniature and bowing before it seems ludicrous. It is so obvious that anything manmade cannot be a god. Does that mean we don’t violate this second command?

Unfortunately, no. I think the first idol I turned to as a kid was money. After all, money can solve so many problems and make that whole coveting sin a lot easier to deal with.

Luke 16 13 “No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”

We make money. We assign a value to the currency of this world. Every generation has. It is something physical. It is also something that people have worshipped from the beginning of time. It’s why Jesus calls it out in both Matthew and Luke. If our daily devotion is to the acquisition and growth of our money rather than to our faith, we worship an idol. We worship something created rather than the Creator. We serve it, to use the wording of the command.

There are a lot of things we choose to serve other than money. I’m sure you can think of some without me making a list. We serve ourselves. We put our trust in our leaders rather than God or pray for a political change rather than revival. We serve convenience. Or pleasure. Or nature rather than its creator.

Anything we serve instead of God is an idol. Sometimes those things seem so innocent we don’t realize right away that we are worshipping God and. But as soon as the Spirit brings it to light, we need to forsake those microscopic gods and humble ourselves before the omnipotent God.

Psalm 33: 12 Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,
The people He has chosen as His own inheritance.

This week, tomorrow as I write this, celebrates the birth of the United States of America. Our founding fathers were a mix of God alone and God-and followers. But all of them had a theocentric world view. Our nation was not created as a Christian nation, but it was created on Christian principles.

Because of this difference with other nations, Americans have been known to make our country their idol. Or a leader in the past or present. But our nation is flawed and all of our leaders were/are human beings with their own weaknesses.

We need to look to God instead.

If we do anything to point others to God, we are doing what God had called the people of Israel to do. They were intended as a nation of priests, reminding all the nations of the world that there is an almighty God.

Zephaniah 2 11 The Lord will be awesome to them,
For He will reduce to nothing all the gods of the earth;
People shall worship Him,
Each one from his place,
Indeed all the shores of the nations.

Psalm 96: 4 For the Lord is great and greatly to be praised;
He is to be feared above all gods.
5 For all the gods of the peoples are idols,
But the Lord made the heavens.

Jeremiah 14:22 Are there any among the idols of the nations that can cause rain? Or can the heavens give showers? Are You not He, O Lord our God? Therefore, we will wait for You, Since You have made all these.

Let us pray our nation turns from its idols. But to do that, individually, we need to root out the idols we serve.