The Most Important Thing

I hear it all the time.  Everyone thinks they know what the most important thing is. 

The most important thing is to get a good education. 
The most important thing is to learn to read. 
The most important thing is to be kind to others. 
The most important thing is to be financially successful. 
The most important thing is family. 
The most important thing is to have good friends. 

I went to see the movie Ratatouille last week.  It was a really cute movie, but it made the point that the most important thing was family.  It really struck me, as I watched those rats interact like family, that they’ve got it wrong.  Family’s great, but it’s not the most important thing.  Neither is a good education, or financial success or any of the other things people put so much importance on. 

So, what’s the most important thing?  God.  That’s it.  There’s nothing else that matters.  If we don’t consider God to be the most important thing, we’ve failed.  It doesn’t matter how financially successful we are, how well we read, how kind we are, what good friends we have.  None of it matters. 

Solomon wrote a whole book on this — Ecclesiastes.  He tried everything.  He put lots of things before God.  He put his wives before God.  He chose to satisfy their desires to worship their idols and even participate with them rather than to put God first.  Solomon put his family before God. 

Today, we tend to idolize our families.  Our children are given such a place of honor in our homes, that we are, at times, willing to go against what we know God wants us to do to please our children.  We let their activities, such as baseball (in my family this is the tough one), interfere with our gathering together and worshiping God.  Some of us will put too much time into our work so that we can give our children what they want.  Instead of being the parent and training our children, we let the children run things.  That’s not putting God first.

Many times, our families cause us to compromise on our convictions.  To keep peace in the family, we choose to keep quiet about  error.  We choose to let things go that we need to speak up about .  When we put our family first, we aren’t helping them.  It doesn’t help a child or a parent or a sibling if we keep quiet while they continue in their sin.  Putting God first may require some hard choices.  It may cause others to choose to stay away from us.  We still must put God first.

Back to Solomon.  We can read about his life and see what happened when he began to put others ahead of God.  He was the most glorious king.  He was king during Israel’s highest moment.  He didn’t put God first and they began to slowly lose it all.  By not putting God first, his son was not ready to reign.  His son didn’t put God first and the fall of the Israelites began.  If Solomon had put God above his family, things might have turned out differently.

Solomon summed it all up in the last two verses of Ecclesiastes. 

"Fear God and keep His commandments,
For this is the whole duty of man. 
For God will bring every work into judgment,
Including every secret thing,
whether it is good or whether it is evil."

That’s the most important thing — Fear God and keep His commandments.  If we all truly believed that God is who He said He is, we’d truly fear Him.  He controls it all.  He made us.  He made everything.  He is the great  "I am".  He has the authority to tell us what to do.  It wouldn’t matter what He tells us to do, if we truly believe that He is God, we’d do it.  Even if that meant we had to give up what we thought was most important.