LAW HOMILY - It Is Well With My Soul

The First Commandment and the Call to True Worship

Every week we go through the law of God because we want to understand what God has to say to us, his people. We want to understand how to obey him, how to worship him rightly in spirit and in truth. And we want to know what God has to say to us in every myriad circumstance and situations that we walk through.

So today we're going to be back in the first commandment. I'll read it and then we will discuss it. Then God spoke all these words saying, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of slavery and you shall have no other gods before me.

Horatio Spafford, Grief, and the Question of What We Cannot Lose

I want to begin today with a story and then tie it into the first commandment. It was November the 22nd, 1873 in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean at two o 'clock in the morning. Horatio Spafford's four daughters, Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta were asleep in their cabin when a collision hit the boat and the SS Villa du Havre, I have no idea how to say that, struck by an iron hold ship began sinking in the black waters below.

His wife Anna fought to save them. She clutched, she prayed, she screamed their names into the chaos. But 12 minutes was all that it took for four daughters to be gone. When Anna reached Wales, she cabled two words to her husband, saved alone.

You can't imagine how that feels. The first commandment sounds really simple. You shall have no other gods before me. When things are safe, we don't bow to statues, we don't chase idols, we're good. But when Luther says, whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that really is your God, your God is whatever you cannot imagine losing, and this hits really close.

Not what you shouldn't lose, but what you can't lose. That thing that if it's taken away would make your life feel meaningless, that good thing that's become an ultimate thing. Spafford, Horatio Spafford loved his daughters, of course he did.

There's nothing wrong with loving your children, loving them fiercely. But when your children become your hope, and when they become the very essence of your existence, and the very thing that you live for, when your success as a parent is your validation as a person, when their safety becomes your peace, then you have committed idolatry, and you've made them bear the weight of the Savior, and no human being can carry the cross.

Exposing the Idols That Promise What Only God Can Give

Some questions here would be, what do you check the first thing in the morning, your phone or your Bible? That sometimes can tell us where our idol is. What thoughts dominate your heart at 3 a .m.? God's promises or your bank account?

That will often tell us where our God is. What devastates you more, sin against God or the loss of a reputation? That's where our worship is. What would shatter you if it was taken away from you? Your career, your health, your comfort, your plans, your image, political victory, your children's achievements?

Whatever it is, that's the God that you're trusting in instead of the one true God. And here's what kills me. Every idol promises what only God can deliver. Your career promises, but it gives you a golden calf instead of freedom.

Your comfort promises peace, but it delivers anxiety if you ever lose it. Your children promise you a legacy, but they're just broken people like you, and sometimes drowning under expectations that you've placed on them.

Your control promises security, but it's one phone call away, one telegram away from losing everything. And in that, we keep digging cisterns that can't hold water, dying of thirst ten feet from the fountain.

Jeremiah said, My people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. Every single thing that we trust in right now, except God, will either leave you or you'll leave it.

Your money, you'll die and you will leave it behind. Your health, it's already failing right now. Some of you know it. Your reputation is already one scandal away from ruin. Your children, by the Lord's grace, will bury you.

Your plans, God laughs at our plans, all of it can sink in 12 minutes in the ocean. Horatio Spafford boarded a ship to meet his shattered wife when the captain called him to the bridge over the very spot where his daughters drowned, where his ancestors had been torn from the ocean floor, where every security had been swallowed by the deep.

It Is Well With My Soul and the Lord as Our Portion

He went to his cabin and he wrote this, When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, It is well, it is well with my soul. How can a man sing over his daughter's grave that it is well with his soul, unless his hope was not anchored in his daughters, but it was anchored in God?

The Imitation says this, I call to mine and therefore I have hope. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness.

The Lord is my portion. Jeremiah said that as Jerusalem was burning and the ashes were still being seen miles and miles away. The city of the temple, the city where God's presence was covenanted to dwell, he said God's mercies are new every morning against the backdrop of the smoldering bricks of the temple.

We can say it is well with our soul as long as our soul and our hope is not anchored in anything but God. So brothers and sisters, let us pray this morning and repent of anything we've held to that's not Him.

Let us give it over to Him and let us sing and praise for this God who forgives us when we fall short.

Amen. Amen.

Let's pray.