We often think that our faith is most severely tested during our times of difficulty. When bad things happen to us or our loved ones, we are often tempted to think that God isn’t there or that God doesn’t care. Today’s passage reminds us that times of prosperity can be even more spiritually perilous. For when things are going well, it’s easy for us simply to forget God.

So, what’s the remedy for this sort of complacency? In the first place, we must remember that God has delivered all who trust in Christ, not from slavery to Pharaoh in Egypt, but from bondage to sin and death through the blood of the cross. We must also remember why God saved His people in this way – because He loves us with a love that is not only unconditional and self-sacrificial and everlasting, but a love that is jealous, a love that longs for us to respond to Him with exclusive devotion.

But just knowing that God loves us and just knowing that God has delivered us is not enough. Since God put His love into action on the cross of Christ, our love must also be expressed not just with our thoughts and feelings, but with our deeds. We must express our love and gratitude in obedience to God.

This of course means that we should search God’s Word, trying to know more of His Will so we might put His law of love into practice each and every day. As we’ve already seen this week, it means we should make every effort to love our neighbors just as much and in the same way as we love ourselves. But it also means turning our attention and affections away from false gods, from anyone or anything else we might be tempted to put in God’s place in our lives.

God has loved us. God has blessed us. God has saved us. Doesn’t He deserve our trust and our devotion today?

Deuteronomy 6:10-15 (ESV)

10 “And when the LORD your God brings you into the land that he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you– with great and good cities that you did not build,
11 and houses full of all good things that you did not fill, and cisterns that you did not dig, and vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant– and when you eat and are full,
12 then take care lest you forget the LORD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
13 It is the LORD your God you shall fear. Him you shall serve and by his name you shall swear.
14 You shall not go after other gods, the gods of the peoples who are around you–
15 for the LORD your God in your midst is a jealous God– lest the anger of the LORD your God be kindled against you, and he destroy you from off the face of the earth.