PURPOSE: To help listeners recognize how love for God must come before love for neighbor.

Have you ever heard anyone preach about how to have a happy marriage?

Or how to have more friends?

Or how you can deal with failure?

Or how to be an effective leader?

I. What do you expect those sermons to be about?

These sermons give some good sound advice, but they may not really be biblical.

Is it possible that in wanting the answer to those questions, we make a fundamental mistake of believing that the Bible is a book about us rather than about God?

When we say that the Bible is a revelation, a revelation of what?

What is the danger of making the Bible people-centered rather than God-centered?

II. Is it possible that when people think of the Ten Commandments, they think of the commandments as guidelines for living, as a way to live a moral life?

Do the commands tell us how to live in relation to our neighbor?

But is that the thrust of the Ten Commandments?

They call us first to love God, then out of that love, we are to love our neighbors.

III. Is there a danger in getting that reversed? And what is the danger?

We end up with ethics and no power.

In a book review of a discussion on ethics, the reviewer said, "The writer shows us how to be good, but he does not show us why we should want to be good."

It is out of our love for God that we love our neighbor.