Is Your Worship Like Camel Sex?

I just started studying Jeremiah…here is section of scripture that stood out to me this morning:

Jeremiah 2:23-25
You say, ‘That’not true!
I haven’t worshiped the images of Baal!’
But how can you say that?
Go and look in any valley in the land!
Face the awful sins you have done.
You are like a restless female camel
desperately searching for a mate.
You are like a wild donkey,
sniffing the wind at mating time.
Who can restrain her lust?
Those who desire her don’t need to search,
for she goes running to them!
When will you stop running?
When will you stop panting after other gods?
But you say, ‘Save your breath.
I’m in love with these foreign gods,
and I can’t stop loving them now!’

Most of us would strongly deny that we worship anything but God, yet if we take an inventory of our life and we take a serious look at where we spend our time and what we spend it doing we would see that we allow other ‘idols’ to get the attention that our God should be receiving. Maybe that idol is money…not necessarily that you have a lot of it, but the opposite, you feel like you don’t have enough, so you spend your time worrying about how the bills are going to get paid, how you are going to get out of the deep debt you are in, or you spend all of your free time working extra jobs to make up that which you lack, all the while the very one who provides everything to us, goes without notice, He gets ignored, and we wonder why our lives are a total wreck. It could be loneliness; we seek out anything that will give us a temporary fix, something that will make us feel accepted and valued just for a little while…yet the God of all creation…the one who created us to love us and to care for us, and to make us a part of His family gets put to the side, yet we never fill that void because we ignore the only one that has the power to fill it.

I love how the verse describes Israel’s desire to seek after and worship other gods as an animal seeks to mate when it is in heat. Are we not the same way? Do we not seek after pleasures in our own lives, anything to fill the void of loneliness, anything to fill the time? The fact is we are just like Israel was in the time that Jeremiah went to send them God’s message…we love our pleasures, we love our stuff, we love and we worship everything besides our glorious God, we exchange it for worthless idols! We are nothing more than animals in heat seeking our next partner. What would happen if those who call themselves Christians would love God first? What would happen if we decided to love God with all of our hearts, our souls, and our minds?