Ezekiel 14:1-8: When God gets left behind week 1

Today I’d like to share something kind of personal about me. Though it probably won’t surprise you, you may not have realized what I am about to tell you about me. I have a unique hobby of sorts that I enjoy doing. I like growing my beard. In fact, I’ve had some sort of facial hair almost as long as I can remember. In nearly 15 years of marriage, my wife has never seen me without some sort of facial hair. I’ve experimented with different styles over the years, early on in our marriage I had a goatee and mustache. I’ve had short beards, I’ve had beards even longer than the one I’m sporting now, but I enjoy growing my beard. There are some things you may not have known about beadsmen—yes, that is the correct term for a man who grows and grooms his beard himself. You don’t just wake up with a nice beard overnight. It takes some work. So in order to groom my beard and make it look presentable I have some equipment that I use. I have a bear brush—this is a bore hair bristle brush that helps keep straggly hairs in line. I also have a cedarwood beard come. Not only does is smell great, but it helps keep everything in line as well. There are also specific products you put on your beard. One that I use is beard oil. This helps to soften the hair so that it can be pliable and moldable, and it is scented so it smells nice. Then there’s the beard balm. This a produce that helps to soften the hair but also has a slight hold to it so everything stays in place just the way I want it to. If I’m really trying to style it, I have some wax that I use. This is mainly for styling my mustache, but my wife doesn’t really like the handlebar look so I don’t usually do that. But there are all of these products that I use, and really guys, if you want to get a nice beard that is shaped right and looks nice you ought to consider some of these things. But you now, there’s one thing I have noticed about this whole regimen I have. If I fail to use it, I’m going to have some problems. Pretty soon hairs are going every which direction and no matter how hard you brush them they seem to have a mind of their own. And if I’m not careful to use some of these basic steps to help “tame my mane”, it can get pretty out of control. It doesn’t take long before you look like a Minnesota mountain man! So I have to regularly take some of these steps to prevent a beard that is unwieldy and out of control. As I thought about this during this week, I began to see some parallels to our spiritual lives. There are certain elements in our spiritual lives that are absolutely vital. They help tame our heart and control our soul, and if we forget or neglect them, our spiritual lives can start to become kind of out of control. It can be so easy to get so busy with our lives that we begin to let some of these things slip. That we give ourselves a pass on this or that or the other thing, and before we even realize it we are living our lives on our own and we realize that we have left God behind; we’ve been doing life without him. Yes, we are “spiritual” people, yes we come to church and perform or ministries of service. We may even have a regular time of reading God’s Word, but we’ve lost something. We’ve lost the heart. Everything we have is in the head, and we’ve left God out of our hearts. And so today, and over the next few weeks, I’d like to talk about how God can get left behind in specific areas of our lives. I’d like to address four specific areas in our lives during this series. This week we’ll talk about how God can get left behind in our hearts. And I’d like us to consider a passage in the book of Ezekiel that show to us how easy it is for God to get left behind in our hearts in a way that we replace him completely with other things. BIG IDEA: Don’t leave God out of your heart!