The Big Three: Give God Your Loyalty, Your Love, and Your Purity
Ask three honest questions: what rules my heart, how am I treating people, and am I honoring God with my body and thoughts?
#377 — The Big Three - Identifying and overcoming the three most prominent sins of the New Testament.
Jun 2, 2025
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Look beneath the busy religious life
We can stay busy with religious activities while avoiding something we know needs attention. We sing, study, and attend, yet protect a desire, a resentment, or a habit that keeps claiming authority over us. The activity matters, but it cannot make a deliberate contradiction harmless. Faithfulness involves more than presenting the Lord with a list of correct practices while keeping a part of life outside his authority.
Idolatry, bitterness, and sexual immorality give us three searching places to look. This isn't a ranking that makes other commands unimportant. It asks whether our loyalty, relationships, and private choices agree with the Lord we publicly honor. The grouping helps us ask foundational questions. Who receives our highest allegiance? How do we treat people? How do we use our bodies and desires? Other instructions remain important. Give these questions an honest hearing while continuing to receive all of Christ's teaching.
Give God the deciding voice
Jesus names love for God and love for neighbor as the great commands in Matthew 22:34–40. Matthew 6:24 adds that we cannot serve God and wealth. Something gets the final word when loyalties compete. Following Him brings that love into decisions about what we keep, give, and pursue. A competing master does not need to announce itself as a rival religion. It may operate through an ambition, a possession, or an appetite that repeatedly receives the deciding vote when the Lord’s instruction requires something different.
Colossians 3:5 calls covetousness idolatry. We should take that seriously without deciding every gift we enjoy is an idol. Ask whether a good thing has begun deciding which of God's instructions we're willing to obey. Love for family, work, and ordinary recreation can belong within faithful life. The danger comes when a gift takes God's place in our decisions. Look at what you defend most fiercely, what consistently receives your time, and where you refuse correction. Those choices can show where saying 'God comes first' still needs to become true in practice.
Stop feeding the resentment
Hurt is real, and it doesn't give resentment permission to govern the heart. Ephesians 4:31–32 asks us to leave bitterness, slander, and malice for kindness and forgiveness. We need mercy shaping our response to wrong. If we keep reviewing the injury only to renew our anger, we may be strengthening the very habit we need to leave. The passage does not make wrongdoing unimportant. It directs the response of people who have received mercy and must not allow another person’s sin to become the ruler of their own conduct.
Forgiveness doesn't require calling betrayal harmless or returning to danger. Accountability and boundaries can remain necessary. The question is whether we're seeking what is right or feeding the desire to hurt someone back. Love can seek accountability and maintain necessary boundaries while refusing revenge. Matthew 5:21–26 also presses us to take damaged relationships seriously rather than imagining that an offering can replace needed reconciliation. Examine the resentment you have been protecting. What would obedience require now: an honest conversation, an apology for your own conduct, a release of retaliatory plans, or a prayer that the other person will turn toward what is right?
Honor God with body and mind
First Corinthians 6:18–20 connects purity with belonging to God. Our bodies matter to Him. Matthew 5:27–30 also reaches the desires we deliberately cultivate, asking us to address more than visible behavior. It belongs within the life Christ has purchased. Matthew 5:27–30 likewise addresses lust as well as outward adultery, showing that the moral concern reaches deliberate inward pursuit. Purity therefore involves both conduct and the habits that encourage conduct: what we seek, imagine, view, and permit to become familiar.
A temptation isn't the same as choosing to feed it. We should resist without pretending that a difficult struggle makes growth impossible. Look at access, habits, and secrecy, and ask what needs to change. The practical question is whether we are feeding the desire or taking it seriously enough to change. Remove access that repeatedly leads toward sin, seek trustworthy accountability when needed, and address the loneliness or secrecy in which the habit thrives. Jesus’ striking language about removing what causes stumbling expresses the seriousness of resistance. It calls for decisive action against sin, not physical self-injury or confidence that willpower alone supplies every answer.
Learn from people who truly turned
First Thessalonians 1:8–10 describes people turning from idols to serve God and wait for His Son. They receive a new direction. What has changed in the things we trust because we now belong to Jesus? They did not merely add Jesus to an unchanged collection of loyalties. The relationship displaced the former masters. That is a useful question for us too: what is different because we belong to Christ? The answer should be visible in more than the religious terms we now use.
Paul prays for increasing love in First Thessalonians 3:11–13 and teaches holiness in chapter 4. A good beginning gives reason for encouragement and further growth. Love and purity belong in that continued response. First Thessalonians 4:9–10 commends brotherly love and urges further increase. Together, these passages give a positive setting for the three concerns. We are turning toward God, learning to love people more, and using our lives in holiness. Resistance to sin is strengthened when the faithful life replacing it is understood and actively practiced.
Depend on Jesus while resisting sin
Taking sin seriously doesn't mean enough good days can buy forgiveness. We still need Jesus. Nor does weakness make deliberate rebellion something we should accept. We can confess the struggle and keep seeking to obey. Admitting need can move us toward help instead of becoming another excuse to stop resisting. The Christian response includes confession, repentance, and a willingness to receive correction. There is an important difference between struggling while seeking to obey and defending a practice because we have become unwilling to leave it.
Colossians 3:1–10 puts leaving sinful habits within a life directed toward Christ. Name the wrong specifically, consider what keeps feeding it, and ask who could help you respond with greater honesty and care. Identify the particular wrong rather than speaking only in vague categories. Ask what habit keeps it available, what truth challenges its attraction, and who can help you respond responsibly. Depend on the Lord while making use of practical means. A faithful friend, a changed routine, or appropriate professional help may support the work of addressing an entrenched problem. These steps don't buy grace. They show that we mean to follow the Lord who gives it.
Let the questions change today
Bring these three questions into prayer, then connect the answer with a choice today. A priority can change, a bitter word can remain unspoken, and something feeding impurity can be removed from easy reach. Then connect each request with a decision in the day ahead. A concern about idolatry may lead you to change a priority. A concern about bitterness may alter the way you speak. A concern about sexual sin may require removing something you have repeatedly chosen to keep within reach.
Begin honestly rather than promising to become perfect overnight. A busy religious life must not hide a part of ourselves we won't let Jesus correct. Receive His mercy and give the next decision a better direction. Christ calls us to a whole response, and every revealed instruction should be honored in its proper place. Let the focused examination help expose what activity can conceal, then move forward with repentance and hope. A life increasingly loyal to God, generous toward others, and careful with the body gives religious practice the sincerity it needs. The Lord’s mercy encourages that growth, and his word gives it a dependable direction.
Take the idea with you.
- 01What gets the final word when it competes with God's will?
- 02What resentment are you continuing to feed?
- 03What change would help you resist impurity?
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