Have you noticed how easily and inevitably good things, intended to serve us, become our masters? It’s all so gradual we don’t see it happening, but in a short time the transformation takes place.

The good servant becomes the tyrant. The angel has become a devil. Let me give you an instance.

To love is what we are here for, yet to love passes so easily into a desire to possess, and the possessiveness kills us. The love of a partner can become the love of possession. The love of children can become the love of their dependence on us. The love of hard work – a fine virtue – can so easily become an obsession with success.

Whether it’s money, or things, or people, status or success, our loves start off all right but seem to be subject to a law of demonic gravity pulling them down. Even saints so easily and inevitably become sinners. Even an angel can become the devil-

That’s why the Bible, in its wisdom, savs that the first great priority of all – successful, joyful Iiving-
is to love God and to love Him first. To put that to work and practise and cultivate it. That’s the only way to keep all our other loves pure. There’s no other way. Christ comes first.