He Is Our Praise

Read This Week: Deuteronomy 10

Fear the Lord your God and serve him. Hold fast to him and take your oaths in his name. He is the one you praise; he is your God, who performed for you those great and awesome wonders you saw with your own eyes. Your ancestors who went down into Egypt were seventy in all, and now the Lord your God has made you as numerous as the stars in the sky. – Deuteronomy 10:20-22 NIV

The life of faith is ultimately about returning to God each day. Moses recounts how God told him to make new stone tablets after Israel broke the first ones through idolatry. The broken tablets showed Israel’s rebellion, but the new tablets showed God’s mercy. Before Israel could move forward, God had to restore them. This is one of the chapter’s great theological truths: our failure does not exhaust God’s willingness to forgive. God does not pretend that sin is insignificant, but neither does He abandon His people when they fail. He restores them and calls them to walk with Him again.

That pattern speaks directly to ordinary life. We often imagine that spiritual growth means never stumbling, never making the wrong decision, never falling into the same weakness twice. But Scripture presents a different picture. Faithfulness is not perfection; it is continually turning back toward God. Sometimes our choices leave something broken behind us: a relationship, a habit, a commitment, a season of obedience. Repentance is not merely feeling sorry about what happened. It is accepting God’s invitation to begin walking with Him again. Grace does not erase the seriousness of our failures; it gives us the possibility of an obedient future beyond them.

The language of this section is also deeply relational: fear, walk, love, serve, hold fast. Obedience is meant to flow from a life oriented toward God. This challenges a common tendency in our own spirituality sometimes to reduce Christianity to a collection of activities. We can attend worship, read Scripture, and serve in ministry, yet still let our hearts drift. God is after something deeper. He wants our allegiance, our affection, and our everyday lives.

More interesting language is the command to circumcise your heart. Circumcision was an outward covenant sign, but Moses uses the image to point toward an inward transformation. God wants the barriers around the heart removed so that His people can genuinely love and obey Him. It is possible to look spiritually healthy on the outside while becoming increasingly resistant to God on the inside. Pride, resentment, self-sufficiency, bitterness, and secret compromise can harden the heart long before they become visible to anyone else. Spiritual maturity therefore requires examining what we’re doing and what is happening inside of us. A soft heart remains teachable, repentant, responsive, and willing to be corrected by God.

Loving the Lord should change how we speak to people, interact with the family of God, treat employees and coworkers, respond to strangers, handle disagreements, spend our resources, and regard those whose circumstances differ from our own. Scripture does not allow us to separate devotion to Christ from love expressed toward others. The question is not simply whether we worship God sincerely, but whether our lives increasingly reflect His character.

He is the one you praise; He is your God. Israel’s identity was not ultimately rooted in its strength, success, or accomplishments. Its greatest possession was God Himself. We need that reminder too because life constantly tempts us to build our identity around other things. Our careers, families, reputation, possessions, achievements, failures, or others’ approval. Those things may matter, but none of them can bear the weight of being our ultimate source of worth. When God becomes our praise, we are freed from having to prove ourselves continually.

Deuteronomy 10 therefore calls us to a simple but demanding way of life: receive God’s mercy, keep your heart soft, walk in His ways, love Him wholeheartedly, and let His character shape how you treat others. The chapter does not present obedience as a way to earn God’s love. Like we’ve seen before, obedience is the grateful response of people who have already experienced His mercy. We obey not to convince God to love us, but because His love has given us a new direction. He is our God, and He is our praise.

For everyday life, that means beginning again when we fail, examining the condition of our hearts rather than merely our outward behavior, choosing obedience when nobody is watching, and looking for practical ways to reflect God’s compassion toward people who are easily overlooked.