Genesis chapter 22

12 Do not lay a hand on the boy, he said. Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.

To me, this is all about faith and about having idols in our heart that take the place of God.
I don't know what was going through Abraham's mind as he made this three day journey in obedience to God. Imagine, taking your son to be sacrificed, knowing you were going to be the one to kill him, and yet trusting God the while time to fulfil his promise that you would be a great nation through Isaac, the son of the promise. The test here for Abraham was whether or not he trusted God, believed in His word no matter what or whether or not his love for Isaac outweighed his love and duty and response to God.

We may never be called upon to sacrifice our children, thankfully, but we may well be called upon to give something up that is really important to us, something that is maybe so deeply ingrained in our hearts that it has become an idol, something that takes the place of God in our lives. What about that tv programme we love, that film, that person? Does our work take priority in our life or our hobbies? Would we rather go read a book than spend time with God? What is there in your life, in my life, that we put before God, the thing we have to do, see, watch, read before we have our quiet time? What about our family, do we put them before God? Or our possessions, our car, our home, our job, our clothes, our finances? Do these take priority over God?

There are things we have hidden deep in our hearts, things that maybe God does not like, does not approve of and that draw us further away from God instead of closer to Him. Like Abraham, we need to give whatever it is to God, to offer it to Him and let Him deal with it. Pretty soon, you will find the Holy Spirit is at work, changing you from within and removing that idol, those computer games, those magazine, whatever it may be, and replacing it with a love for God, a hunger that maybe wasn't there before because our hearts were full of other things.