"God's Rights"

"I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he goats out of thy folds: for every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills." (Psalms 50:9-10) I don't know if I totally understand it or not, but God wants to have fellowship with us; He wants us to love Him, and yet He has given us free will to make us choose to love Him, because real love involves a choice: I must choose to love God above everything else! All of those different sacrifices and offerings, something like eleven or so different ones, they are not to get anyone clean or purified, really they are to show how much we need God's mercy and grace upon our lives. It is all about a heart that wants to be "Restored" with God, and restoration involves so many different areas of our lives; we need to be clean before God, we need to have peace with God, we need to be on the side of God, and we need to be the friend of God; all of which requires our heart to want it to happen, the real question is, how much do I want it? Will I offer more sacrifices, as if those matter more than the desire of my heart? or will I just choose to love God more than my sin? Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to make this all about trying to be righteous, because I am convinced that I cannot even consider that I am able to achieve righteousness on my own; but it is more about the heart, and does my heart want to be right before God! If my heart does, then God has provided the way, and it really does not involve any animals, because they all pointed to Jesus anyways; it involves knowing that God has given us His righteousness in place of our own, because He knows already we will fail on our own. Think about that for a moment, because it takes awhile for it to sink into our stubborn hearts; a heart that wants to be free and to choose for itself, just as God has designed for it to do, is all of the sudden dependent upon God to get it right; a heart that wants to think that it is strong enough to make the right choices, is given no choice when it comes to righteousness, because it has no strength to be totally righteous. In other words, we have a choice, but there is really only one thing to choose: It is God's way or no way at all... "Thus saith God the LORD, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that spread forth the earth, and that which cometh out of it; he that giveth breath unto the people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein: I the LORD have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thy hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles; to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house. I am the LORD; that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images. Behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I declare: before they spring forth I tell you of them." (Isaiah 42:5-9)