What Are Your Idols?

“Beloved children, keep yourself from idols.” – 1 John 5:21

Tim Keller says, “An idol is anything which occupies God’s place – it is anything upon which you will base your life. It is what you look to for your sense of meaning, happiness, and validation. When something becomes your idol, you will give it your unquestioned loyalty. You will let it run your life, determine your choices, and govern the use of your money and time. You will give yourself to it effortlessly.”

What are your idols?

Scott Sauls, in his article “Building a Christ-Centered Message and Ministry Culture” lists and expounds upon some of David Powlison’s idolatry diagnostic questions:

1. What do people feel they cannot survive or function without? In other words, what do they feel they have to have in order to enjoy life, or to be acceptable as a person? What are the things that they are terrified of losing?

2. Where do people spend their time and money with the least amount of effort? We always, without exception, will give our time and resources effortlessly to the things that give our lives the most meaning.

3. What do people tend to think and talk about the most? Another way to frame this question is to ask, “Where do their thoughts go when they are driving alone in the car, when they first wake in the morning?” What does this say about where the utmost treasures of their hearts are residing?

4. Which biblical commands are people the most hesitant to obey? This is always going to be the most revealing questions about the nature of a person’s particular idols. Whenever we choose to disobey a command of God – any command of God – at that moment in time our hearts are treasuring something or someone more than Him.

5. When do people become most angry? What kinds of people, things, or circumstances irritate them the most, and what is it about these people, things, or circumstances that give them such power over their hearts? What, if it happened, would tempt them to become angry with God?

6. How would people fill in the blank? “I cannot be happy unless ____.” Whatever is on the other side of the “unless” is the idol.

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A Day On a Cali Campus: Edgar and His Family Idol

Today I spent all day at UCSD sharing my faith with some top notch students from around the country.

UCSD is an interesting animal of a campus. They are incredibly smart. Their library is designed to be the “tree of knowledge”. There is even a long sidewalk shaped like a snake that stretches hundreds of feet next to the library. We heard today that this liberal University is allowing students to put student-made pornographic videos on the campus TV network for the whole campus to see.

The students are chasing after noble things. One of the students I met with today, Edgar, is a non-practicing Catholic who said that is greatest goal in life is to have a great family.

Having a wonderful family is a great thing, but if it is the end goal, life will be much less than what God intended it to be.

If you are like Edgar, you need to know that if family is your ultimate object of worship, comfort, and security then you are in danger. What if a member of your family dies? What if your spouse leaves you? What if your child doesn't become an “A” student or a star athlete?

If any of these things happen, it will result in depression or bitterness. Why? Because the thing (in this case family) that we make an idol or god, if fractured or destroyed, will leave us with nothing to fall back on. Hope, comfort, and security will be stripped away from us.

The good news is that Jesus confronts family idolatry and offers a better solution. He died on the cross so that we could have the opportunity to have Him be the supreme object of worship in our lives rather than family. And if we trust in Him, our families actually become better!

How?

If someone in your family passes away (and Jesus is supreme in your life), He offers to be your comfort and offers to give you hope that you will get to see your family member again. If your spouse leaves you (and Jesus is supreme in your life), He will remind you that He will never leave or forsake you. If your child doesn't meet your academic or athletic standards (and Jesus is the supreme in your life), you will be able to love your child unconditionally since Jesus loved you without any conditions even though You didn't meet his expectations.

Family is a good thing, but when made ultimate, becomes a very bad thing. Jesus is Edgar's only hope to have the family he desires.

Satan’s Schema – Part 4

Jesus is tempted three times in Matthew 4. The third and last temptation goes something like this: “Worship me and I will give you all of the kingdoms of this world.”

This temptation is a little less subversive than the others. Satan simply wants Jesus, the Son of God, to worship him. It is no secret here that this is what Satan wants. That’s his motive for everything he does. That’s why he got kicked out of heaven (FYI: he used to be an angel). He stopped worshiping God the Father because he wanted to be like God and be worshiped.

This temptation can be broken down into two temptations: WORDLY AMBITION and IDOLATRY- yet both are linked together.

An idol is anything we worship other than God. Idolatry is not simply worshiping Satan or other gods, but can be a worship of money, sex, our boyfriend or girlfriend, our family, our job, or even our favorite Sports team.

An idol is anything we elevate and make supreme over the one true God.

If we are worshiping (talking about, praising, meditating on, etc.) anything more than God it is idolatry - which is Satan’s desire for us. As long as he takes our attention off of worshiping God (which is the only worship that is truly satisfying to our souls) he wins. There is no middle ground. There is no gray area. There is only lightness and darkness. There is the kingdom of God and kingdom of Satan. If we aren’t worshiping God as supreme, we are in the realm of Satan’s kingdom.

In Matthew 4, Satan was trying to transfer Jesus out of the kingdom of God and place him in his own kingdom.

And how did Satan try to accomplish this with Jesus? By appealing to his fleshly need for power – which is exactly what he does with us.

Here are a few examples of how Satan uses power and ambition as a temptation for us to worship in his kingdom:

• Satan: If you just put in more hours at work you’ll be a) richer and b) more powerful within your company. You won’t have time to worship God, and your family will be left in the dust, but you’ll be powerful.
• Satan: If you spend all your time studying for your classes, I will give you a wonderful job someday. A job that will give you power and prestige. Even if you don’t have time for God or time to go to church or time to serve others, you’ll get a lot of money someday which will take care of all your needs.
  

Now, I think that working hard in school and working hard in the workplace are good godly desires. However, my point is that Satan’s goal is to take good things and make them ultimate in our lives so that we worship those things and not God. If Satan gets our eyes off of God, he wins.

What are the idols in your life? What are you fixing your eyes on, thinking about, praising - that is not God Himself? How is Satan using worldly ambition to tempt you away from God?

Everyone Has a God

*this musing was adapted from The Last Addiction by Sharon Hersh

“Whatever we are ultimately concerned with is a god for us.” – Paul Tillich

Whether we claim to believe in a god or not, we all have a god (or idol) that we worship and are addicted to – namely, a person, place, substance, activity, or ideology that becomes central to our mind, body, soul, and spirit.

Addiction is from the Latin word addictus, which means “to surrender to the gods”.

We all have a person, place, substance, activity, or ideology that we surrender ourselves to for the sake of finding peace and satisfaction.

It could be baseball. It could be shopping. It could be a parent. It could be a son or daughter. It could be work. It could be school. It could be a fraternity or sorority. It could be Allah. It could be a guy or a girl. It could be alcohol. It could be going green. It could be anything that we think about, talk about, and give praise to the most.

“Addiction is… worship. It is giving my heart and soul over to something that I believe will ease my pain…” – Sharon Hersh

As Christians, we might be tempted to worship something more than God Himself, which is idolatry. And even though an atheist might claim not to be religious (see last blog post), he does in fact have a religion because everyone worships something.

Here is the big truth about being addicted to anything other than God: “Addiction makes everything better until it makes everything worse.”

A man who is addicted to his work and makes it his god may be a good thing at first (i.e. job will bring in good money, favor from co-workers, recognition, etc.). But, when his family starts falling apart, everything gets worse.

We can apply this scenario to any of our idols. And the result is always the same: everything gets better until everything gets worse.

The only addiction that will not lead to emptiness, loneliness, and despair is the God of the bible.

“In Your presence is fullness of joy; In Your right hand there are pleasures forever.” – Psalm 16:11

Once we are addicted to the God of the bible, we can go on enjoying everything that He’s given us. We can worship Him who has given us all things instead of worshiping the things themselves.

Nudity Is The Point: Part 1 of 3

For years people have been wearing clothes.

Our attire has evolved from leaves to leather since our first parents, Adam and Eve, entered the scene.

When Adam and Eve sinned for the first time, they felt ashamed, not only emotionally but physically – spurring them to grab a few leaves and run for cover. I would argue that this physical act of “covering up” is a demonstration of what is going on inside the heart.

For some reason, for the however many years that Adam and Eve lived in the garden before they sinned, they felt no need to wear any clothes. We have to ask ourselves, “Why?”

Donald Miller, in his book Searching For God Knows What, says that he thinks Scripture teaches us that “Man is wired so he gets his glory (his security, his understanding of value, his feeling of purpose, his feeling or rightness with his Maker, his security for eternity) from God, and this relationship is so strong, and God’s love is so pure, that Adam and Eve felt no insecurity at all, so much so that they walked around naked and didn’t even realize they were naked. But when this relationship was broken, they knew it instantly.”

Once the relationship between Adam and Eve and God was broken, they continued to drift into insecurity more and more. They began to believe that what they did was so terrible that God could not possibly forgive them. So they ran and hid.

Perhaps counseling people in our world should be simpler that most people think. What if the majority of all our problems can be traced back to the idea that we have a broken relationship with our Maker and therefore are trying to find security and value in other things besides Him? What if the reason for the lusting of business success, popularity, or money can be traced back to the fact that we are cut off from the Source of Life and therefore are desperately trying to fill these huge voids in our lives.

What if a college student went on a drinking binge not because he or she was trying to take their satisfaction to the next level, but because they didn’t have any satisfaction in God and His way of doing things in the first place? What if a college girl had sex with a random fraternity guy not because she was intentionally trying to do evil, but because she didn’t feel like she was accepted and loved enough by God?

Maybe every act of sin or evil can be traced back to the fact that a broken relationship with God propels us into a life of filling the holes in our heart with things or people other than God - a life that causes us to put on our clothes and enter unsafe territory.

In part 2, we’ll contrast the characteristics of a “relationship with God” and a “broken relationship with God.” We’ll also connect these characteristics to spiritual nudity – the wonderful thing that Adam and Eve had going before the Fall, the kind of thing that God desires for us right here, right now.