"All these toys were never intended to possess my heart. My true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ." - C.S. Lewis
"If we turn from God to treasure something more, it will prove to be a hard master. An eternally hard master." - John Piper
"We all worship something. What do you bow to in your heart? If it ain't Jesus, it ain't worth it." - Jefferson Bethke
"Idols always break the hearts of their worshipers." - C.S. Lewis
"Sin is not simply doing bad things. It is putting good things in the place of God." - Tim Keller
From Pastor Tim Keller...
"The Ten Commandments begin with two commandments against idolatry. Then come commandments 3 – 10. Why this order? It is because the fundamental problem in law breaking is always idolatry. In other words, we never break commandments 3 – 10 without first breaking 1 and 2.
We will either worship God or other things. We cannot eliminate God without creating God substitutes. Something will capture our hearts and imaginations and be the most important thing to us – our ultimate concern, value, and allegiance. So every personality, community, and thought form will be based on either God himself or on some God substitute, an idol.
This means that idolatry is ultimately the reason for all wrongdoing. Why do we ever lie or steal or covet? Of course, the general answer is “because we are weak and sinful,” but the specific answer is always because there is something besides Jesus Christ that we feel we must have to be happy, something that is more important to our hearts than God, something that is enslaving our hearts through inordinate desires. All our failures to trust God wholly or to live rightly are rooted in idolatry – something we make more important than God.
…Therefore, in sin we are always forgetting what God has done for us and instead are being moved by some idol. That is precisely what happened to the Israelites in the desert.
Note also that God first rescues the people from Egypt, and then he gives them the Ten Commandments. Keeping the Ten Commandments is not what saved them; God had already done that. God did not first give the Law and then deliver the people - first he delivered his people, and then he gave them the Law. Thus we are not saved by the Law, but saved for the Law. The Law is how we regulate our love relationship with God, not the way we merit the relationship. We are saved by faith in Christ alone.
Over the past few years God has spoken to me most about two things - idolatry and grace. I never realized how much of my heart was given to things rather than God and I never realized the depth of God's love and grace that He would continue to pursue me through my constant rebellion. Some of my idols have been taken away, others have been lessened and still others remain. It is almost unfathomable to me, knowing what I now know, that idolatry remains an issue in my life. I know that attempting to find my hope, joy and comfort in anything besides Jesus leads to addiction, depression and despair. Yet, the pull remains - a pull that I am not always successful in defeating. In fact, idolatry is more than just a battle between humans and their vices. It is more than just a test of our willpower. It is ultimately about good vs. evil.
8 Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods. 9 But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you want to be once more? - Galatians 4:8-9 (ESV)
What is Paul talking about here? He's not pulling any punches...that's for sure. This is a letter written to the church in Galatia that was losing its grip on the Gospel. Notice that it was God who found them. Not the other way around. Paul doesn't allow self-righteousness to creep in for one second. But what about this phrase - "worthless elementary principles of the world"? From Matt Chandler...
Now, what we know about that phrase “elementary principles” is it’s a reference to demonic spiritual forces. In the ancient world, they attributed to the elements of nature a kind of a spiritual force that needed to be appeased in order to get what you want from that spiritual force. If you were a farmer and you needed rain, you would need to appease the god that controlled the rain in order to make it rain. If you were going to go on a trip via the sea, then you wanted to appease Poseidon so that you would get there safely. If you wanted to become pregnant, you go to a fertility god. If you wanted to get married, you’d go to Aphrodite and you’d make these sacrifices and you would take part in these kinds of rituals to get from that god whatever you wanted from that god.
Paul’s saying that these gods are not gods; they’re elementary principles. Which means there are spiritual forces, powerful spiritual forces, behind our idols. Paul’s pointing out the reality that these spiritual powers cannot deliver what they promise. They cannot deliver what they promise because ultimately they are not sovereign and all powerful. They can only do what they’re allowed to do.
This should get our attention. Idolatry is essentially demonic worship. That should make you more than tremble a little. It got my attention. With certain battles that have lasted years and years, there can exist a level of comfort within that battle. This teaching takes any level of comfort away.
God gave us many gifts - food, drink, sex, money, health, marriage, success, etc. These gifts were all meant to not only be blessings to us, but to point back to the Creator, so that our love and affection would rise up to Him. Instead, we regularly choose to have our affections terminate on the gift itself. When we do that we do not worship God...we worship His creation. This is simply paganism. It is being enslaved to those things that by nature are not gods. You were created to glorify God. To use creation to glorify yourself is to worship things other than God. We have been fooled into thinking this isn't a big deal, or even worse, we no longer even think about it all.
There are some great questions in the following sermon that can help each of us determine what our idols are...
"Want to know if you have an idol? If you're willing to sin to get it, or if you're sinning because you're not getting it." - Jeff Bethke
http://www.justinbuzzard.net/2012/04/25/that-idol-that-you-love-it-doesnt-love-you-back/
http://www.stevekmccoy.com/keller-idoaltry.pdf
http://www.bloggingtheologically.com/2015/08/26/idolatry-is-dumb-jesus-is-not/
http://kellerquotes.com/the-definition-of-idolatry/
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