Idolatry - When you worship what you should use and use what you should worship.
David Clarkson was an English Puritan preacher back in the 1600’s. In one of his sermons he asked a number of questions to help people identify the idols in their hearts and lives. The question’s he asked I thought were very profound and helpful so I’ve just reframed these more for our time and place. But I want you to think about these because how you answer these questions has the potential to point out to you what has the most potential to be God’s primary competition in your heart and in your life.
So here is question number 1: What are you most disappointed with right now? What are you most disappointed with? Maybe it is your career. Maybe it is your financial status. Maybe it is your sex life. Maybe it is your family. Maybe it is your marriage. What are you most disappointed with? Whatever you’re most disappointed with points to something that you’ve put your hope in. Instead of putting our hope in God, we put our hope in this or in that, and when it doesn’t work out we live with this disappointment and despair. Now some disappointment, of course, is natural. That’s not what I mean. I mean, there’s just this constant disappointment in your life. What causes that?
Maybe another way to ask this question is, “What do you complain about the most?” What you complain about often and frequently has a way of revealing something that you’ve put your hope in, something that has replaced God in some way in your life.
Here’s another question: What do you sacrifice your time and money for? What do you sacrifice for? That’s how you know what or who your god is. Do you sacrifice time and money for the Lord God, or do you sacrifice time and money for…? Maybe it’s a person or maybe it’s the job or maybe it’s your home or maybe it’s your car. What do you sacrifice for?
And the Bible says, “Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart is.” If you really want to know who or what you worship, look at how you spend your money and your time. It reveals the gods within our hearts.
Question #3: What do you worry about? What scares you? What do you think, “If I lost this or if I lost that or if I lost this relationship or this person, life wouldn’t be worth living?” It has a way of showing who or what we worship.
Number 4, where do you go when you get hurt? I think this is a big one. Where do you go when life is hard? Where do you find comfort? Do you come home after a long day and you open up the refrigerator and there’s some comfort food? I mean, that’s even what we call it. Instead of turning to God, we help ourselves feel better maybe by eating or maybe drinking.
Maybe you get into a fight with your spouse and you feel rejected, so where do you go for comfort? Do you enter the pagan temple of a pornographic website and try to find some kind of comfort there? Where do you go for comfort?
Maybe you turn on the television after a hard day where life has just gone poorly, and you flip through the channels and you just kind of go numb so you don’t have to think about things.
Here’s what I’m saying: Where we go for comfort reveals where we’ve put our hope. It reveals if we’re going to God with our problems and with our challenges and with our pain and our suffering. Or are we going to something or something else?
Imagine it this way. Imagine that there is a mom with a kindergarten son. And her kindergarten son loves the new kindergarten teacher, and he just comes home and is always talking about his kindergarten teacher. And the mom, though she wouldn’t say it, starts to feel a little bit threatened by the kindergarten teacher. Well, the mom is volunteering at school one day and she’s out on the playground visiting with the teacher while the son is playing on the playground. But he falls and he gets hurt, and the tears just come. And he starts running towards where the mother and the teacher are standing and talking. Now who does he run to is the question? He doesn’t have to think about it. He runs straight into the arms of his mother, and it creates this honest moment because where he turns when he is hurting shows where his heart lies.
When we go to something or someone other than God, first and primarily, with the hurts and the pain of this life, it has a way of revealing what has become an idol.
Question number 5: What makes you mad? What makes you angry? Maybe your team loses and it ruins your whole week. What’s that tell you? What’s that tell you? Or maybe someone treats you with disrespect and it just makes you angry, because you’ve made other people’s respect a god.
Here’s a 6th question: What brings you the most joy? What makes you laugh? And this is where it gets a little bit challenging because some of what gives us joy, there’s nothing evil or wrong about those things. In fact, those things are often gifts from God—good gifts from God. But instead of allowing those gifts to draw us closer to God, we allow God’s gifts to become competition for Him. Instead of worshipping the Giver, we worship the gift. So what are some of the things that make you happy? And instead of rejoicing in the Lord with those things, maybe you allow them to replace Him.
Last question, “Whose applause do you long for? Whose approval are you really living for?” Maybe it’s a boss, or maybe it’s a spouse, or maybe it’s a parent or a friend. Who you are living for, whose applause you’re living for tells you a lot about who has the throne of your heart.
Ultimately, an idol is anything or anyone other than God that takes the passion, value, the hope, the glory, the commitment of your life. So an idol, then, is just kind of this cheap substitute for God. Where we look to something or someone to do for us what God wants to do for us. We try to find that in something other than Him.
It’s important to identify any and all idols and potential idols in your life and then….Get them out of your life! I love you Church and pray that we are a people who are intentional about making sure that God doesn’t have to compete with anything in our lives and hearts!!
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