God has greatly challenged me the past several months to examine my life to see what idols I have set up in my heart. I do not often think of myself as a person who serves idols (that is something that people in the Old Testament did, not me!), but by God’s grace He has showed me how entrapped I am by the idols in my life. My heart is grieved and filled with such anguish as I stop and see how I actually live and act and invest my time and thoughts; I am no different than the children of Israel when they were in the wilderness, continually wandering away from the one who had rescued them from slavery.
To begin, I want to first challenge you to dig into God’s Word. Dust cannot lie. How terrible it is when we who call ourselves followers of Christ can write Jesus’ name in the dust that collects on our Bibles. Jesus engraved our names in the palms of His hands by the shedding of His precious blood. He suffered and endured God’s wrath for our sin. He has given us such amazing grace, and in return for His kindness we offer Him a pile of dust that we have allowed to collect on His Word. Instead of investing ourselves knowing God and spending our lives glorifying His awesome name, we serve our idols. We do not want to serve the Jesus of the Bible (of course we would never say those words!). If we actually read our Bibles I think we would come face to face with the fact that the Jesus in the Bible is too dangerous, uncomfortable, unsafe, radical, challenging, and serious for our “Christianized American Dream”. Sure we want to follow Christ---we want to go to heaven---but we do not want to actually take up our instruments of death and follow Him down a narrow, unpopular, and lonely road. We do not want to die to self and give up the things we enjoy on this earth. We would rather linger in the rays of the sun than tremble in joyful awe before the throne of God; we would rather go to college, get married, find a good job, make a good salary, and enjoy our dreams than live radically for the one whose love for us was so radical that He endured our hell so we can be with Him (don't misunderstand me though, all these things are not bad, but when we live for them instead of Jesus that's when it is bad)...and we would rather live for this world than run hard for eternity.
Jesus must be our treasure and nothing else in this life. Christ demands complete obedience, 100% commitment, and total dedication. There is no such thing as half-hearted Christians; those who consider themselves as such are not Christians at all.
So we must know Jesus and treasure Him with all of our hearts, and to do this we must look into God’s Word and see Him for who He really is---the Almighty Son of God, who is the Creator and sustainer of all things; who made Himself nothing and humbled Himself to the point of death; who drank the Father’s wrath and made atonement for sin; who was raised from the dead on the third day and is exalted at the right hand of God; and who is standing always to make intercession for His own. However, most of us do not look into God’s Word to see who Jesus is, but instead we pear into our mirrors and fashion a Jesus who looks like us, talks like us, thinks like us, and lives like us. So we make Jesus into something He is not but something we can handle and wrap our minds around. Instead of remembering that we were made in God’s image, we want to serve a god who is made in our own image. This is idolatry! Dear Brothers and Sisters if you examine this “Jesus” we have made, we are not worshipping the Lord God, but we are really worshipping ourselves.
O Lovers of Christ, may your hearts be broken as mine is, and may you be filled with great sorrow over your sin. Let us repent and turn back to the Living God, and let us serve Him with all of our hearts.
Let us destroy our idols! Open up God's Word today and fill your moments with the Truth.
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