Smash That Idol - Final
It helps us to carry out the first and greatest command, love God, by having no idols. What do you love more than God? What do you look to for security more than you look to God? Where do you draw your sense of identity from, more than you draw it from God? These are things you must lay on the altar. Here is where your most earnest repentance lies. These things may not in and of themselves be bad, but if we make … more to us than God is, we have made an idol of them, and here we must repent.
Whatever you look to for security or comfort or assurance or validation, whatever you look to to make yourself feel better or to bring you pleasure over and above or quite apart from God is idolatry. … When you say, “I love God,” but what you care about more is what others think about you, you’ve got an issue. When you say, “I know God is my provider,” but all your hope and confidence is in your career, that’s idolatry. It happens anytime we look to anything over God as the source of life.
When it comes to God, we simply begin to practice loving Him. We make him the treasure of our heart, every day. Simply begin the day by saying, Jesus, you are my treasure. You are my heart’s desire. I love you. Help me to love you today. And then we shepherd our hearts, with his help. We notice where our hearts go looking for love or approval, for comfort or affirmation, and in those very moments we repent. O Jesus, forgive me for this idol. Cleanse me here, give me your holiness here. I renounce this idol. I choose God. In those moments, we give our hearts over to God in fresh and deeper ways.—John Eldredge9
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What kind of idols do people worship today? “Who worship the works of their own hands.”10 What are people crazy about today? What do they go in debt for today? All kinds of luxuries, electronic equipment, beautiful luxurious homes, gorgeous million-dollar buildings. Things, things, things! What do many people today live for? What do they spend most of their time and money on? What are they working for? “The works of their own hands,” which they give most of their time, their devotion, and their strength.
“My people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit. For My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and have hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.”11 The message given through Jeremiah was to a people who had forgotten their God and turned to other idols.
As God’s Word says, “The people seek a new thing.”12 But they find nothing that ever satisfies, no love that ever lasts, no happiness that is forever theirs. They are miserable, brokenhearted, wounded, bound, captives of their own passions and prisoners of their own shattered hopes, desires, and limited human frailties.
For although the body is of this earth and is satisfied with the things of this earth, the human spirit—that intangible personality of the real you that dwells in that body—can never be completely satisfied with anything but utter union with the great and loving Spirit that created it. He’s the power and life of the universe that the Bible itself calls love, for “God is love,”13 the very spirit of love itself—true love, everlasting love, real love, genuine love that never ends from a lover who never leaves, the lover of all lovers, God Himself.—David Brandt Berg
9 The Utter Relief of Holiness (FaithWords, 2013).
10 Jeremiah 1:16.
11 Jeremiah 2:11,13.
12 Acts 17:21.
13 1 John 4:8.
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Give us joy in our labors and glory in our tasks, Lord.
Thank the Lord for the oil of His Spirit! -- That vital touch with Him -- His Divine Life, Beauty, Power and Wisdom!
Has whatever you do got the power and the fire of God? -- If not, it's dead works! God help you to have the fire-power of God's Spirit in all you do! Amen? Hallelujah!
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