I•DOL•EYES
We were created by God to worship him and to love him above all. But in the Garden of Eden, we broke this natural order and started to worship things other than God. This is what the Bible calls idolatry, and in biblical days it involved worshipping self-created gods, or even a statue of wood, stone or gold. Seems silly to us now …
But we are as much idol worshipers as were our ancestors. We just worship different kinds of idols, things like comfort, control, significance and money. Tim Keller defines an idol as “anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.”
What is so tricky about modern day idols is that they often start out as good things; gifts from God, even. And then we twist them and elevate them and give them a status they were never meant to have. When this happens, they become very dangerous things indeed because they threaten to displace God from his rightful place.
Idols are dangerous because they promise to fill a hole in us that only God can fill.
Idols always over-promise and under deliver.
And most dangerous of all, when we worship idols, we displace God from the center of our heart and we start to depend on those idols for benefits they can never, ever provide. We miss the beautiful opportunity to solely cling to Christ for all things.
As it says in Jonah 2:8 – Those who cling to worthless idols, forfeit the grace that could be theirs.
If idols are so dangerous, why do we have them in the first place?
How do we begin to recognize when something good has turned into an idol?
And how do we begin to put idols back in their rightful place and give God our whole heart again?
Join us for 4 weeks as we explore this critical topic for Christ followers. Come learn how the Gospel helps us to remove idols from our lives and to fix our eyes on Jesus for all that we want and need!
