How Do I Deal With Idols of the Heart - Part One

How Do I Deal With Idols of the Heart?

For the last eight weeks or so we have been studying the five idols of the heart. Let’s see if we can remember them using the acronym CRACS – control, respect, appreciation, comfort, and success. We have defined them, illustrated them biblically, illustrated them in everyday life, and analyzed what principle of scripture they violate. I hope that you have become very familiar over the past two months with the two questions that identify the presence of idols in your life: if I am willing to sin to get something I want, what I want is an idol. If I respond sinfully when I don’t get something I want, then what I wanted is an idol. I hope that you are sensitive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit as He convicts and nudges you.

This morning I want to talk to you about how we deal with an idol. As we have been going through this study I hope that a scenario similar to this one has gone through your mind. “OK, I see the idol in my life, I see the principle it violates, I understand the magnitude of what is going on, I see the negative consequences the idol brings about – but what do I do now? How do I tear that idol down?” That is the question I want to answer this morning – how do I deal with an idol of the heart?
Transition: So what I want to share with you over the course of two messages is five principles for dealing with idols. The first one is found in Joshua 24:15. Turn there with me and let’s think about choosing whom we will serve.

1. Choose Whom You Will Serve – Josh. 24:15

"And if it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the LORD, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD."

God demands full allegiance from His followers. Not only do we see it here in Joshua 24, we also see it in the words of Jesus in Mt. 6:24. “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will hold to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” Paul expresses this same truth in 2 Cor. 6:14 when he says, “for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness? Or what harmony has Christ with Belial, or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever? Or what agreement has the temple of God with idols?” The answer is “none!” The call to follow Christ is a categorical call, and the first step in dealing with idols is to choose whom we will serve.

There is a very interesting passage that has bearing on this point in Rev. 3:14-16 where God rebukes the church in Laodicea by saying, “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I would that you were cold or hot. 16 'So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth.” Do you see the categorical nature of God’s call? God can really use a “hot” person, and He can work with a “cold” person, because He knows where they are. Their positions are well defined. But He despises a person who tries to maintain a “middle of the road” position.

Isn’t there something particularly distasteful about things that are tepid? Just the word itself has negative associations – I don’t think we even use the word “tepid” in a positive way. Don’t you find it irritating when you don’t know where a person stands? When he refuses to take a side? I remember the anger I felt when I was trying to speak to a state senator about NY’s effort to redefine marriage. I couldn’t actually talk to him, so I ended up talking to his chief of staff, or office manager, and the official position, the official statement coming from this senator was, “Should this legislation come to vote, at this point I anticipate voting against it.” When you think about that statement, it says nothing. So when she told me that, I responded by saying, “that is a very craftily worded statement that says nothing definite.” She smiled at me and said, “We think so.”

God feels the same way about people who refuse to give Him their wholehearted allegiance. God wants followers who leave no questions in anybody’s minds about where they stand. That is the essence of Joshua’s challenge to the nation of Israel in Joshua 24:15 – “choose Whom you will serve.”

To build on this point, turn with me to 1 Cor. 6:9-11, where we are going to see that God demands a clean break with our past. When we come to Christ for salvation, God expects a wholehearted, decisive, comprehensive break with our past. “Do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, 10 nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you [in other words, they weren’t that way any more]; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God.”
So the first step in removing an idol from our life is to realize the categorical nature of being a follower of Christ.

Unfortunately, we live in a culture that fosters convenient Christianity and doesn’t demand a radical break from our past. We really do think we can have our cake and eat it too – which is an incubator for idol worship. So if you are struggling with an idol and want to tear it down, the first thing you have to do is determine where your allegiance lies. Are you a follower of Christ, or not? Are you going to declare yourself as such, or not? Are you going to be “hot” for Christ, or not? God does not want tepid followers who can’t make up their minds whether or not they are going to worship God or their idols.

So once we make that decision to follow God, the second principle in dealing with an idol is found in Mt. 22:37. Let’s turn there and see that we need to resolve to love God with all our heart.

2. Resolve to Love God With All Your Heart - Mt. 22:37

35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, 36 "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?" 37 And He said to him, "'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' 38 "This is the great and foremost commandment.”

What does it look like to love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind? Have you ever wondered that? In other words, I think we would all agree that we want to do this, we really do want to love God with everything within us, but how do we do it? Is there something I can measure to see if I am doing it? Well, it really is somewhat simple (which, by the way, is different from being easy) in that love is demonstrated best by obedience. Turn to John 14 with me, and let’s look at verses 23 and 24 where Jesus teaches this idea. “Jesus answered and said to him, "If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him, and make Our abode with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father's who sent Me.” Do you see what Jesus is saying here? Our love for God is not some kind of arbitrary, subjective endeavor. It’s not like I get to love God my way, and you get to love God your way, and she gets to love God her way, and each way is equally legitimate. That isn’t what the Bible teaches. Love for God is measurable. It is objective. And it is seen by our level of obedience to Him, or as Jesus puts it in this passage, “keeping His words.”

What does this have to do with idols? Just this. The true nature of idolatry is that every act of idolatry is also an act of self love. To the degree we are worshipping idols, we are not worshipping God. Or I could say it this way, to the degree we are loving idols, we are not loving God. Idol worship is taking God off the throne of my life and putting myself up there.

One of the sobering questions we have to ask ourselves is this: “How much do I love God?” Do I love Him enough to say “no” to the call of the idol? Or do I love my idol more? That’s really what idol worship boils down to. Let’s see if we can apply this concept to our opening illustration 8 weeks ago. Do you remember when I gave the hypothetical situation of the daughter telling her dad that if he’d look for the remote with his eyes instead of his mouth he’d find it quicker? At that instant of sarcastic disrespect, something goes off in the man and he has to decide in a moment which direction he is going to go. Everything in his old nature is screaming for him to worship at the idol of respect and seek vindication and justification and to take his daughter down a notch or two.

On the other hand, he knows that this situation is not primarily about him and personal disrespect – the violation of God’s principles of honor and parental authority tremendously outweigh his personal hurt. This isn’t primarily about him. So in that moment, he has to decide the love thing. Does he love himself the most, or does he love God the most? If he loves himself more than he loves God he is going to light into his daughter and give it to her with both barrels. On the other hand, if he loves God more than himself, he’s going to firmly and persuasively convince her of the magnitude of her offense – primarily against God, and only secondarily against her father.

Do you see how love works, do you see the role love plays in idol worship? As humans, we have a limited capacity for love. To the degree we love ourselves, we won’t obey God. To the degree we love God, we won’t obey our impulses to idolatry. If we love God with 80% of our heart and soul and mind, while that sounds admirable, we are going to be worshipping idols with 20% of our heart, soul and mind. If we love God with 40% of our heart, we are going to be worshipping idols with 60% of our heart. This is why we must resolve to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind.
Transition: So as we answer the question, “How do I deal with an idol of the heart,” we have seen two principles. First, we have to choose whom we are going to serve, and second, we have to resolve to love God with all our heart. The third truth I want to share with you is found in Acts 1:1-8, and it is that we have to appropriate the power of the Holy Spirit.

3. Appropriate the Power of the Holy Spirit – Acts 1:1-8

In Acts 1, starting in verse one, we read, “The first account I composed, Theophilus, [this would be the Gospel of Luke] about all that Jesus began to do and teach, 2 until the day when He was taken up, after He had by the Holy Spirit given orders to the apostles whom He had chosen. 3 To these He also presented Himself alive, after His suffering, by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days, and speaking of the things concerning the kingdom of God. 4 And gathering them together, He commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the Father had promised, "Which," He said, "you heard of from Me; 5 for John baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now." 6 And so when they had come together, they were asking Him, saying, "Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?" 7 He said to them, "It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority; but you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.”

Note the connection in verse 8 between the coming of the Holy Spirit and the word “power.” The promise of Jesus in this verse is that when a person comes to Christ for salvation, something mysterious happens to him in that the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, comes to live inside him. Don’t ask me how it works – I don’t understand the biology involved. What I do understand is the reality.

The reality of this promise is that as a follower of Christ, you have a strength, or a capacity for accomplishment, that you didn’t have before you were a Christian. I want you to take a moment to let that sink in because this is a truth we Evangelicals often minimize because of the excesses of the Charismatics. The Holy Spirit coming upon you at the moment of your salvation gave you a supernatural strength, not necessarily physical, a supernatural capacity to do things you would be incapable of doing without the Holy Spirit living in you. That is the meaning of the word “power” in Acts 1:8. It is really interesting to me that the Greek word used here is δύναμις, spelled in English as “dynamis.” Our English word “dynamite” comes from this word.

If you want to see some great illustrations of how this concept works, read the book of Judges in the Old Testament (though it isn’t limited to this book), paying special attention to the phrase “and the Spirit of the Lord came upon him mightily . . .” And then see what that man or woman was able to accomplish while under the influence, under the power, filled with a capacity for accomplishment, by the Holy Spirit. You will read of Gideon and his defeat of the Midianites, Jeptha and his defeat of the Ammonites, and multiple stories of Samson including Samson and the lion attack and Samson and the Philistines. What we see in the Old Testament concerning the presence of the Holy Spirit is that He came and went, as it were. And when one of God’s people in the Old Testament needed supernatural help, the Holy Spirit was sent to fill him and energize him and give him the capacity to do what needed to be done.

That is significantly different from the work of the Holy Spirit today. After Jesus was crucified but before He went back to heaven, He made this promise in Acts 1:8 to that little band of terrified followers. And on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came down and took up permanent residence in the lives of the Believers, and that is how He has operated ever since – He permanently dwells in the lives of those who have come to Christ for salvation. In practical terms, what that means for you and me today is the Holy Spirit doesn’t come and go in our lives like He did in the OT, He is here all the time to give us, among other things, the power and help we need.

Turn with me now to John 14. I want us to look at verses 15 – 17 where we see Jesus explain this concept in a little more detail. In verse fifteen Jesus says, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments [that sounds familiar, right? It was our last point – resolving to love God with all our heart]. 16 "And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper [the reason that word is capitalized is because it is a reference to deity], that He [the Helper, who is obviously the Holy Spirit since Jesus is the speaker and He has referred to God sending “another Helper”] may be with you forever [unlike in the Old Testament times]. Now, what is the connection between “keeping the commandments” of verse 15, and the promise to send a “helper”? It isn’t very easy to keep the commandments, is it? So, in order to help us out, Jesus promises to send the Holy Spirit]; 17 that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not behold Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you, and will be in you.” The Holy Spirit, Who is my helper, lives in me. That is Jesus’ point. We are not trying to live up to God’s expectations on our own.

Now what does all that have to do with idols? Simply this. Those of you who have struggled with idols like I have know from experience that we don’t have it within ourselves to simply work up the strength to deal with idols. Tearing down idols is not a matter of self discipline. Now, self-discipline does play a role as we are going to see in one of the next points, but conclusively dealing with idols takes Supernatural empowerment. If you think you can just exercise some self-control and focus and overcome the idol, you are either out of touch with reality or extremely naïve about the power and nature of idol worship.

So once we understand that we can’t do this on our own, that we need help, and that God has graciously given us a “helper,” we are well on the way to dealing with idols. But there was a very important word in the title of this point – the word “appropriate.” Not only do we have to choose whom we are going to serve, and resolve to love God with all our heart, we also have to appropriate the power of the Holy Spirit. What does “appropriating” the power of the Holy Spirit look like? That is where we are going to start next time we get together.

I’d like to close our time together this morning by having everyone close their eyes and bow their heads. I want us to spend some time in personal reflection and examination. We have looked at three principles for dealing with idols this morning, and I want us to focus on the first two, those of choosing whom we will serve, and resolving to love God with all our hearts. Think about choosing and resolving – those are action words. They require you to engage your will. Mental assent isn’t enough.

My goal for you this morning is not to have you agree with everything I have said, it goes way beyond that. My goal is for you to do something. Will you choose this morning to serve God alone? I’m not talking about salvation here, I’m talking about serving. Salvation covers your eternity, service covers your day in and day out living. Will you choose this morning to serve God alone?

In addition to that, will you resolve this morning to love God with all your heart? He doesn’t want most of our love, He wants it all. And in light of what He has done to secure our eternity, isn’t giving Him all our love about the least we can do for Him?

If you would choose to serve God alone and love Him with all your heart, would you quietly stand to your feet right now as a testimony to yourself and God that on Sunday morning, June 27, 2010 you took two decisive steps in dealing with idols of the heart. This isn’t a testimony to me, or to the people sitting around you – this is a testimony to yourself and God that you are not only willing but serious about this matter of idols. Would you stand to your feet now while I pray for us.