Idolatry

Centering Our Lives On Something

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

“Since we are made to worship, we are always centering our lives on something whether we realize it or not.  It is like a fire hose that is stuck in the ‘on’ position and shooting water out endlessly with great force. We must decide where we aim the hose as the focus of our worship. The idols of our modern world are not necessarily the hand-carved statues of the ancient world.  In our autonomous self-seeking ways, people have instead come to serve or worship the self-erected idols of approval, comfort, and security.  We must ruthlessly inspect the sin in our heart for these idols… so it is vital that [we] get to the heart. As Tim Keller puts it, ‘The solution to our sin problem is not simply to change our behavior, but to reorient and center our entire heart and life on God.’  Therefore, we must go after the nature of the sin by going after its root and not just the fruit of the sin. Oftentimes people repent of sin that is simply the fruit of the idols in their hearts. We must find out the why of the behavior and not just the what”.

~Tom Wood & Scott Thomas, Gospel Coach

From Graced Again

Disinfecting Ourselves of Spiritual Malware

/ Dennis Griffith / 5 Comments

In his masterful work, Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin observed:

“Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.”

That may seem to be a peculiar notion. Some will, no doubt, simply chalk it up to “O, that Calvin guy had a lot of strange ideas”.  Some, being a bit more charitable, may concede that this might be true of man in his fallen nature, but certainly no longer the case once we have been made new creations through faith in Jesus Christ.  Some may go even a little further, admitting that sometimes Christians do struggle with issues akin to idolatry, such as lust and pornography, love of money or materialism,  or co-dependency and fear of man.

But Tim Keller, in his book Counterfeit Gods, goes even further and deeper:

We think that idols are bad things, but that is almost never the case.  The greater the good, the more likely we are to expect that it can satisfy our deepest needs and hopes. Anything can serve as a counterfeit God, especially the very best things in life.

What is an idol? It is 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.

A counterfeit God is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living. An idol has such a controlling position in your heart that you can spend most of your passion and energy, your emotional and financial resources, on it without a second thought…

If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning in life, and identity, then it is an idol.

While Keller clearly states that idols are often the good things in our lives, I have found that many people, godly people, may accept this as truth yet still fail to recognize the idols that drive and shape them. They get caught up by phrases such as “more important that God”.  To their minds, nothing is more important to them than God. And while in many cases I have no question that this is true of them when it comes to their professional faith (the faith they profess, and actually intellectually believe), they are unaware of the idols that influence them and their functional faith (the faith that effects the moment by moment emotions).

It is somewhat like a malware virus I have had on my computer on a few occasions.  Once the virus infects the computer it automatically blocks any attempts to identify the problem.  In fact, every attempt to clean it out only serves to further strengthen and entrench the virus.  Likewise, in some people I have encountered such a powerful block that any attempts to identify the spiritual malware – the idols –  is met with a greater resolve that they are not infected.  This  especially seems to be the case when the malware is something good, something very good, something even godly, such as a powerful desire for church growth, evangelism, doctrinal purity, etc.  Malware in such guise seems to almost always shut down any suggestion that these are problems.

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Counterfeit Gods

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

In his reletively recent book, Counterfeit Gods, Tim Keller explains what a counterfeit god is and describes how to make one – as we are so prone to do:

A counterfeit god is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living.  And idol has such a controlling position in your heart that you can spend most of your passion and energy, your emotional and financial resources, on it without a second thought.  It can be family and children, or career and making money, or achievement and critical acclaim, or saving “face” and social standing.  It can be a romantic relationship, peer approval, competence and skill, secure and comfortable circumstances, your beauty or your brains, a great political or social cause, your morality and virtue, or even sucess in the  Christian ministry.

Keller also asserts:

When your meaning in life is to fix someone else’s life, we may call it “codependency” but it is really idolatry.  An idol is whatever you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, “If I have that, then I’ll feel significant and secure.”  Introduction, p. xviii)

I greatly apprecialte Keller delving into this subject. While few people are likely to identify themselves as Idolotors, it is an affliction that plagues us all.  

John Calvin was correct when he declared: “Our hearts are little idol factories”.  Understanding how we each make our individual idols, and identifying how they influence our actions and thoughts, is a major step toward diplacing them.

Me Worship

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

The foolishness caricatured in this video probably needs no comment. It touches on what is perhaps the most common plague of American Evangelicalism: the notion that life (and Church)  is all about me – what I like, what I want, etc. 

God seems to have other ideas. In Isaiah 48.11 God says:

For my own sake, for my own sake, I do this.
       How can I let myself be defamed?
       I will not yield my glory to another.

This problem may nowhere be more evident than in the worship wars that erupt in many congregations. What might worship be like if our primary concern was God’s glory? If we primarily asked ourselves what God enjoys?

Idol Factory

/ Dennis Griffith / 6 Comments

John Calvin said:

“The human heart is a factory of idols… Every one of us is, from his mother’s womb, expert in inventing idols.”

This truth is difficult to convey. Few people think of themselves as idolators. And when I as a pastor, or a friend, suggest to people that they – like me – struggle from this affliction, the most common response is a grinning dismissal.

For most people the concept of idolatry conjurs mental images of statues and shrines. And since few people I encounter would knowingly do something as primitive as that, it is easy to understand why that notion is so easily ignored.

Nevertheless it is a condition that needs to be recognized.  We need to recognize it as a general condition of humanity. And each of us needs to discover what kinds of idols our own hearts are producing. You see, what my production center cranks out is different than what your production center develops – both in product and in volume.

In a recent post, titled X-Ray Questions, Scott Thomas, President of Acts 29 Network succinctly addresses this subject. And in that post he offers 35 X-Ray Questions for the Heart.  Thomas’ challenge:

Examine the following questions and ponder your heart for the existent idols and then crush the idols of our heart before they crush you.

  1. What do you love? Hate?
  2. What do you want, desire, crave, lust, and wish for? What desires do you serve and obey?
  3. What do you seek, aim for, and pursue?
  4. Where do you bank your hopes?
  5. What do you fear? What do you not want? What do you tend to worry about?
  6. What do you feel like doing?
  7. What do you think you need? What are your ‘felt needs’?
  8. What are your plans, agendas, strategies, and intentions designed to accomplish?
  9. What makes you tick? What sun does your planet revolve around? What do you organize your life around?
  10. Where do you find refuge, safety, comfort, escape, pleasure, and security?
  11. What or whom do you trust?
  12. Whose performance matters? On whose shoulders does the well being of your world rest? Who can make it better, make it work, make it safe, make it successful?
  13. Whom must you please? Whose opinion of you counts? From whom do you desire approval and fear rejection? Whose value system do you measure yourself against? In whose eyes are you living? Whose love and approval do you need?
  14. Who are your role models? What kind of person do you think you ought to be or want to be?
  15. On your deathbed, what would sum up your life as worthwhile? What gives your life meaning?
  16. How do you define and weigh success and failure, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable, in any particular situation?
  17. What would make you feel rich, secure, prosperous? What must you get to make life sing?
  18. What would bring you the greatest pleasure, happiness, and delight? The greatest pain or misery?
  19. Whose coming into political power would make everything better?
  20. Whose victory or success would make your life happy? How do you define victory and success?
  21. What do you see as your rights? What do you feel entitled to?
  22. In what situations do you feel pressured or tense? Confident and relaxed? When you are pressured, where do you turn? What do you think about? What are your escapes? What do you escape from?
  23. What do you want to get out of life? What payoff do you seek out of the things you do?
  24. What do you pray for?
  25. What do you think about most often? What preoccupies or obsesses you? In the morning, to what does your mind drift instinctively?
  26. What do you talk about? What is important to you? What attitudes do you communicate?
  27. How do you spend your time? What are your priorities?
  28. What are your characteristic fantasies, either pleasurable or fearful? Daydreams? What do your night dreams revolve around?
  29. What are the functional beliefs that control how you interpret your life and determine how you act?
  30. What are your idols and false gods? In what do you place your trust, or set your hopes? What do you turn to or seek? Where do you take refuge?
  31. How do you live for yourself?
  32. How do you live as a slave of the devil?
  33. How do you implicitly say, “If only…” (to get what you want, avoid what you don’t want, keep what you have)?
  34. What instinctively seems and feels right to you? What are your opinions, the things you feel true?
  35. Where do you find your identity? How do you define who you are?

Two other worthwhile resources on this subject:

Humble Calvinism: The Idol Factory

Idol Factory – A Series of messages by C.J. Mahaney & Mark Driscoll