Keep yourselves from idols

    I want to talk about one of the big subjects in the Bible today. It’s actually the first of the 10 commandments that God gave Moses on the mountain, right at the top of the list. The first commandment is ‘You shall have no other gods before me.’ 

You might think- well I know that command and I am here this morning in church to worship Jesus. Jesus is my God and I have no other gods before him. But actually Christians can allow other things to rise up in our lives which subtlety take our focus, our love, our trust, our obedience. And even though we still call Jesus ‘Lord’, there is a danger for all of us that we can actually have something else up on the throne of our hearts, something that is just as important or even more important to us than Jesus. An idol. 

The Bible says in the last verse of the letter of 1 John, 1 John 5:21;

‘Little children, keep yourselves from idols.’

And we as God’s children need that reminder, now and again.

Let me tell you a story to give you an example of what I’m talking about. It’s an example that shows that even the most committed Christians can have an idol appear in their lives and they might not see it unless God shows them. 

As many of you might remember I became a Christian on board the Christian run hospital ship called ‘The Anastasis’ . Anastasis means ‘Resurrection’ and the ship was called ‘The Resurrection’ for a reason!

The Ship was bought in 1978 by Youth With A Mission- the mission organisation. But it wasn’t the first ship that YWAM had tried to buy. It was the second, the first attempt ended in failure. 

The story is told in the book ‘Is that really you God?’ 



Five years earlier they had tried to buy a ship called ‘The Maori.’ The Lord had given Loren Cunningham, the found of YWAM, a vision of buying a ship to bring medical care and the gospel to some of the poorest countries in the world. And he had learned about this old car ferry called the Maori that was moored in New Zealand. After prayer, Loren and others in YWAM felt God was calling them to put down the deposit of seventy-two thousand dollars to buy the Maori to turn into a hospital ship and they did. News got out in the New Zealand media that young missionaries were feeling called by God to buy the Maori, which was a well known ship in New Zealand and people were excited. 

Loren and the YWAMers felt confident. They felt God had been guiding them and they were sure God would provide the money for it. They made some statements in the press stressing the fact that God not only speaks to His people but also provides. The papers loved it. One headline read, “Youth say; ‘God Will Give Us The Ship!” 

More and more money came in to cover the rest of the cost of buying the ship. Everything looked on track. 

But one day Loren Cunningham was sitting quietly praying with his Bible open in the book Hebrews. Suddenly the words of chapter 12, verses 26 and 27, leaped off the page. It said: “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the heavens…that those things which cannot be shaken may remain”.

A rock hit the bottom of his stomach. “Oh no, he thought, I hope that doesn’t mean the ship!”. Was God saying that he was going to shake things and take the ship away from them?

We have been thinking about how God speaks. And God can speak by making a verse from the Bible jump out at you from the page. It’s like a few words or a verse or two, just have real impact in your heart when you read them. More than the surrounding verses. That’s one way we will hear the voice of God. Hold on to these verses when it happens, they are important.

It felt like God was saying to Loren Cunningham that he was going to shake things up.

Well soon after Loren was heading to a leadership conference in Osaka Japan a few days later and he was in a hotel in Seoul South Korea on the way to Japan. He silenced his mind, like we have tried to do in our services recently to hear God speak. He silenced his mind, focusing on Jesus, yielding to him and worshiping him, ready to listen to anything Jesus wanted to say to him.

Suddenly he found himself looking at a mental picture. He saw himself standing before a crowd of YWAM leaders. In the vision he announced with enthusiasm, “We’ve got the ship! God has given us the money for the Maori!” The crowd cheered wildly, waving their arms and shouting. Then all of a sudden, in the vision, Loren saw a figure standing in the shadows to the left, unnoticed by any of the people. He looked closer at his face and saw that he was grieving. Then it hit him—this was Jesus! They were ignoring Him! They were cheering a ship and forgetting Jesus!

Loren buried his face in the bed, unable to wipe away the horrible sight. He cried- “Oh, God! Forgive me! I have gotten my eyes on the ship you’re giving us and have taken them off You! I…we…do not deserve to have it! We don’t want to rob You of Your glory and give it to a hunk of metal.” He cried a long time, and he felt that God had heard and forgiven him. 

And then when Loren shared with the YWAM leaders in Osaka, there followed a time of repentance on the part of the YWAM leaders. They realised they had failed to put God first. But instead they had put God’s gift first and God second. 

Every day the YWAM leaders came into the austere meeting room in Osaka and experienced a heavy feeling of guilt. And every day they confessed their sins, and every day they found new areas in their lives and attitudes that needed purifying. Other idols and other sins that needed dealing with emerged and were repented of. A painful awareness of God’s awesome holiness coursed through the room. They saw down into the deceit of their own hearts, how pride had got in. How they had looked down on other mission organisations. Loren Cunningham said for the first time he glimpsed something of what it will be like to stand before God on Judgment Day.

They humbled themselves, throwing themselves on God’s mercy. On the seventh day as they were singing softly, suddenly a special, deep quietness settled over them. Immediately they all knew that Jesus had walked into that bare conference room. And in an instant He sovereignly removed all the guilt. They were clean, forgiven.

I share that story, because it illustrates how easy it is for us to turn something good that maybe God has given us and made it too big a part of our lives, to turn it into a god. And how easy it is to side-line Jesus and yet think that what we are doing pleases him and yet we are not, for we have allowed idolatry in. Loren and the YWAMers were mature Christians- and this example shows us that idolatry is something sincere Christians can fall into. 

It’s necessary for us to do what Loren Cunningham and YWAM did at that season and take time to examine our hearts and our actions and check that we are living right. 

Two weeks ago Norma received a prophecy in the Sunday service. If you remember we had a time of listening to God after the sermon and when we did, Norma asked the Lord, what He wanted to say to the church. She got the following words coming to her. The words came with power and she felt shaken when she heard them. The words were ‘Surrender, I am the only God.’ 

‘Surrender, I am the only God.’

The word ‘surrender’ according to the Merriam Webster Dictionary means:

A To yield to the power, control, or possession of another.

B To give up completely.

That’s what the YWAMers and Loren did when God showed them what they had done. They surrendered to the Lord. They got on their knees in humility and admitted their sin. They gave up the idolatry and they yielded. 

If the Lord gives one of us a prophetic word and I believe it was a genuine word from the Lord, then we should act on it. 

We must do what Lamentations 3:40 says;
‘Let us examine and test our ways, and turn back to the LORD.’

We don’t want to be worshipping an idol. 

Let me say again what an idol is. An idol is a good thing that we turn into a God thing. Into an ultimate thing. Or as Tim Keller defines it:

An idol is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, and anything that you seek to give you what only God can give.

Loren Cunningham and YWAM was looking to the ship to give them what only God could give them. The ship was occupying their hopes, their dreams and their imagination more than Jesus. They were coming to love the idea of having the ship, more than Jesus. It was a good thing that had become a God thing. It had become an idol. And Jesus does not want us to have any idols. He is our God and he wants us to have him as number one in our lives. 

I got a flier in the post recently from a political party campaigning for the Scottish Parliament elections and this party was criticising another party and it said they ‘Failed to put the people of Scotland first’.

Well idolatry is when Christians or a church fails to put Jesus first. 

Sometimes we put Jesus second. And we love him less than something else in our lives. It could be your husband or wife or your child. We hear about putting family first. A Christian should never put family first, because Jesus deserves to be first. Family comes second. 

Some Christians put church first and Jesus second. That’s called Churchianity not Christianity. They think keeping the church alive or the traditions of the church going or the reputation of the church is more important than what Jesus wants for the church. 

It is subtle. You see how idolatry can be hidden. It slithers into the garden of our lives unnoticed. 

Some people will put personal comfort and happiness first. Basically that is making an idol of themselves. As long as they and their family are comfortable and happy, nothing else matters quite as much as that, that’s the main thing. That is making an idol of self. Sometimes Jesus asks us to give up comfort and happiness. 

Remember an idol is making a good thing into the main thing, into a god. Comfort, happiness is good, but it’s not the main thing. God may call us to surrender it. 

God said to Ezekiel “Son of man, these men have set up idols in their hearts and put wicked stumbling blocks before their faces. Should I let them inquire of me at all?’

We don’t need to make an idol out of wood or metal, we can set one up in our hearts. Our hearts are idol factories. We make false objects of worship in our hearts.

Timothy Keller in his book; ‘Counterfeit Gods’ says an idol is anything so 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 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 success in Christian ministry.

An idol is whatever you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, ‘if I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure.’ There are many ways to describe that kind of relationship to something, but perhaps the best one is ‘worship’. 

Anything can become an object of worship. The old pagans were not being fanciful when they depicted virtually everything as a god. They had work gods, war gods, money gods, nation gods, sex gods, house gods. The truth is that anything can be a god if we allow it to rule our lives, if we serve it in our hearts. Physical beauty is a pleasant thing, but if you get concerned too much about your appearance, it becomes something like Aphrodite- the Greek goddess of beauty. Young people (and those not so young) who spend so much money and time on their looks are effectively going around worshipping something rather like Aphrodite rather than the living God who made them. 

When I was younger, I had an idol, something good which I had made into an unhealthy focus, an idol. It was running. It started out as a way of getting fit and a hobby, but I eventually did more and more of it and I was running very day – maybe 50 miles a week, using a heart rate monitor and computer programs to tell me how much. It gradually became an obsession, a main focus of my life, how to increase my running times. I wasn’t great at it, but I enjoyed it and I was very committed to it. It was the thing that occupied much of my thought life, and my imagination. Harmless you might think, but not harmless to God. 

When the opportunity came up for me to join the Mercy Ship, I had a choice to make, join the ship or continue my running. Because living on a ship, it’s not easy to keep training 5 miles a day! I chose to cut back the running. 

And an idol fell. Actually I continued my running, but after I came to Jesus, it was no longer an obsession, I wasn’t interested in beating others in races either. I took it much easier. I could keep my hobby, but it didn’t have the same central place it used to have. Jesus took that place.

Remember an idol is normally a good thing that becomes too big, it becomes number one priority.

Tim Keller talks about a single woman, Anna, who wanted desperately to have children. She eventually married and contrary to the expectations of her doctors, was able to bear two healthy children despite her age. But her dreams did not come true. Her overpowering drive to give her children a perfect life made it impossible for her to actually enjoy them. Her overprotectiveness, fears and anxieties, and her need to control every detail of her children’s lives made the family miserable. Anna’s oldest child did poorly in school and showed signs of serious emotional problems. The youngest child was filled with anger. There’s a good chance her drive to give her children wonderful lives will actually be the thing that ruins them. Getting her heart’s desire may end up being the worst thing that happened to her.

Anna’s problem is not that she is loving her children too much. Her problem is that she loved God too little in relation to her children. She was looking to her children for the meaning, hope and happiness that can come from God alone. As a result her child gods were crushed under the weight of her expectations. 

I think of the rich young ruler in Luke’s gospel who came to Jesus and he asked Jesus what must he do to inherit eternal life and Jesus said – you know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honour your father and mother.’” ²¹ 

And he said, “All these I have kept from my youth.” ²² When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” ²³ But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich. ²⁴ Jesus, seeing that he had become sad, said, “How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! ²⁵ For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” 

It seems to me that ruler was not willing to surrender. He wouldn’t surrender something that he valued- his money. His money was more important to him that the command of Jesus. With his money was his social status, he would be giving that up as well. It was an idol he didn’t want to surrender. And he turned his back on the love of God. He walked away sad. He didn’t enter the kingdom of God. 

The book of Jonah has a warning for us. ‘Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them.’ Jonah 2:8

An idol is worthless, but we still can cling to it. We don’t want to let the thing go. But the warning is that if we don’t let it go, we will turn away from God’s love for us. We will not receive God’s love. An idol in our lives is a blocker to the love of God.

Western culture has bowed to money and possessions for generations. The pursuit of money and the acquisition of things is a guiding force for many. It’s an idol. 

And listen, you don’t have to have lots of money for money to be your idol. It’s not about what you have. It’s about what you long for. For the rich, the poor, and those in-between money can be an idol that quickly entraps us. 

Money isn’t the problem, it’s how we use and view it that can become a problem. 

It becomes a problem when we place our hope and our trust in money instead of trusting in God. Many have placed their hopes and dreams in money. They trust it to provide for them, care for them, and protect them. And yes it can do these things up to a point, but only up to a point and for a time. The problem is, it can’t live up to what we are trying to get from it.

I don’t have much else to say this morning except the prophetic word that came to us ‘Surrender, I am the only God,’ is, I believe, a true word from the Lord for us and it asks for a response. So I would encourage you to get really humble and open before the Lord and ask him to help you see anything in your life that is basically an idol. 

To help you, here are four questions to ask yourself to help you identify idols in your life:

Where Do I Spend My Time?
Where Do I Spend My Money?
Where Do I Get My Joy?
What’s Always On My Mind? 

As you think about those questions. They will lead you to what is either an idol or what you might be tempted to make an idol. What are you putting in a higher priority than Jesus.