Apostles Church

Detecting and Destroying Your Idols. 1 John 5:21
Introduction: Review – What is an idol? Anything in creation you have inflated to function as God; made more fundamental than God, more necessary. You never eliminate the idea of God, you simply exchange the true God for a god-substitute When we make something an idol, inflate it to function as God in our lives, we become enslaved to it (it drives us with warnings and promises – we must possess it). It also leads to shame (we fail at the level of our existence if we fail to attain it). Our only hope of being free from these idols is the difference between two words: achieve and receive. Achieve is self-salvation – I will secure for myself identity, meaning, security, joy and save myself from condemnation, insignificance and insecurity through my success, beauty, family, wealth, relationships, etc. (something we hope in too much, love, count on, trust in, expect too much from). We ask it to save us. Receive is Christ-salvation. I will receive Christ as the object of my trust and greatest treasure and in Him (not from him, but in him) find identity (as a son or daughter of God) and meaning (to be known and love and know and love), security (no condemnation having his righteousness) and joy (possessing the Father, Son and Holy Spirit has the greatest treasure and eternal joy).

Far and Near Idols: The difference between a far idol and near idol (Richard Keyes – No God but God). Far Idols are abstract, less tangible: power, control, approval, comfort, pleasure, security. These are things we are motivated by and strongly desire, exalted to status of need. Not that they are bad things but that they are twisted and inordinate desires. Near Idols are concrete objects  - work, relationships, food, money, beauty, children, etc. These concrete objects, these near idols are the means by which we seek to secure the far idol; they promise us the far idol. So we give ourselves to work and order our life around it because we want approval, or we know it will bring us wealth which gives us  security, power, pleasures. We have a food idol, over-indulging in food not simply for the sake of food, but because there is a far idol that is using the near idol of food to control us; the near idol is promising possession of the far idol. So we might have the far idol of comfort and food is the near idol that we embrace to attain it.

Detecting: If we are to be free from idols, we must first detect them in our lives and then destroy them, removing them from their place of prominence. We detect them through the painful process of self-examination. X-Ray Questions from David Powlison. These questions help put the spotlight on our behavioral patterns that reveal idols in our hearts (both near and far) that we are living for.

•    What do you organize your life around? Work. A relationship. Children. These are the near idols that are being used to secure a far idol.
•    What do you want, crave or wish for? What do you obsess over? What preoccupies you? What do you find your mind instinctively drifting towards? What fills your conversations?
•    What are you willing to sacrifice an inordinate amount to attain?
•    What do you fear losing? What if you lost it would make you lose your desire to live because all meaning in life would be sucked out? All desire to move forward would be lost?
•    What do you rejoice over? What, present or hoped for, brings you or would bring you the greatest pleasure, delight? What must you have? Illustration: Rachel – give me children or I die. Near idol is Children – Far Idol is honor, significance. Avoidance of shame.
•    What would bring you the greatest pain?
•    What is your worst nightmare?
•    What makes you angry or frustrated? These are usually the things that are standing in the way of us having our far idol. Illus: Man on airplane mad about his coat. The desire was to be respected and it was threatened; result: anger.
•    What causes you anxiety or great stress?
•    How do you define success or failure, or weigh significance or insignificance?
•    Where do you go for comfort, refuge, safety? Escapism and false trusts. Illus: Powlison p142.
•    Who, real or imagined, can make your world better, safer, more satisfying?
•    Whom must you please? From whom do you desire approval and fear rejection?
•    How do you define yourself?

As we explore these questions, idols are surfaced – both the near idol and the far idol that is putting that near idol into service. We must then see how these far and near idols are motivating us and controlling our attitudes and behaviors. We are serving them and they are ruling us. They are at the root of all of our sin. They are cruel masters holding out false promises and making unreasonable demands upon our lives. They require that we sacrifice for them, yet they make no sacrifices for us. We have to see the tyranny of these idols and be brought to a place of wanting to be free from them. We have to see how these idols have offended the true God and are destroying us.

Destroying: Removing them from the throne of our hearts: Gospel Repentance and Gospel Replacement.
Repentance. We have to acknowledge that we are willing slaves to these idols. We have subjected ourselves to them. We have willingly given them the place of prominence in our lives. We have to acknowledge them for what they are: rivals of the true God. We have a professed God and a functional god. We have to repent of our functional gods who are incapable of filling the role of God in our lives. This comes through naming the idol, confessing our loyalty to it, acknowledging its powerless to save us and renouncing it as our functional god. Example: Name-dropping (behavior reveals an idol). This is why Lent is so important. It also means repenting for taking the good things that God has placed in our lives and exalting them as near idols that we use to secure our far idols, like food, shopping, TV, children. We have to repent of our over-attachment to them that is an attempt to use them to gain the far idol; an attempt to find in them what only God can give us in Christ.

Replacement: Acknowledging God as the true God who in Christ has come to be our God. He has come to reconcile us to himself and to bring us into covenant with himself so that everything he is for his Glory, He is to us for our Good. He has come to save us – exactly what our idols are incapable of doing . It is not enough to stop looking to our idols; we have to look to Christ. Looking to him means rejoicing in him. The key is not to love the near idol less, but to love Christ more than we love our near idols (we don’t love work less, we love Christ’s more and find in him what we once hopelessly looked to our work to provide us; we don’t love our children less – we love Christ more and stop expecting from our kids or spouse or friends what we are designed to find only in Christ. This is what Augustine called ordering our loves. When we treasure something more than we treasure Christ and trust in something more than we trust in Christ, we have exalted it as an idol.) We have to make Christ our greatest treasure and the object of our deepest trust. That in Him we have an unshakeable identity as sons and daughters of God; In Him we have significance and security (declared right and approved, fully known and fully loved); in Him we have joy (no condemnation, being freed from our past sins, failures, regrets…that our performance could never erase). Repentance and Replacement.

Jeremiah 2:11-13 hits both of these themes well. Judah had forsaken the true God to worship false gods and those idols left them alienated from the true god and empty, unable to find in the false gods what was promised to them. The solution is to forsake wells and dig God – look to God and in him, not from Him but in Him, find identity and life and purpose and joy.