Note: I wrote this earlier this summer, but never got around to posting it until now. Hopefully there will be more to come soon as well :)
Whenever
I hear the word “idols,” I think about the idols that the Bible describes. The ones that were gold or wood statues
that the people would bow down to and worship. In my head I get this picture of this flashy, trophy looking
thing that people look silly bowing down to. Since I don’t worship anything like that, I always thought
that idols weren’t an issue for me. Boy was I wrong.
God
always has a funny way of putting things into your life right when you need
them or when they correspond to something else. As God was beginning to reveal different idols I had in my
life, I began a study called No Other Gods: Confronting Our Modern-Day Idols.
I
learned that idols aren’t just those statues that were worshiped in the
Bible. They are anything that we
put before God. Richard Keyes said “An idol can be a physical object, a
property, a person, an activity, a role, an institution, a hope, an image, an
idea, a pleasure, a hero—anything that can substitute for God.”
That’s
a lot of different things. There
are also things in that list that are good. I always just assumed that idols
had to be bad things since they were taking the place of God. But is a person, a hope, or a pleasure
necessarily a bad thing? No. Keyes says, “Idolatry may not involve explicit
denials of God’s existence or character. It may well come in the form of an overattachement
to something that is, in itself, perfectly good.”
So
that awesome hope you have in something for the future, the great new friend
you made, the fun sport of volleyball: all of those things are perfectly
good. What turns them into idols
is when we get attached to them and let them take the place of God in our
lives.
I
began to realize that I did that (and still do) with a lot of things in my
life. The great new friendship I was building, based around our love of Jesus, was
an idol because I easily put it before God. The sport I had played competitively for 8 years of my life,
was an idol because I was playing for reasons other than to glorify God (more
on volleyball in another blog). My hopes for the future God has for me were an
idol because I was thinking too much about how things could end up instead of
going to God and letting Him take control.
I
got attached to those things without even realizing that I was letting them be
more important than God in my life.
That’s the scary thing. I wasn’t worshipping a statue and saying that God
didn’t exist. I was worshipping
God. And I was worshipping God through these things. I just let them be more
important than Him. They had a part of the worship of my heart instead of it
being fully God’s.
We’re
human. We’re always going to be facing idols in our life. As our lives change, the idols in them
will change as well. But we have to be cautious in recognizing them. It isn’t always the things we think are
‘bad.’ It can be perfectly good
and healthy things. The attachment
and devotion we give to them over God is what makes them an idol. I pray that we start to recognize the
idols in our lives that have taken hold of parts of heart and surrender them to
Him. The only way we can get rid
of them is by giving them over to Him and letting Him fill our hearts fully
instead.
