Tear Down Your Idols

Tear Down Your Idols

Do not worship any other gods besides me. –Deuteronomy 5:7

They were one of the last couples I would expect to struggle in their marriage—friends who went to the mission field in Africa and then planted and pastored a church. So I was saddened and perplexed when she told me that he had moved out. Visiting her a few months later, I was expecting to hear that she was devastated and depressed. Instead what I saw in my friend was disappointment and grief mixed with acceptance, trust, and even joy. She told me the turning point for her was when her eyes were opened to the idols in her life, such as her identity as a stay-at-home mom, financial security through her husband’s work, her desire for a complete family living the church life. By identifying these desires as idols and recognizing that even good things become idols if she worships and serves them more than God, she experienced a spiritual breakthrough. While she would love for her family to be whole again, she knows that if she holds on to these desires too strongly, she won’t be able to grab hold of the new things God wants to do in her life.

While we may think of an idol as a statue of wood, stone, or metal worshiped by pagans, in reality an idol is anything apart from God that we depend on to be happy, fulfilled, or secure. It is anything other than God that motivates and masters us, anything we love and pursue in place of God. Idols begin with desires—often good and healthy desires. But when our desire becomes a demand, when we start believing that the object of desire is essential to our fulfillment and well-being, when it begins to control our thoughts and behavior, whatever it is we want has become an idol (1 Corinthians 6:12). What we want is not the problem; the problem is that we want it too much.

So if we want to go deeper with God, we must search our hearts for idols. This isn’t easy because we tend to justify ourselves and disguise our real desires so we won’t have to let go of what we love. Do you need to examine your life for idols, for desires that have become demands? Going deeper with God is a process of identifying and confessing our idols one by one and cooperating with God as he removes them, bit by bit, from our hearts.

My Idol Slayer, I repent of my idol worship and ask for your forgiveness and cleansing. Replace the idols in my life with a growing devotion to you, an increasing passion to worship and serve only you.

DIGGING DEEPER