"American Idol"
Notes
Transcript
Intro: My love for my Pampaw was fierce and when he died my faith was weak and I walked away from any faith I had left in me. (I won’t allow the same for my grands)
If you have your Bibles, we want to look at Exodus, chapter 20. Even if you don't have a background in church, I think as we begin to read this text, you'll know it.
You might not know it word for word, but as we begin to read it, you'll go, "Oh yeah, I know that text." So, Exodus, chapter 20, starting in verse 1. Read: Exodus 20:1-17
1 And God spoke all these words, saying,
2 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
3 “You shall have no other gods before me.
4 “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
5 You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me,
6 but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
7 “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.
8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work,
10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates.
11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
12 “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
13 “You shall not murder.
14 “You shall not commit adultery.
15 “You shall not steal.
16 “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
17 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.”
If you have a background in church, even if you don't, you know that. That's the Ten Commandments.
In fact, most of you, if you're over the age of 40, probably saw these hung somewhere on the wall in a classroom you sat in as you were growing up. These are the Ten Commandments.
Martin Luther, who was one of the fathers of the Protestant Reformation, said, or one of the insights he had into this passage, was that because the first two commands deal with idolatry…
"Don't have any other gods before me, and don't make graven images of other gods and worship them and serve them."
He said that because the first two dealt with idolatry, the rest of the commands can only be broken if you break one of the first two.
Luther's argument is that if you could steal, if you dishonored your parents, if you lied about your neighbor and so forth, you had already broken commands one and two.
You had already believed there was something greater and more valuable than God. You are already guilty of idolatry.
We're going to talk about idols in two different ways and let me say why we're doing this. First, all of us are guilty of it. Our hearts are idol factories, constantly creating new idols.
The second reason is when we value something more highly than we value God we are forced in that moment to do two things.
One is to suppress the truth of God, and the other is then to question the character of God. When you value something more than God, you will suppress God's truth and question God's character.
If I have a relationship that is higher up in my valuing and celebrating and rejoicing in and pursuing than God, then anything God would say about that makes it fall down a notch.
I must suppress; I cannot listen to it. And because He would dare try to take this from me or tweak this thing, then surely, He can't be good.
It could be anything, but once it's higher than God, anything God says about it that would lower it cannot be listened to; it must be suppressed.
From there, we question God's character, because if God was truly loving, He would let me do what I want, and if God was truly a good God, He wouldn't say this about my idol.
So, when we talk about idols, we're going to talk about them in two different ways. We're going to talk about them as shallow idols and then authority idols.
1. Shallow idols are what you tend to be able to see. If we got to sit down, I might ask this. "What are your current pain points in your life? Where do you feel like you're misfiring?"
What I'm doing at that moment is asking an open-ended question that'll have you talking to me about your shallow idols. Let me give you some examples of shallow or surfacy idols.
A. Image idolatry. "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if I have a particular kind of look or body imagery." That's a good thing. To be healthy, to take care of yourself.
It's not a bad thing. It's not a sinful thing. In fact, there's much in the Scriptures about being a good steward of our body. There's nothing sinful about wanting to be lovely.
It just makes a really crummy god. The issue is the first sentence. "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if I have a particular kind of look or body image."
B. Work idolatry. "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if I'm highly productive, getting a lot done."
Again, the Bible has a ton of positive things to say about hard work, about productivity. The Bible is not anti- these things.
It's just saying if you make it ultimate, if you make your identity built on you being able to get things done, you become a slave, and you're worshiping at the wrong altar.
C. Achievement idolatry. "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if I am recognized for my accomplishments, if I am excelling in my career."
D. Materialism idolatry. "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if I have a certain level of wealth, financial freedom, and very nice possessions."
E. Religion idolatry. "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if I'm adhering to my religion's moral codes and accomplishing its activities."
F. Individual-person idolatry. "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if this one person in my life is happy or they're happy with me."
G. Racial or cultural idolatry. "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if my race or culture is recognized as superior."
H. Click idolatry. "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if a particular social group or professional group or some other group lets me in."
I. Family idolatry. "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if my children or my parents are happy and are happy with me."
J. Relationship idolatry. "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if Mr. or Mrs. Right is in love with me."
K. Suffering idolatry. "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if I am hurting and, in a problem, because only then do I feel noble and worthy of love or am able to deal with guilt."
Now here's why idolatry is so insidious. No one in this room is cognitively thinking, "My life only has value and I only have worth if [fill in the blank]."
No one is cognitively thinking this. Instead, we just live in such a way that reveals this is what’s going on in our hearts.
No one is thinking, "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if…" Yet we live this way.
All the ones I just listed, and we could have gone on and on. All of these are shallow idols. They're what we see, but they're not really the problem. It’s like crabgrass.
It is an unstoppable, dark, wicked thing that is very hard to destroy, right? You can mow and look out at your yard. You're just waiting for that "Yard of the Month" sign to be stuck into the ground.
Forty-eight hours later, you see that quite a bit of your yard is crabgrass. Crabgrass grows at four times the rate of normal grass. You can mow it over, but it pops right back up.
The way to think about these idols I just listed is like crabgrass. To deal with them is simply mow over something but not really solve anything. Illus: Curtis and his patch of grass.
To really get to the heart of the issue you must go deeper, and that's going to take us into authority idols. All of those idols stem from a source idol that holds authority in our lives.
2. Authority idols. What we're going to do is walk through the four authority idols, and we'll see where we can find ourselves. Some of us are going to find ourselves in one.
Some of us are going to find ourselves in two. Some of us are going to find ourselves in three, and some of us are like, "Yep, all four." With that said, let's dive in.
A. Comfort idolatry. "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if I have this kind of pleasure experience or a particular quality of life."
The person with a comfort idol seeks comfort. They want privacy. They want a lack of stress. They want freedom. They do not care about productivity. "Just give me comfort."
They're more than willing to not be productive at all as long as they can be comfortable. Their greatest nightmare is stress and demands.
The problem emotion of those who worship comfort is boredom. They're people who are constantly bored.
Boredom haunts them, because they have not been designed by God to sit around and do nothing. To worship comfort is to enslave yourself to boredom.
Worshipers of comfort see other people, even those closest to them, as potential obstacles to their comfort.
Think about it. If you worship comfort, all your relationships can't get deeper than an inch, because relationships require work. The one who worships comfort can't have that.
It's too much work. So, they just bounce around and never go deep with anyone and the funny thing about the promise of the comfort god is it never delivers what it promises.
For all the comfort you pursue and seek, you simply make yourself more uncomfortable, because the heart was created to abide in community and fellowship and work.
Though comfort is not a bad thing, but comfort makes a terrible god.
B. Approval idolatry. "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if I am loved and respected by [fill in the blank]." What you seek if you worship approval is approval. You want affirmation.
You want love. You want relationships. You don't want to be independent. You need somebody in your life. You don't want space at all. Your greatest nightmare is rejection.
Others often feel smothered by you. You are asking them to be what's not humanly possible for them to be. Your problem emotion is cowardice.
What that means is with this group you're like, "I know; I hate him. I don't know why he's like that." Then over here you're going to be like, "I love him. He's one of my favorite guys ever."
Then you have to go to bed with yourself. You lie in bed at night and realize that you will never speak your mind or have an opinion that matters to you, because it might cost you someone's approval.
Again, I want to keep highlighting this. It's not a bad thing to want to be approved of. That's not a negative thing. We've been designed with this desire to be approved of. Illus: I have suffered in and out of this for years.
The desire to be loved and affirmed is healthy and natural. The problem for the person with the approval idol, however, is that they are not ultimately satisfied with God's love for them.
They seek love and affirmation from those they deem important. People with a worship of approval will do just about anything to make people happy with them.
Approval worshipers often over commit, over promise, and overstate in order to gain affirmation from others.
They are radically insecure in their identity in Christ and fear rejection of people above a biblical fear of God or a hatred of sin.
C. Control idolatry. "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if I am able to get mastery over my life in the area of [fill in the blank]."
What a control worshipper seeks is control. They want self-discipline, certainty, standards. The price they pay is loneliness and spontaneity. We cannot be spontaneous if we worship control.
"What's the weather going to be like? Are we prepared? I read an article once that a kid got on one of these, and not only did he die but everyone died, so we can never ride these things."
This is helicopter parenting. I'm not talking about being absurd. I'm talking about being freaked out, pretending that you can control everything.
The greatest nightmare is uncertainty. The problem emotion for those who worship control is worry.
We seek to control our environment and discover we can't, so we worry, which then forces us to try to control it all the more, which only helps us see we can't control it,
which leads to greater worry, which makes us try to control it even more, which lets us down, which leads us to worry, which then makes us want to control it even more.
We get stuck in this cycle where anxiety and worry and fear devour us, so we clamp down even tighter, only creating more anxiety and fear and worry.
This is the god that control worshipers serve. It enslaves them. The person with a control idol is driven to control every aspect or order every aspect of their lives.
But not just their lives, the lives of the people around them. Those who worship control are often so obsessed with making things go exactly as they planned. They pay with worry and anxiety.
We see this in how they micromanage every area of their life. There is no peace. There is no rest. There is always something to be afraid of. This is control.
D. Power idolatry. "Life only has meaning and I only have worth if I have power and influence over others." What you seek when you worship power is power.
We would define that as success, winning, influence. If it can make more of me, if it can build me up, give me more influence, more power, I'll do it."
You're willing to pay the price of being burdened, bearing the responsibility. The greatest nightmare of somebody who worships power is humiliation.
The problem emotion for those who worship power is always anger. I've never met a violent man who doesn't at his heart level worship power.
Now someone with a power idol gains their identity in competition. The fiercer the challenge the better. Again, there's nothing wrong with competition. Competition, winning, that's great stuff; it just makes a terrible god.
Maybe as we've walked through this… I said it and you were like, "That's me!" Or maybe you're like, "I'm not quite sure," or maybe, "Uh-oh. I could be all four. I'm not quite sure.
I know I'm really angry right now about being bored because I'm lonely." Maybe you're just completely discombobulated. Here's the good news.
When it comes to idols, God would simply have us repent. Maybe there's a question of how we should do that.
So, when we're talking about idolatry, we're talking about seeing our sin. You can't repent if you don't see that there's an issue.
Part of what we're doing here today by laying some of this language out before you is so you can see it.
The reason we're having this conversation is so you can see it by the grace of God. Then if you can see it, here's the second step and the one that few people want to make.
The second step is now that we've seen it, own it. This is so counterintuitive in our culture. Here's what I mean by own it.
Your sin is not something external to you. You don't sometimes lie; you're a liar. Do you hear the difference in those sentences?
So, in Ephesians 2, in 1 Corinthians 6, in Romans 1, in Titus 3, Paul's like, "You were revilers, drunkards, addicts, and sexual perverts, and you were lustful."
Jesus tells a beautiful story in Luke, chapter 7, of a prostitute who comes in and falls at his feet. She's weeping all over his feet and wiping his feet with her hair.
Simon, the Pharisee, thought to himself, "If Jesus knew what kind of woman this was, he wouldn't let her touch his feet."
Jesus answered his thought, which is always freaky, and said, "Simon, quick question. Two men owed a debt to a lender. One owed a whole bunch, and one owed just a little.
Both were forgiven of their debt. Who was more grateful?" Simon the Pharisee, knowing he was busted, said, "I guess, I suppose, the one who owed more."
Jesus said, "You've answered correctly. When I came into your home, you did not give me a kiss and you gave me no water for my feet."
“You did not honor me. You did not show me true hospitality. You did not show me that I was really wanted or desired here.
Then you gave me nothing for my feet, but this woman, from the second she walked in the door, has not stopped kissing me and has washed my feet with her tears. So although her sins are many, they are forgiven fully."
Jesus' point to that room and to this room was that when we own our sin as we should, we really pick up velocity as we move toward this idea down here that I'm a bigger sinner than I thought.
Our culture says, "Forget all about that. That might make you melancholy or sad, but you shouldn't be, because you're awesome."
It's the doctrine of awesomeness that steals and robs us from joy in Christ. It's the idea that God kind of picks the best athletes for his team. That's not how this works.
When we're able to own our sins… "No, I am a liar. I am a pervert. I am broken. I am rebellious. I worship approval, not God. I think I know better than God, which is why I try to control things and don't trust him.
I think I can dispense justice better than he can." All of your idols are accusations against God…unfair, undue, unfounded accusations against the Creator of the universe.
You accuse Him of not being good. You accuse Him of not being for you. You accuse Him of not blessing you. You accuse Him, all the while breathing His air in the body He gave you.
To own our sin creates velocity that pushes us into our far idols. So now we're down in the depths. We're in our hearts. We're not up on the surface; we're under here, which then creates the velocity.
By faith, after we've repented, now we're shooting up into this, "I am fully acceptable." Now Christ is a bigger Savior than I ever imagined.
When we get that, then we start to believe it. "Jesus lives in me. God sees Jesus in me. Jesus died for me, and Christ's life, his perfection, has been imputed or granted to me in Christ.
Now we walk in the joy of the Lord. This is how we repent. We lean into our shortcomings and failures. We don't numb our minds to them. We spend time thinking about them.
How counterintuitive is that? The world is trying to distract you from your failures or give you someone to blame for them.
Here's the first thing we could do. We can name it. If you can name your idol, we've taken a step in the right direction. "I worship comfort. I worship approval. I worship control. I worship power."
If you can name that, then you can unmask it. Once you've named it, you can unmask it for what it is. You can see how it lies to you and how it grieves the heart of Christ.
We stop, we think, we consider, and we remember how grievous it is to Christ. Then we repent. We lay it down. We ask for forgiveness. Here's what's great.
Then we rejoice, because there's no one in this room not guilty of these things, and yet the cross of Christ bids us come and be made new, come and be forgiven, come and be washed clean.
The only way to displace these idols is not via human effort but by divine action and surrender to that divine action.
The only way to remove these idols from your heart is not by greater effort to not be about comfort but, rather, to allow Jesus to reign and rule in your life in such a way that he displaces them.