THE REALITY OF IDOLATRY

We all like to talk about God being all that we need, but the sad reality is that while we are good at talking about God being all we need, many of us are living as though God is not all we need.

Yes, God is enough. But if we’re really going to be happy, we also need this relationship.

Yes, God is enough. But if we’re really going to be content, we also need to live in this particular neighborhood.  

Yes, God is enough. But if we’re really going to show kindness to those around us, they need to show us respect back.

Yes, God is enough. But when hurt and disappointment enter my life, we really need to be able to distract from it by indulging in junk food, TV, shopping, or maybe even a substance.  

Yes, God is enough.

​But. 
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BLIND SPOTS

I think one of the biggest blind spots many of us possess in life is idolatry. After all, we don’t often see people worshiping blocks of wood or statues of gold, so we find it easy to brush off idolatry as something from Biblical times that’s not really an issue anymore.

The result? At worst, we can be guilty of dismissing idolatry as a modern-day issue altogether. At best, we may find ourselves resorting to the Sunday-school teaching of associating idols with things such as video games, TV, and money. And while to a certain extent that can be true, the truth is that the most dangerous idols we worship are not physical objects. 
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DEFINING IDOLATRY

Brad Bigney helps us identify idolatry in our hearts by pointing out three characteristics of idols:

1. An idol is something I turn to as a refuge or comfort.
   When I’m overwhelmed, discouraged, hurt, afraid, or stressed, where do I turn? To what do I turn?
   
   
2. An idol is something I’m willing to sin to obtain.
   How far am I willing to go to have this thing, person, or feeling in my life?
   
   
3. An idol is something I’m willing to sin to keep.
   When I’m threatened with the possibility of losing this thing, person, or feeling, how do I react?

​Using these guidelines, it becomes clear that idolatry is a bigger issue than we originally thought and can have far more reach than we’d like to admit. Ultimately, we can now see that any area of sin in our lives is a result of idolatry.

The truth is that I would not sin if I didn’t think I needed the result in some way. In contrast, when I am satisfied with God, then I have no reason to sin in my effort to obtain a thing, a person, or a feeling, because I have all that I need in Him.  Therefore, any sin that we commit reveals an idol in our hearts that must be torn down and replaced with a right image of God. 
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DEFINING IDOLS

You may have noticed in the list above that the idols are not defined in and of themselves as particular objects, but instead are defined by our priority of them and how we interact with them. In fact, most of the idols in our lives are good things that we’ve simply taken too far in how we obtain them, what we think of them, and how we interact with them.  

With that in mind, let’s look at some of the good things in our lives that can often slip into a wrong place in our hearts and result in idolatry that leads us to sin. 
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RELATIONSHIPS

“If I don’t have my kids…”

“If I lose my boyfriend…”

Can friendships become idols? Absolutely. So we must ask ourselves, am I willing to sin to keep this friendship? Am I willing to sin if I might lose this relationship? Has this person become my refuge, my safe place to hide when life is overwhelming? If so, then yes, this friend, this family member , this mentor, may have slipped into an elevated place in your heart and become an idol that you believe you need in your life in order to be “okay.” 
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EMPLOYMENT

“If I lose this job…”

Is God able to take care of us if we lose our jobs? “Yes, yes,” we say impatiently. But then we become desperate to keep our employment, even to the point of lying, stealing, or manipulating in order to ensure we keep it. Or maybe we lose it – and instead of trusting God to provide, we act out in sinful ways by over-indulging in junk food, binge watching TV, drinking, becoming depressed, and isolating. Or maybe we jump at the next job that comes our way, even though it requires us to compromise our relationship with God by working every Sunday. Is employment good? Yes. Is it something you need to be okay in life? No.
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FAIR TREATMENT

“Can you believe that she said to me?”

“How dare he…”

Did you know that being treated fairly can be an idol in our lives? How do we respond when we’re mistreated? If we get angry, if we push back and retaliate, we are choosing a sinful response to being sinned against, which shows us that we have an idol problem. When we are not treated the way we feel we deserve to be treated, we feel justified in our sinful response, which reveals that our relationship with God is not enough for us to be faithful and obedient to Him; we must also be treated with respect by the people around us. 
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a pain-free life

“I deserve relief…”

“You don’t know what I’ve been through…”

Drugs. Alcohol. Cigarettes. Addictions. These are obvious idols. Duh. Are they, though? Let’s dig a little deeper. Why do we think we need these things? Because of another idol. You see, for each outward expression of idolatry, there’s an inner one. And it’s the inner ones that are the real deal, cause the most damage, and must be removed.

In my years of working with women struggling with addiction, I’ve learned something very important: the addiction is not the problem. It’s merely a symptom of the problem, and it’s their own feeble attempt at curing the problem. Hurt and suffering within causes us to reach for something outside of us to make us feel better, and we can quickly become caught in a cycle of destruction and addiction because we didn’t know how to let God heal us.

​To read more of my philosophy of substance abuse and addiction, click here. 
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MEDICATION

“It’s impossible…”

“I can’t help it…”

Some people believe that they need medication to be okay. Is medication good? In the right context, yes. But is it a savior? No. I was once counseling someone who struggled with a significant anger problem and I tried to explain that regardless of her circumstances, God called her to be obedient, and further, that He promised her the grace and power necessary to act obedient. In response, she told me that she wouldn’t get angry if she was on medication. She bought into the lie that she could not obey God without her medication. Her medication was her idol. Can medication help us with our struggles? Yes. But medication is a tool, not a cure.

​To learn more of my philosophy of mental health and medication, click here. 

GOD

“God, if you’ll just….”

Sadly, some of us can even be guilty of making God into our own personal idol, saying things like, “God, I’ll obey you, so long as I have this, or if you do that…” Why do so many of us wrestle with only crying out to God when we’re in trouble? Because we want something from God. Once we get it, we go back to the way we were. Or if we don’t get what we want, we take off in anger and bitterness. We sin because of what we did or didn’t get. Ultimately, we begin treating God as our own personal idol, using Him to get what we want.
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understanding idolatry

The nature of idolatry is manipulation.

Ultimately, each of us has one single idol: ourselves.

And we use other people and things for our pleasure and comfort, even God.
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What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
James 4:1-3

Again, Brad Bigney offers a striking insight into the struggle of manipulation and the way it unfolds in our lives to reveal idolatry. Here’s his model, based on James 4. 
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DESIRING

All of us have desires. The desires themselves are not an issue. However, if we begin to focus and fixate on our desires, we enter dangerous territory. What we dwell on becomes what we believe, remember? So when we dwell on our desires (for a job, for a friend, for acceptance, for respect), they grow in our minds until we begin to tell ourselves that these desires are needs. 
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NEEDing

When a desire becomes a need, it is dangerous first and foremost because God has already promised to supply all that we need. As Christians, we have all that we need in Him. Therefore, to make our desires needs is to dethrone God in our hearts and effectively tell Him that He is not enough for us. This leads us to our next step:

DEMANDING

If what we desire is a need, then we begin to feel justified in demanding it. We have a right for our needs to met, right? This demand can run in a variety of directions: sometimes it’s a demand on a friend or loved one. Sometimes it’s a demand of ourselves and our own performance. And sometimes it’s a demand of God, to “do His part” to provide for what we believe we need. 

EXPECTING

​When we have needs, and when we make demands, we slip into a mindset of expectation. We tell ourselves that we deserve what we want because it’s a need not just a desire. We’ve said what we want, and now we’re just waiting in expectation. Which inevitably leads to the next step: 
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DISAPPOINTMENT

Inevitably, we will experience disappointment when our expectations are not met. People are human and sinful, and truth be told, every single person in our lives will disappointment us at some point. And as much as we’d like to think we can do it all, we can’t, and eventually we ourselves will disappoint ourselves and fail to meet our own expectations. And ultimately, God does not cater to our demands, so whatever expectations we place on Him are sure to be disappointed. 
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PUNISHMENT

This is where our idolatry turns to sinful behavior. In response to disappointment, our flesh kicks in and causes us to lash out by attempting to punish those whom we believe wronged us by failing to meet our needs. From silent treatments to yelling matches, our goal in this behavior is to make the other person regret disappointing us so that they will do better next time. We can even be guilty of trying to punish God in the same manner. “If you don’t do this, I won’t do that.”  
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This is how idolatry plays out, and it’s how relationships are destroyed. 
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THE LURE OF IDOLATRY

The heart of idolatry is self.

The nature of idolatry is manipulation.

The lure of idolatry is control.

Why do we trust in our jobs, our relationships, our money, our medications, our Christian books, our political parties to save us? Because we can control those things; they’re in our power. At least, to a certain extent.

But God is not in our control.

And He never will be.

And that terrifies us.

But oh my friend, that’s the best news ever.  

If our salvation, freedom, contentment, joy, and peace depend on what we can manipulate and control, then we’ll never get what we’re looking for. But if we can surrender, if we can let God be God, then we can finally experience all those things we’re searching for.

The thing about anything we need in addition to God is that if we need it, we don’t need God. Idolatry causes us to reject God and choose created things and people over our relationship with Him. We become more concerned with those relationships, things, or feelings than God, so we’re willing to offend our Creator rather than feel some sort of discomfort.

When our comfort is our priority, we sin to get what we want; we sin when we lose what we want; and we turn to people and things to comfort us instead of to God, who is the Great Comforter.
 

HOW DO WE RECOVER FROM THIS?

Next week we will talk about how to repent of idols in our lives and how to make God enough for us. In the meantime, I want to encourage you ask God to seek your heart and reveal to you anything in your life that has become an idol and a justification for sin in your life, and ask Him for the grace to forsake those things or people you’ve been trusting in so that you can find your life in Him and not His gifts.