Worry and idol

I notice lately how my worry can easily become my idols and sway me from seeking Him first.

For example...if I worry I don't have money, in my mind I can already think of so many different ways to make more.  Back up plans.

Yet, the most important is to sit before Him first.

To some, this might not be very practical.  For me, it is a way to train myself spiritually to rely fully on Him.

What a great reminder to myself as well.  Seek Him and His Kingdom first.

At times it might seem irresponsible or impractical to seek Him first.  Not sure what to say but if this is His Will, I will as well.

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. 

25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? 

28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Matthew 6:24-34

Of sin and duty

No one sins out of duty

I read this line from a book earlier this week and had me thinking on the drive to work.

No one gets up in the morning and tell himself or herself, I MUST sin.  We choose to sin because of the hollow promise it offers.  A rebellious choice more satisfying, more joyful, more pleasurable.

That's the lie of satan.  A broken world.

Sin...it can be drunkness (Getting mad drunk is fun) or lust (porn)...

Someone also said that when a good thing becomes the ultimate thing it is a sin as well.

I think these days, it is much harder to ask people, Christians, to let things go loosely than cling on to them as if their life is depended on it.

We can talk about relationship, jobs or status.  Are these things bad? No, of course not.  However, it becomes our own idol when they matter the most in our lives....

I must have her because she is the only one that will complete me.  Without her, I am truly nothing.  If anyone (guys) get in my way, I will go out of my way to knock them down. 

I must get this education because this is the job/career I want.  If I can't get this degree, my life is hopeless and I am lost.

...

And we can see how the prayers will go.....God, I deserve this...God, I pray for you for this....God, I serve in church. I do so much for You.  I am a leader.  I serve the community. I even hang out with brothers and sisters that no one wants to hang out.  Can't You at least grant me this?   You own me.....

...

Love the Father's thing..but not necessarily the Father.

If we take it one step further, we can see how when good things become the ultimate things, they are hollow and broken.

Going after a relationship as the ultimate thing leads to a person in jealousy and even hatred...

She is the only one in my life. If I can't have her, no one else can.   (Perhaps this is why couples in the heat of anger, kill the other person?)

My life is define by my education.  This is who I am and I will do whatever it takes to get to the top.  If you get in my way, you are going to get it because I am going to beat you down. (Perhaps a higher divorce rate and broken family because of the chase in the rat race?)

...

I am quickly reminded about the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4).  She had five husbands and now living with a man that is not even her husband.  Clearly, even 2000 years later in today's standard, we see something is wrong here.  

At worst we can call her an adulterer.  The type that sleeps around.  I am sure it is just as shameful to do it back then as today.  But really why would she do it?  Does she get up in the morning and tells herself, I must sleep around because it is my duty to do so?  Or does she find the joy and the love from these different lovers?

Probably the latter.  Yet, the love that she longs for, that she thirsts for, cannot be satisfy from human relationship.  

Jesus told her that He is the Living water and anyone who drinks it will never thirsty again (John 4:13).

And she wants it.  She desires it.  And Jesus offers the love which she cannot find in anyone else.

When our relationship with the Lord is broken, we will earnestly search for the filling from something else.  Love, money, power.....all these things are good.  But if we seek them as the ultimate things, we are worshiping these things and in the long run, it will disappoint us.  Never satisfy us.

I continued to reflect the 'sins' in my life.  My love to get drunk before I met Jesus.  Why?  I can say it is a mix of pride and enjoyment.  Boastful in telling others how much alcohol I can drink.  Boastful in saying that even with a liver transplant I can still drink.  The fun of the feeling of getting wasted.  When my feet starts to go numb....

Yet, it is hollow.  I get up the next day, have a hang over.  Vow to never do it again.  But the joy of doing it persists. As I don't have the living water. I crave for it to fill the gap again.  Like a druggie.  I am hooked. I need that quick fix.  And so the vicious cycle begins.  Another night out with the boys in a bar somewhere.  That's what we call being trap by sins.  In the Bible, that's death (Romans 6:20).

A while a go, a Christian sister mentioned that she wanna go to party, get wasted and get drunk.  She said to me, 'Well, Cliff.  At least you had a chance to have fun right?  I want the same chance as well.  This is my turn to do so.'

I didn't know what to say..but at that point, those weren't the moment I missed at all.  Those memories were all just a blur.  In fact, if those memories weren't there, I wouldn't miss a thing.  It was fun at that point. But it just fades away.  Very very quickly.

Not sure where we go from here...but I think as Christians, we should show others that Jesus is indeed the Living water.  The One that truly satisfies.   The vicious cycles of sin can be broken. There is a glory and beauty greater than those things which we hold onto so tightly.  There is indeed freedom from Christ.

Let us not our souls to one another

Yesterday during worship, we sing Give Us Clean Hands by Chris Tomlin.

Here is part of the lyric:

We bow our hearts

We bend our knees

Oh Spirit come make us humble

We turn our eyes

From evil things

Oh Lord we cast down our idols

Oh give us clean hands

and give us pure hearts

Let us not lift our souls to another

Oh God let this be

a generation that seeks

that seeks Your face, Oh God of Jacob

In Old Testaments, the idols were asherah poles and objects that man created to worship other gods.

I was listening to Beyonce's Single Ladies on the drive back home yesterday. There was one part of the song that caught my attention:

Your love is what I prefer, what I deserve

Is a man that makes me, then takes me

And delivers me to a destiny, to infinity and beyond

Pull me into your arms

Say I’m the one you WANT

If you don’t, you’ll be alone

And like a ghost I’ll be gone

..to a destiny, to infinity and beyond...from a Christian perspective, only God can do that. Not very tough to connect the dots, in a sense, the role of God is being replace by a man.

From my previous post, I quoted from Tim Keller's The Counterfeit gods that our heart is an idol generating machine. Looking at the modern culture where God is not place in the center, there is a need to place the vacuum role of God with other objects (or in this case, person).

Perhaps we should replace let us not lift our souls to another to let us not lift our souls to one another.

What mature Christian do...

From Tim Keller's Counterfeit gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters

Speaking about the characteristics of a mature Christian:

Our hearts are like that. We think we've learned about grace, set our idols aside, and reached a place where we're serving God not for what we're going to get from Him but for who He is. There's a certain sense in which we spend our entire lives thinking we've reached the bottom of our hearts and finding it is a false bottom. Mature Christians are not people who completely hit the bedrock. I do not believe that is possible in this live. Rather, they are people who know how to keep drilling and are getting closer and closer.

The great pastor and hymn-writer John Newton once wrote about this struggle:

"If I may speak my own experience, I find that to keep my eye simply on Christ, as my peace and my life, is by far the hardest part of my calling...It seems easier to deny self in a thousand instances of outward conduct, than in its ceaseless endeavors to act as a principle of righteousness and power."

Page 176-177

I was sharing last night to a brother that I notice how much idols (money, sex, comfort, approval from others etc...) are popping up in my life. I can feel them crawling right underneath my skin. The hardest is that as much as I want to put them away, there is a part of me that CRAVES these idols. Dirty idols. Like a cheap fix. Psalm 14 hits the spot!

Today, at dinner, I thought about the Grace that I bestow upon. I was quick to realize that there is no way I can tear these idols down myself. Tim Keller hit it right on. The second we tear them down ourslves, they will come back. Our heart is idols generating machine.

This is why we need Jesus. This makes a lot of sense. I mean, if I can tear down my own idols and worship God, I pretty much fulfill the Law by myself. Then why do I need Jesus? This leads to salvation by works..not by grace. If I am honest about myself and based all my thoughts, motivations, attitudes and actions from the Law, I will fail every single one of them.

Wow. Why in the world would God be so gracious in saving me? Calling me His children? Indeed, amazing Grace! What can I do but rejoice and repent!!

Abraham, Issac and Jesus

Why had Isaac not been sacrificed? The sins of Abraham and his family were still there. How could a holy and just God overlook them? Well, a substitute was offered, a ram. But was it the ram's blood that took away the debt of the firstborn? No.

Many years later, in those mountains, another firstborn son was stretched out on the wood to die. But there on Mount Calvary, when the beloved son of God cried, "My God, my God - why hast thou forsaken me?" there was no voice from heaven announcing deliverance. Instead, God the Father paid the price in silence. Why? The true substitute for Abraham's son was God's only Son, Jesus, who died to bear our punishment. "For Christ died for sin once for all, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God" (1 Peter 3:18). Paul understood the true meaning of Isaac's story when he deliberately applied its language to Jesus: "He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all - how will he not also, along with him, freely give us all things?" (Romans 8:32)

Here, then, is the practical answer to our own idolatries, to the "Isaacs" in our lives, which are not spiritually safe to have and hold. We need to offer them up. We need offer them up. We need to find a way to keep from clutching them too tightly, of being enslaved to them. We will never do so by mouthing abstractions about how great God is. We have to know, to be assured, that God so loves, cherishes, and delights in us that we can rest our hearts in him for our significance and security and handle anything that happens in life.

Taken from Counterfeit gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters by Tim Keller (page 16-18)

Very cool stuff. I know for me, often I will ask myself how can I be more like Abraham and have his faith. Blah. We are missing a big point there. The story of Abraham and Isaac is a foreshadow of Jesus.

I found it fascinating the idea of one to many and many to one. Isaac, Abraham's only son, through him will have people of many nations. And Jesus, the only Son (John 3:16!), one man saved people of many nations. One to many, many to one :)

Reading this book, it cuts clearly that we all have idols in our heart. I know I do. And it just to show how much grace God has and willing to give up in order redeem us.