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July 4 - August 25, 2019
Lastly, you can, as C. S. Lewis says at the end of his great chapter on hope, reorient the entire focus of your life toward God.
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world
Because Jacob sought to get his life validated from having a physically beautiful wife, he gave his heart to a woman toward whose immaturity and shortcomings he was blind. Leah’s counterfeit god was not sex. She obviously had access to her husband’s body, but not to his love and commitment. She wanted him to be “attached” to her, to have his soul cleave to her. But he did not. Her life became bound in shallows and miseries.
The text says that when the Lord saw that Leah was not loved, he loved her.
subjects; he is not just a shepherd and we are the sheep. He is a husband and we are his spouse. He is ravished with us—even those of us whom no one else notices. And here is the power to overcome our idolatries.
How can we know God’s love so deeply that we release our lovers and spouses from our stifling expectations? By looking at the one to whom Leah’s life points.
What is greed?
For Jesus, greed is not only love of money, but excessive anxiety about it.
Idolatry also makes us “servants of money.”
Nowhere is this slavery more evident than in the blindness of greedy people to their own materialism. Notice that in Luke 12 Jesus says, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed.”
Zacchaeus did a surprising thing. He climbed a tree. We must appreciate the significance of this. In traditional cultures it was not freedom and rights that mattered but honor and dignity. For any grown male to climb up into a tree would have invited enormous ridicule.
So why did he do it? Luke tells us, “He wanted to see who Jesus was.” Zacchaeus was eager to connect to Jesus. Eager may be too weak a word. His willingness to climb a tree signifies something close to desperation.
Zacchaeus did not approach Jesus with pride but with humility. He did not stand on his dignity and wealth; instead he put aside his station in life and was willing to be ridiculed in order to get a glimpse of Jesus. Ultimately, it was not Zacchaeus who asked Jesus into his life, but Jesus who asked Zacchaeus into his.
He promised to give away 50 percent of his income to the poor.
Zacchaeus knew that when he made this offer. His heart had been affected. Since he knew salvation was not through the law, but through grace, he did not aim to live by only fulfilling the letter of the law. He wanted to go beyond it.
Did Jesus ‘tithe’ his life and blood to save us or did he give it all?” Tithing is a minimum standard for Christian believers. We certainly wouldn’t want to be in a position of giving away less of our income than those who had so much less of an understanding of what God did to save them.
God’s salvation does not come in response to a changed life. A changed life comes in response to the salvation, offered as a free gift.
That was the reason for Zacchaeus’s new heart and life. If salvation had been something earned through obedience to the moral code, then Zacchaeus’s question would have been “How much must I give?” However, these promises were responses to lavish, generous grace, so his question was “How much can I give?” He realized that while being financially rich, he had been spiritually bankrupt, but Jesus had poured out spiritual riches on him freely.
People with the deep idol of power do not mind being unpopular in order to gain influence.
Each deep idol—power, approval, comfort, or control—generates a different set of fears and a different set of hopes.
“Surface idols” are things such as money, our spouse, or children, through which our deep idols seek fulfillment.
The person using money to serve a deep idol of control will often feel superior to people using money to attain power or social approval. In every case, however, money-idolatry enslaves and distorts lives.
Jesus gave up all his treasure in heaven, in order to make you his treasure—for you are a treasured people (1 Peter 2:9-10). When you see him dying to make you his treasure, that will make him yours. Money will cease to be the currency of your significance and security, and you will want to bless others with what you have. To the degree that you grasp the gospel, money will have no dominion over you.
“Achievement is the alcohol of our time,”
In the end, achievement can’t really answer the big questions—Who am I? What am I really worth? How do I face death? It gives the initial illusion of an answer. There is an initial rush of happiness that leads us to believe we have arrived, been included, been accepted, and proved ourselves. However, the satisfaction quickly fades.
More than other idols, personal success and achievement lead to a sense that we ourselves are god, that our security and value rest in our own wisdom, strength, and performance.
One sign that you have made success an idol is the false sense of security it brings.
Another sign that you have made achievement an idol is that it distorts your view of yourself.
If your success is more than just success to you—if it is the measure of your value and worth—then accomplishment in one limited area of life will make you believe you have expertise in all areas.
The main sign that we are into success idolatry, however, is that we find we cannot maintain our self-confidence in life unless we remain at the top of our chosen field.
Our contemporary culture makes us particularly vulnerable to turning success into a counterfeit god.
In spring of 2009, Nathan Hatch, president of Wake Forest University, admitted what many educators have seen for years, that a disproportionate number of young adults have been trying to cram into the fields of finance, consulting, corporate law, and specialized medicine because of the high salaries and aura of success that these professions now bring. Students were doing so with little reference to the larger questions of meaning and purpose,
One of the main motivations behind the drive for success is the hope of entering the “Inner Ring.”
In this, the story of Naaman functions as a parable. Many people pursue success as a way to overcome the sense that they are somehow “outsiders.” If they attain it, they believe, it will open the doors into the clubs, into the social sets, into relationships with the connected and the influential. Finally, they think, they will be accepted by all the people who really matter. Success promises to do that, but in the end it cannot deliver.
They believed religion was a form of social control. The operating principle of religion is: If you live a good life, then the gods or God will have to bless you and give you prosperity. It was only natural, then, to assume that the most successful people in a society were those closest to God.
Naaman is after a God who can be put into debt, but this is a God of grace, who puts everyone else in his debt. Naaman is after a private God, a God for you and you but not a God for everybody, but this God is the God of everyone, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Until Naaman learned that God was a God of grace, whose salvation cannot be earned, only received, he would continue to be enslaved to his idols. He would continue to use them to earn a security and significance that they could not produce. Only if he understood God’s grace would he see his successes were ultimately gifts from God.
If you have been robbed of money, opportunity, or happiness, you can either make the wrongdoer pay it back or you can forgive. But when you forgive, that means you absorb the loss and the debt. You bear it yourself. All forgiveness, then, is costly.60
This unsung heroine of the Bible refused to relieve her own suffering by making him pay. She did what the entire Bible tells us to do. She did not seek revenge, she trusted God to be the judge of all. She forgave him and became the vehicle for his healing and salvation. She trusted God and bore her suffering with patience.
Only when we see what Jesus, our great Suffering Servant, has done for us will we finally understand why God’s salvation does not require us to do “some great thing.” We don’t have to do it, because Jesus has.
When love of one’s people becomes an absolute, it turns into racism. When love of equality turns into a supreme thing, it can result in hatred and violence toward anyone who has led a privileged life.
It is the settled tendency of human societies to turn good political causes into counterfeit gods.
We can look upon our political leaders as “messiahs,” our political policies as saving doctrine, and turn our political activism into a kind of religion.
One of the signs that an object is functioning as an idol is that fear becomes one of the chief characteristics of life.
U.S. political trends
They have put the kind of hope in their political leaders and policies that once was reserved for God and the work of the gospel. When their political leaders are out of power, they experience a death. They believe that if their policies and people are not in power, everything will fall apart.
Another sign of idolatry in our politics is that opponents are not considered to be simply mistaken, but to be evil.
But why do we deify and demonize political causes and ideas? Reinhold Niebuhr answered that, in political idolatry, we make a god out of having power.
The original temptation in the Garden of Eden was to resent the limits God had put on us (“You shall not eat of the tree. . . .”; Genesis 2:17) and to seek to be “as God” by taking power over our own destiny. We gave in to this temptation and now it is part of our nature. Rather than accept our finitude and dependence on God, we desperately seek ways to assure ourselves that we still have power over our own lives. But this is an illusion.
Ideology can be used to refer to any coherent set of ideas about a subject, but it can also have a negative connotation closer to its cousin word, idolatry. An ideology, like an idol, is a limited, partial account of reality that is raised to the level of the final word on things.
