The Gospel vs. Idolatry

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. See, if you lose a good thing from your life, then you're sad. But if you lose a God thing from your life, an ultimate thing, then you're devastated. You might have a preference for a lot of things. You might want certain things to happen to you. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you're like, there's no way I can be secure.

There's no way I can really have a good life. There's no way that I can have joy apart from that thing, then it has become an idol. Welcome to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of Pastor J.D. Greer.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Bitovitch. Okay, we've talked about this on the program a lot over the years. But when you hear the word idol, what do you picture? Is it an ancient statue or a graven image?

Most likely you thought of Indiana Jones, right? Well, today, Pastor J.D. explains that idols aren't just a thing of the past.

They are still with us today, and they come in different packages. We're examining where idols might be lurking around in our lives. And guess what?

They might be closer than you think. Today's message is called The Gospel versus Idolatry, and it's part of our series titled Scent. Pastor J.D.

is teaching from the book of Acts chapter 19. I genuinely like the movie Frozen. Maybe that's not the right word.

Maybe the word is appreciate. It's a great family film. But I swear, if I hear those songs one more time, I'm going to lose my mind. I don't want to build a snowman. I don't want to ride my bike around the hall. Every single time I ask my kids, what would you like to watch? Every single time it's Frozen. I just feel like, kids, let it go.

Let it go. I feel like I've got to balance my son out because he's four years old, and he dances and prances around the house right now singing these songs. I'm like, kid, let's watch Rambo together. Or maybe he's too young for that.

Braveheart or Rocky or something. We'll start him out on those things. But there are certain things that are awesome until you hear them repeated over and over and over and over and over again. I feel like that about the movie Frozen, but I also feel a little like that about the subject that we're going to get into today. But what we're going to discuss is really the theme of the whole Bible. It's really the core, the essence of what it means to become a follower of Jesus.

So it's one of those things that I feel like we just really can't talk about enough because if I'm teaching the Bible faithfully and if I'm pastoring you faithfully, then this is a subject we've got to go into over and over and over again. And it's basically this, that the core sin of mankind is idolatry. God created us to love Him, to serve Him, to know Him, to worship Him. And what sin was was we chose a bunch of other things to love and worship more than or often in the place of God. And so the whole story of the Bible is God challenging us in and rescuing us from our worship of false gods.

One of my favorite Jewish commentators in the Old Testament, a guy named Moshe Albertal, says that really the whole Bible, you explain the whole Old Testament in kind of one sentence, and that is God challenging false gods and showing they're not really gods at all. When you are converted to Christ, essentially what you're converted to is the worship of God as God. And a lot of people don't really get that. They think that what it means to become a Christian is that you kind of work out this get out of hell free deal with God. And then in response to that, you become more moral and you go to church and you tip God in the offering. And that's basically what it means to become a Christian. Well, the essence of what it means to become a Christian is that you return to God as your God, which means He is your delight. He's your foundation.

He is your trust. The illustration I've used over the years with you to illustrate this is when I was in graduate school, one of my roommates had a dog, great dog, very loyal, faithful dog, but it was really old. It's a black Labrador retriever. In dog years, it was like 110 or something. It had gotten sick. It had been in an accident.

And so for the last several months of its life, it just sort of laid around our house, very obedient, would do sort of groggily everything you told it to do. But I remember stepping over that dog one time, leaving the house and thinking that based on how most people understand what it means to become a Christian, that dog would have made a fine Christian. He didn't drink. He didn't smoke.

He never cussed. We had it neutered. So that wasn't really a problem anymore. But obviously that's not what it means to be a Christian. It's not just that you become a submissive dog to God.

Yes, submission is a part of becoming a Christian, but God created you to love Him and to worship Him. And that's what it means to become a follower of Jesus is that you return to God as God. Well, if you get that concept, then you're going to see how the passage we're going to get into today is really applicable to you. Acts 19 is the story of the gospel going into Ephesus. You're going to see it challenge the most cherished false gods in the city.

And you're going to see people get violent as a result. This story should mirror the story of God coming into your life. When God comes into your life, He challenges your most precious idols. And sometimes you react every bit as violently as the people did in Acts chapter 19. If that never really happened to you, if you're like, well, God's never really made me mad. God never really challenged these idols.

I don't even know what you're talking about. Not to start off really negative, but that might mean that you've never actually let God challenge and get into what you really worship because there's always the struggle and there's always this kind of reaction. It just always happens. Sometimes people read stories like the one we're going to get into at Acts 19 and they see the temples and the idols and they're like, oh, these are primitive people. We're not like that today.

We're modern people. We don't worship, you know, kind of silly stuff like they did back then. The gods they worship were always a means to an end, right?

And the end that they were after was power, sex, money, family stability, all the things that we think make for a good life today, they thought made for a good life then. That was what they really worshiped. You and I worship the exact same things that they do. The only difference is that their worship was overt and conscious.

Our worship is covert and subconscious, but it's every bit as real. Each heart, listen to this, each heart, every heart in here has its own Parthenon. Parthenon is that place where they kept all the statutes of the gods.

Every heart has its own Parthenon. And to become a Christian means you tear down the Parthenon and you put Jesus in its place. And when it's idols, when your idols, your Parthenon is challenged, we react just as violently as the people at Acts 19. So that's why the story that we're going to get into is really applicable to you.

Plus, it's just wildly entertaining, which is why there's no way at all I can skip it. So Acts 19. First, let me give you a few Wikipedia kind of facts about Ephesus. Ephesus was the richest city in the richest region in the Roman Empire.

It was a port city so that all the trade coming into that part of Asia had to go through Ephesus. It was rich. It was multi-ethnic.

It was cosmopolitan. It was highly educated. Largest library in the world was in Ephesus. Largest amphitheater, so it was into culture and sports. The largest temple in the world was in Ephesus. It was a temple dedicated to the goddess Artemis, who was the goddess of the city. To give you a little perspective, it was four times bigger than the Parthenon in Athens.

So we're talking a massive structure. It's one of the seven wonders, man-made wonders of the ancient world. The statue of Artemis, which was the centerpiece of the temple, was carved out of a meteorite that they believed had fallen from the sky. She was the protector of the city.

She was the one they believed guaranteed their prosperity, and she was the one that they put their hope in. So that's what Ephesus is. It is really the pinnacle of culture in that ancient world. Acts 19, Paul enters Ephesus with the gospel. By the way, Paul is not the first one into Ephesus with the gospel. The first guy into Ephesus with the gospel is a guy, as far as we can tell, named Apollos.

I cannot make this point too often or too strongly. Just about every time the gospel goes into a new area in the book of Acts, it doesn't do so through an apostle. It does so through a regular guy or regular woman who just takes the gospel in there. The reason I keep telling you that is I need some of you business people to understand that God has made you the tip of the spear when it comes to evangelism. The Holy Spirit intends to use you to take the gospel into parts of the world that church leaders like Paul or me are going to come years later and actually establish the church that you planted. Some of you never realized that that was God's intention in making you good at business.

Yes, he wanted you to do well and he wanted you to make money, but the primary thing he wanted was he wanted to use that as his way of getting into new areas. We see this all through the book of Acts. When Paul finally shows up, verse 11, God was doing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul so that even handkerchiefs or aprons that had touched his skin were carried away to the sick.

Their diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them. This was Paul's sanctified hanky ministry. Verse 13, some of the itinerate Jewish exorcists saw all this and they undertook to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits too, saying, I adjure you by the name of Jesus whom Paul preaches. Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were doing this.

Evidently, there was this local ghostbuster squad in Ephesus named the seven sons of Sceva from the firm Sceva, Sceva, Sceva, Sceva, Sceva, Sceva, Sceva, and Sceva, and they see this happening and they're like, well, this is pretty awesome. This guy sneezes on a hanky and casts out demons. So they go up to these groups of demons, people that have demons, and they're like, we command you to come out in the name of Jesus, whom that guy Paul's always talking about. Verse 15, one of the demons responds to them. Jesus, I know, and Paul, I recognize, but who are you? I mean, talk about the ultimate diss.

A demon says to you, bro, I don't even know who you are. My question when I read this is how have they heard about Paul? How do they, do they communicate? Do they have staff meetings? You know, they say stuff to each other.

They fly past each other in the atmosphere. Like, Hey, you got to watch out for this cat Paul. He's pretty dangerous.

They have a newsletter, the hellish times, or, you know, I figured they probably just read the New York times as they communicate. Verse 16, when they said this, when they said this, the man in whom was the evil spirits leaped on them, mastered all of them and overpowered them so that they fled out of that house, naked and wounded. I'm not really sure why he had to say and wounded, because if you're in a fight where you get the clothes beat off of you, I'm going to assume that you're wounded.

And not just physically, by the way, if you're in a fight and you walk away without your pants, then you've been wounded emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, physically, there's no other way you can be wounded. Verse 17, and this became known to all the residents of Ephesus, both Jews and Greeks and fear fell upon them all. And the name of the Lord Jesus was extolled. By the way, that's a description of what an awakening in a city looks like is when there's great fear of who God is.

But then also Jesus becomes more glorious and his name is high and lifted up and people are drawn to in verse 18. Also, many of those who were now believers came confessing and divulging their occult practices. And a number of those who had practiced magic arts brought their books together. In Ephesus, it was big business to collect spiritual incantations into books and then sell them like secrets of the dark arts or whatever. And so they brought all their Harry Potter books and stuff, and they burned them, just kidding, in the sight of all. And they counted the value of them and found out that it came to 50,000 pieces of silver, which was, they say, somewhere near $7 million.

So this was a big deal. Anytime there was a spiritual awakening among a group of people, one of the second things that happens after there's fear and the name of Jesus is extolled is believers get convicted of secret sin and they bring it forward and they begin to confess it. I realized that probably you don't have a lot of books full of dark magic that you use to cast out demons by the occult. But I know that when God is moving in your community, that what stops it is when you have secret sin. And I would say that probably in our community, there are some places that God is not working.

There's some things He's not doing. And it's because you have secret sin that is impeding the work of His Holy Spirit. But when they got rid of those things, verse 20, the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily. Well, all of this gets the attention of a businessman in Ephesus named Demetrius. Demetrius owned this chain of shops where they made these little silver statues of the goddess Artemis and he would sell them. Well, he starts getting worried because everybody's becoming Christians and so they're not buying these little statues anymore. So he gets together all the businessmen from his city and he says, verse 25, men, you know that from this business, we have our wealth. I mean, this was big business. Tourism, in addition to making the statues, tourism was a big deal.

People coming to worship at the temple and then you had all the hotels and the restaurants and the people who sold the little Artemis kitsch, little bumper stickers that said, Artemis is my co-pilot and pictures of Artemis eating the Darwin fish with the legs on it and stuff. And he's like, hey, if this goes down, then we're all going to lose our jobs. And you see and hear that not only in Ephesus, but in almost all of Asia, this Paul has persuaded and turned away a great many people saying that the gods made with hands are not really gods at all. I put that in quotes because scholars say the way that it's written, it had evidently become a slogan.

So this is like Paul's one line campaign speech. Gods made with hands are not really gods at all, which makes me wonder why that is not self-evident, right? I mean, a God that you concoct with your mind or shape with your hands is not really a God who could have created you and not really a God that you should be worshiping.

But before we get all snooty toward them, I think the exact same thing when I talk to somebody and they begin to object to what the Bible says about God. And they're like, well, my God would never do that. My God would never do that. And I'm like a God that you create with your mind is not a God that's worthy of worship. The real God ought to be able to challenge you and offend you and make you mad. And if the real God is not doing that, then chances are, you're not worshiping God. You're worshiping a figment of your projected imagination. Your God is really just a glorified version of yourself, right?

And so if your God never makes you mad and exploits your categories and turns things upside down and offends you and makes you want to leave, then chances are you've never met the real God, all right? Demetrius goes on, verse 27, there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis may be counted as nothing and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence. So Demetrius whips everybody up into this frenzy and they flash mob into the amphitheater, which sat 25,000 people, one of the largest in the ancient world.

Still stands today, most of it. If you go on a tour of Ephesus, one of the first places you go. So he whips them all up. They all get in there, 25,000 people. For two hours, it says that they called out in unison, great is Artemis of the Ephesians. Great is, some of your translations say Diana, which I guess was her nickname or whatever, what her friends called her, but great is Artemis of the Ephesians for two hours. Just think about this.

This is a crowd about the size of the one at the Dean Dome at the UNC Duke game with the intensity like it's coming up to the last couple minutes of the game and it's really close for two hours. Great is Artemis of the Ephesians. One side calling out Arda and the other side calling out Miss, you know, back and forth with each other for two hours, for two hours, for two hours. Verse 32, some cried out one thing, some another for the assembly was in confusion. Most of them did not even know why they come together. Why are we here?

I don't know, but great is Artemis of the Ephesians. Paul decides that he wants to go in there because, hey, 25,000 people. Paul's never going to turn down a crowd. His friends wisely tell him, that's a bad idea, Paul. There's no sense you going in there just to die.

And so wisely, they keep him from doing that. Finally, the crowd disperses and Paul and his friends live another day. Okay. So I want to show you five things that you need to understand about idols in your life that you can learn from this passage. Five things about idols in your life as the gospel comes into your life that you can learn from this passage. And then what I want to do is show you how the gospel that Paul preached would confront these idols.

That's what we'll do right toward the end. All right, five insights from idols or into idols from Acts 19. I'll give this as an A through E. A, idols are anything that promises to us a life of security and joy apart from God. Idols are anything that promise to us a life of security and joy apart from God.

You want a definition of idolatry? That's it. That's what Artemis did. She was the protector and prosper of the city with her. They believed they were guaranteed to have security and joy without her.

They could not have those things. So here's my question for you. What is that in your life? About what do you think if this is present in my life, I'll have security and I'll have joy. Is it influence?

If I have a lot of influence, that'll make me secure. Give me joy. Is it success? Is it physical beauty?

Is it weighing 20 pounds less than you weigh right now? Is it money? Is it romance? Is it having children? Is it having your children live close by?

Is it something a little more immediate like a beach house, a retirement plan? What is it that you say if that's present, I can have security and joy, but without that, there is no security and joy. Idols, as I often explain to you all, is our idols are not usually bad things. They're just good things that we've turned into God things.

Things that we believe will give us security and joy and without which we can't have security and joy, even if we have God. So for example, if romance is that thing for you, then that means that you believe the good life begins when you find that person and that without that person, the good life will never really truly begin. So for example, in the romantic comedy, When Harry Met Sally, which I know is a little older of a movie, but I imagine many of you have seen it in the climactic scene. And when Harry Met Sally, Harry comes to Sally and says, when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. Now you're like, well, I haven't seen that movie.

Insert into any romantic comedy ever written ever into that spot. Because they're all just basically, they have one plot, right? They meet each other. They don't like each other. They exchange witty banter for about two hours. Then they get together, right? Like, can I get an amen from the guys? That's every single one of them right there.

I'm like, I can tell you where this is going. But the message is clear. Your good life begins when you meet that person. And if you want the good life, you better find that person. If you get this, you'll be happy.

And the flip side is also true. Miss this and your life is over. So if you are single right now, let me ask you a question. If you're single and you really want to be married, the question you need to ask is, could you be happy and content single?

I did not ask, is that your preference? I asked if you could be happy and content being single. If you could not be happy and content being single, then you probably have turned romance into an idol. Because see, if you lose a good thing from your life, then you're sad. But if you lose a God thing from your life, an ultimate thing, then you're devastated.

And there's a difference between sad and devastated. You might have a preference for a lot of things. You might want certain things to happen to you.

There's nothing wrong with that. But if you're like, there's no way I can be secure. There's no way I can really have a good life.

There's no way that I can have joy apart from that thing, then it has become an idol. Could you be okay if you never really progress in your career? Could you be okay if your big ship never really comes in? That there's really no substantial change in your career from right now. You never really get the promotion.

The big ship never comes in. Could you be okay, happy and content if you never have kids? If your health never improves? If your work never gets noticed, your talents never get recognized?

If you never accomplish anything that's on your bucket list? Could you be happy and joyful if how you've suffered is never really made right in this life? What is it that you think will give you security and joy apart from God?

Or that there's no way to have security and joy without that thing, even if you do have God? Because whatever it is, is your Artemis and is probably the primary God in your Parthenon. Letter B. Idols engage the deepest emotions in our hearts. Idols engage the deepest emotions in our hearts. As you can see from this story, when you threaten people's idols, they get violent.

Why? Because their idols are their lifeblood. Their idols are the protectors of their city. What is that in your life?

What is the protector of your city? What is that thing that the idea of losing it or never losing it or never gaining it makes you despair? Again, if you lose a good thing, then you're sad or mad. But if you lose a God thing, then you are devastated.

Here's another way of coming at the same question. Who were you unable? Who were you unable to forgive? Who are you unable to forgive?

Because if you're unable to forgive somebody, it's because it's tied to a deep resentment that you have toward that person. And that deep resentment is probably triggered by the fact that they attack something, that they damage something that you feel like you can't be happy and joyful without. In other words, they got to your idol. If idols are defined as anything that promises security and joy apart from God, then what is it that you think will give you security and joy apart from God? Or what is it that there's no way to have security without, even if you have God? That, my friend, is most likely your idol.

And we want to help you remove it as soon as possible. You're listening to Pastor JD Greer on Summit Life. One thing this teaching series has taught us is that as followers of Christ, God is still using us today to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. But JD, what if we don't feel like we're qualified for that mission?

Well, welcome to the club, right? A lot of times we'll say, God doesn't call the equipped. He equips the called.

The call comes precisely because you are unqualified. When the Apostle Paul was called by God into mission, he was a mess. He had a bad reputation, but God took time to rebuild him. And God took what previously had been used as an instrument of pride and selfishness and harm, turned that into an instrument of blessing and love. He can do the same thing for you. That's why we provided these resources that will help you go deeper.

Yeah, listening to the messages is great, but taking it a step farther to get into the concepts, that's where real transformation can occur. So back in March, we offered volume one that covered chapters one through eight of Acts. Now we've got volume two that covers chapters nine through 28. You can get volume two now.

It's available on jdgreer.com. It's just not too late to reserve your copy. And I would encourage you to act on it as I think it'll help you tap into an extraordinary opportunity and talent that God has for you.

This Act study guide will help you gain a personal understanding of your part in the Great Commission. Don't miss out on getting your copy of volume two today. Request this Bible study devotional when you donate to Summit Life. Our suggested donation amount of $25 or more helps to fuel this ministry so others can join us each day for a life-changing encounter with God. To give, call us at 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or give online at jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Vitovich and I'm so glad that you joined with us today. And be sure to listen tomorrow when Pastor JD concludes this message titled The Gospel versus Idolatry. That's Friday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.