Hey, you know, last week we started studying the Ten Commandments one at a time. And so we started, obviously, with commandment number one. And what is commandment number one?
It says, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. And by way of review, let's remember that God begins the Ten Commandments by demanding that He be our exclusive God, by demanding that we love Him with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, that we enthrone Him as the absolute Lord of our life, that we enthrone His will as the supreme authority for our life, and that we dethrone ourselves. And you'll remember last week we saw what the Apostle Paul said, Romans 12, 1. He said, in light of God's undeserved mercies to you and me, this is our reasonable service.
What that means is it is totally appropriate for God to ask us for this kind of commitment, and it is totally appropriate, Paul says, for us to give it to Him. Now today we want to move on to commandment number two. And so if you brought a Bible, I want you to open it with me to Exodus chapter 20. And if you did not bring a Bible, reach under the armrest right next to you, you'll find a copy of the Bible. We're going to be on page 54, page 54 in our copy, Exodus 20, and you'll find commandment number two in verse four. So here we go.
You ready? God says, You shall not make for yourself idols in the form of anything in heaven above or on earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them. Now, friends, commandment number one and commandment number two go hand in hand.
They're like blood brothers, if you will. Commandment number one focuses on the positive side in that it says you shall love God supremely. And commandment number two focuses on the negative side and says you shall not allow anyone or anything to replace God as the supreme love and the central focus of your life. Or, as commandment number two puts it, you and I shall not allow anything to become an idol in our life. Now, we should understand that idolatry has been a problem ever since the human race existed. And let me tell you why.
There's a reason for that. The reason is that every man, woman and child was born to worship something. Anthropologists tell us that every race of people ever to live, civilized or not, everyone has had some sort of God that they worship. And the reason for this is that God has put a worship pacemaker, if you will, inside the heart of every human being. In other words, God has given every human being an instinctive drive to worship something higher than himself. This is simply part of the human psyche. This is simply part of what it means to be a human being. Now you say, well, Lon, that's good, right? I mean, the idea that we all are wired to worship something, that's good, right? Well, yeah, it is, except that there's a problem. The problem is that unsaved man, unregenerate man, people outside of a relationship with Christ, these folks cannot worship the true and living God.
And here's why. Ephesians 2, 1 says that we are all born spiritually dead in our trespasses and our sins. We come into this world alienated from God, separated from God, disconnected from God, and folks, in this kind of spiritual condition, no one can worship the true and living God of the universe.
But remember what we said. Man needs to worship something. And so, unregenerate man does the only thing that he can do, and that is he finds something else to worship other than the true and living God, something he can touch, something he can feel, something he can relate to, and he bows down to it, and he makes it the number one priority, he makes it the number one focus of his life. Friends, this is the dynamic that causes every society, every culture, every race, and every human being outside of Jesus Christ to sink into idolatry. Now, in ancient times, these idols that people worship were mostly physical things, tangible things. We just got back from a tour of Egypt doing the footsteps of Moses, and as we traveled through the country, we saw all these gods that the ancient Egyptians worship.
They were all human bodies with animal heads. These were their idols. And then if you saw the movie Apocalypto by Mel Gibson, you know that the Mayan culture worshiped gods represented by grotesque masks, and they used human sacrifice to worship them. The ancient Greeks and Romans worshiped gods who looked just like you and me, but the Romans and the Greeks considered them to have much greater power than us. Today, however, in our modern world, we still have idols, but our idols today are not so tangible as this. They're much more subtle than this. Much more intangible than the gods of the Egyptians and the Romans and the Greeks.
And you know what some of these idols are. There was a fascinating article, friends, in the New York Times a couple weeks ago highlighting an article by Dr. Christopher Carroll, a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University. And the title of his article, Dr. Carroll's article, was Why Do the Rich Save So Much? Why Do They Hoard So Much Money?
It was interesting. In the article, Dr. Carroll noted, number one, that the main reason cannot be philanthropy because the 60 richest people in the world in 2006 only gave away 1.1 percent of their wealth. He noted, second of all, that the reason folks that are rich, the super rich, hoard money, excuse me, cannot be to spend it on themselves because, as he says in his article, no one could spend that much money on themselves.
He uses as an example Larry Ellison, we all know good old Larry boy, founder and director of Oracle Corporation. Dr. Carroll noted that Larry Ellison, let me clear my throat, forgive me, Larry Ellison would have to spend on things that could not be resold, things like parties and shoes and clothing and meals. Larry would have to spend, you ready for this, $30 million a week.
That's $183,000 an hour on these things. And all that would accomplish is that his net worth would not go up. It would not decrease his net worth at all.
It would just keep it from going up. Now, I know you think your wife can shop, but friend, she cannot shop like that. Nobody can shop like that.
It's impossible. And that's why Dr. Carroll says since nobody can spend that kind of money, the purpose for hoarding all these funds can't be to spend it. Third and finally, he says the reason why the rich hoard so much money can't be to pass it on to their children because a recent survey showed that only 4% of the super-rich people in our world say that one of their reasons for amassing wealth was to leave it as an inheritance to their children. So if it's none of these reasons, why is it?
Well, here's Dr. Carroll's conclusion, and I quote. He said it's because they love money, not for what it can buy, but just for its own sake, end of quote. Well, what's the point? The point is, friends, money is their idol. Money is the thing they bow down to and worship. And the point is that most of us as Americans, if somebody walked up to us on the street and accused us of being an idolater today, we would be offended. We would bristle.
We would say, what are you kidding? Me? An idolater? Listen, I don't have a stone statue with horns in my backyard. I don't have a golden calf in my family room that I dance around to at night with candles. I don't have an altar in my living room that I sacrifice gerbils on. Idolater?
What are you kidding? I'm not an idolater. But as we've seen, friends, we don't have to own carved images and we don't have to sacrifice gerbils in the living room to be an idolater.
I love what one commentator said. He said, and I quote, There can be idolatry without physical idols. Whatever sets up a rival interest in our souls, absorbing the love and service which belongs to God alone, this is another God and an idol. End of quote. Now, in a moment, we want to ask our most important question, which you know what that is.
But before we get there, I've got one other question I want us to ask, and that is this. You know, God condemns idolatry in the Bible hundreds upon hundreds of times. The question is, why is idolatry such a big deal with God, huh? I mean, why does God get so upset about idolatry?
Well, friends, the answer is found right here in Commandment number two. Look, verse five, God says, Don't bow down to idols. Don't worship them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God. God says later on in Exodus thirty four, you shall worship no other gods for the Lord, whose name is jealous, is a jealous God. Friends, God is jealous when it comes to our love. God is jealous when it comes to our devotion and our loyalty.
In the Bible, God compares as followers of Christ. God compares our relationship with him to a marriage relationship. And in a physical marriage, when one of the partners goes off and gives their affection to someone else, we call that physical adultery. Well, in our spiritual marriage with God, when we go off and give our affection to something else, God considers that to be spiritual adultery. In fact, he says that Ezekiel twenty three, verse thirty seven, he says, For with their idols they have committed adultery. And this is why God hates adultery so much. This is why he hates it with a passion, because to him it's adultery.
It is a betrayal of his love for us at the deepest possible level. And God despises when we worship anything in our life other than him. That's what Commandment number two is all about. To summarize it, the bottom line of Commandment number two is that when it comes to our love and it comes to our devotion as followers of Christ, God wants no rivals. God wants no competitors.
God wants no other suitors in our life, but him and him alone. Now, that's as far as we're going to go in Commandment number two, because it's time to ask our most important question. And you know what it is, so are you ready? All right, here we go, nice and loud.
One, two, three. Yeah, you say, Lon, so what? Say, all right, so I understand what you're trying to say here, but what difference does that make to me?
Well, let's talk about that for a moment. You know, it's interesting what John said, the Apostle John. 1 John 5.21, he said, Dear friends, keep yourselves from idols. The Apostle Paul said, 1 Corinthians 10.14 in the New Testament, Therefore, my dear friends, flee from idolatry. And may I point out to you that both of those verses were written not to non-believers. They were written to us as Christians, as followers of Christ. My point is, it is entirely possible for you and me as followers of Christ to commit adultery, spiritual adultery, to commit idolatry, or if it weren't, there's no way they would have written these things to us.
So here's my question. What are some of the things that you and I as followers of Christ today, what are some of the most common things that we commit idolatry with? Well, I want to tell you about three of them.
The first one, number one, is the idol of family ties. Matthew chapter 10, Jesus said, Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and a person's enemies will be the members of his own household. You say, what is Jesus talking about here? Well, what he's talking about, friends, is that there is evidence throughout the New Testament that when a Jewish person embraced Jesus in the days of the early church and confessed Christ as their Messiah, that person's own family members became some of their worst enemies.
And you know, in 2,000 years, things have not really changed all that much. I mean, today, when a person chooses to follow Jesus Christ, there is often a huge price to pay in their family. Jewish parents still hold funerals for children that come to believe in Christ and declare them dead forever to the family. Muslims often turn their own brothers and sisters, their own children in. In fact, when we were in Egypt, I was talking to one of our guides who was a Coptic Christian, and she was telling me that when a Muslim comes to Christ in Egypt, the rich Christians get together and pay for that person to leave the country because if they didn't, their own family would kill them as a matter of honor.
That's real. Jehovah's Witnesses, when a person comes to Christ, that person is disfellowshipped, and their family is instructed never to speak to them or interact with them ever again. Husbands walk out on wives who come to Christ. Boyfriends break up with girlfriends who give their lives to Christ and say, hey, you know what, there's no more sex.
We're knocking it off. Parents have often, and I run into this a lot, often say to children, listen, I'm not going to be a part of you throwing your life away. You want to go be a missionary? Then you do it with your own money.
I'm not helping you at all. That's on you. This happens, folks. Jesus said, when you embrace me, it's likely to cause real trouble in your family. But listen to what Jesus said. He said, Matthew 10, 37, He who loves father or mother or son or daughter, and may I add, or husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend more than me, is not worthy of me. Jesus said, don't you put your love for your family, which is good, but don't you put it ahead of your love for me.
Don't you make your family into an idol. Number two, idol number two, is the idol of worldly stuff. 1 John 2, John writes, Do not love the world, nor the things in the world. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father. Now notice that the apostle John did not say, he didn't say don't enjoy the things of the world.
He said don't love the things of the world. Friends, God is not against us enjoying the nice things of this world. But God is against us promoting those things to a position in our life above Him. As long as we don't turn those things into idols, God is fine with us enjoying them. But you know our problem as human beings is that we have a tendency to love these things more than we love God. Proverbs 27, 20 says the eyes of man are never satisfied. And this means that our sinful human nature is hopelessly in love with stuff, folks. No matter how much of this world's stuff we've got, our flesh still wants more. That's why no matter how nice your golf clubs are, you're always dreaming about a new set. That's why no matter how nice your house is, you're always looking at the houses on the market to drive by and thinking what it would be like to move into that house. That's why no matter how nice our car is or how nice our clothes are or how nice our shoes are or our furniture is, we're always dreaming about new cars and new clothes and new furniture. It's why whether it's tools or collectibles, what difference does it make? It's all stuff. And as human beings we are hopelessly drawn to stuff. And that's the second idol that is so difficult for us to resist.
Listen, if the truth be told, my friends, for so many of us as Christians, it's some piece of stuff that really occupies first place in our life and not God. Finally, idol number three is the idol of self. Acts chapter 17, when Paul and his team arrived in Thessalonica, here's what it says. The people of Thessalonica said these men who have turned the world upside down have come here now. They are defying Caesar's decrees.
How? Listen, by saying there's another king than Caesar, one called Jesus. Now it was obvious to the people in Thessalonica what the apostle Paul was saying. Paul was saying that the king of the universe, the real king of the universe, is not Caesar but a person named Jesus. Now today our problem is that everybody in the world sees themselves as Caesar.
Our problem in the modern world is every person you run into wants to be their own boss, wants to determine their own destiny, wants to set their own boundaries, and wants to be in control of their own lives. In other words, idol number three, frankly, is ourselves. We bow that we put ourselves on the throne of our life. We proclaim ourselves to be Caesar, king, and then we bow down to ourselves. And we worship ourselves. We worship our wisdom, our talents, our successes, our fame, our education. We worship our independence. We worship our ability to scheme and get what we want. And as the apostle John called it, 1 John 2, he said, This is the boastful pride of life.
Friends, we live in a town that is madly in love with idol number three. The people in this town are madly in love with themselves and worshipping themselves. And if we're not careful as followers of Christ, we can get caught up in all that nonsense. This is why the apostle Paul said to us, Romans 12, 3, he said, Do not think more highly of yourself than you ought, but rather use sober judgment.
Boy, you know what? I don't know what's written on top of the Congress building, but they ought to take whatever it is down and write this verse up there. They ought to write this verse on top of the White House and this verse on top of the Executive Office building and this verse on top of the Supreme Court. Do not think more highly of yourself than you ought. Because as the apostle Paul said here, you know what? You don't belong on the throne of your life, my friend, no matter how much power you have, how much success you have, how much fame you achieve. Don't begin believing your own PR, Paul says. Don't begin worshipping yourself because, friends, when we worship ourselves, we worship a very puny God.
Don't do it. Now let me conclude by saying this. Several years ago I had the opportunity to lead a tour where we did the seven churches of the Revelation.
Revelation chapters 2 and 3. And one of the cities we went to was Ephesus. Unbelievable dig. Unbelievable archaeological site. And there's a theater there that they've unearthed. It seats 25,000 people. That was the theater in Acts chapter 19 where the Bible says that the people of the town dragged Gaius and Aristarchus, two of Paul's friends, and they were going to kill him and beat him up in the theater.
This is the actual theater. It was really amazing to stand in there and be standing on a piece of the Bible. Well, we went in there and I read the letter that the apostle Paul, forgive me, that the Lord Jesus, through the apostle John, wrote to the church of Ephesus. Here's part of what he said.
Revelation 2. He said, I know your deeds, your hard work, and your perseverance. I know how you have endured hardships for my name, and you have not grown weary, and how you have rejected false teachers. You say, wow, what a great church. I mean, they were standing for God and suffering for God and rejecting heresy and false teaching.
Yeah. Then look what Jesus says. He says, yet I have this against you.
Oops. What could you possibly have against us? I mean, we're standing for Christ and suffering for Christ and rejecting false... What could you possibly have against us? Yet I have this against you. You have lost your first love. Who's he mean? Well, he means himself, the Lord Jesus himself. So repent, Jesus says. Have a change of heart and a change of mind.
Make a U-turn and do the things you did at first. What's he mean by that? He means when these folks first came to Christ, when they first gave their lives to Jesus, the kind of passionate love they had for Jesus in those days. Jesus said, I love your work and I love your theology, but you know what I want?
I want you to be passionately in love with me like you used to be. And I have to tell you, I can relate to this. When I first came to Christ, 1971, I was passionately in love with Christ because God had saved me out of the biggest, nastiest mess you could ever imagine in my life. And yet, here's what I learned in 37 years of being a Christian. Here's what I've learned. I've learned that if we're not careful, friends, slow erosion can take place in our life. Sometimes the erosion comes from these three idols that we've talked about. Number one, an unhealthy love of our family. Number two, an inordinate love for earthly stuff.
Number three, a twisted love of self. Sometimes these are the idols that can creep in and kick the Lord Jesus out of position number one. But you know, sometimes the things that do it are not bad things. Sometimes they can be good things like a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a husband, a wife, a hobby, even some ministry. Listen, for a while in my life, the idol in my life was McLean Bible Church.
It was. And you know, I had to learn that if we're not careful, imperceptibly, slowly, these things can creep in and suddenly we turn around one day and we've lost our first love. We're like beautiful Easter eggs. You know, we're all pretty and painted on the outside. We're doing all the right things on the outside, like the Ephesians were. We go to church, have our quiet time, serve the Lord, read our Bible.
But on the inside, we're like these Easter eggs. We're all sucked dry and empty. And what does God say to us? Well, what did He say to the Ephesians? He said, repent, change your mind, make a U-turn, fix this in your life and get back to where you were at the beginning.
And many of you know what I'm talking about. When you came to Christ and the passionate love of your life was Jesus and Jesus alone, folks, I had to repent. I had to make a U-turn in my life years ago, and I had to restore Jesus as the preeminent, unchallenged love of my life.
And I still have to do that every single day. And so do you. Let me share a verse with you as we close. 2 Chronicles 16, 9. For the eyes of the Lord go to and fro throughout the earth. You know, God's scanning the earth.
Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo. And what's He looking for? Why? Look at the verse. Looking for those whose hearts are completely His.
Looking for people who are passionately in love with Jesus Christ, who He's first in their life, and there is no rival. Why does God look for these people? Look at this verse. That He might show Himself mighty on their behalf.
Wow. Want God to show Himself mighty on your behalf, my friend? Well, He tells you what you have to do to meet that condition. You know, do you have to serve the Lord? Do you have to stand up for God? Do you have to do right theology? Well, those are important, but that's not what He said.
He's looking for people who are passionately in love with Him. Now, I learned one other thing, and with this we're done. I learned that in my own energy, in my own human strength, I can't do this. I learned that I am a hopeless idolater in my flesh, that left to myself, I am an expert at putting other things ahead of God in my life, and that in my own human strength and my own human ability, I can never keep commandment number two. I can never satisfy Revelation chapter two and keep Jesus as the first love of my life. The only way to do that, friends, is for the Holy Spirit Himself to dethrone us every day, the Holy Spirit Himself to deactivate our sinful, fleshly passions every day, and for the Holy Spirit Himself to enthrone Christ as number one in our life each and every day. And that's why you and I both, if we're going to do this, it's not about the power of positive thinking, it's not about gutting it out, it's about getting on our knees every day and saying, God, let's be honest, huh? I am a hopeless idolater left to myself today, I will put something else ahead of you. God, you've got to help me not let that happen. I'm going to trust the Holy Spirit today to keep you first in my life. That's how you do it, my friends. Don't try to do it in your own energy. You can't.
But the Holy Spirit, that's why He lives inside of us, is to give us the ability to do what God wants us to do. Perfectly? No. Consistently? Yes.
And so that's my challenge to you. Friends, have you lost your first love? That's a question only you can answer.
Have you lost your first love? Is Jesus really the preeminent, unchallenged, number one love of your life? Really, is He?
And if He is, well, that's great. Trust the Holy Spirit to keep Him there every day. And if He's not, well, what did Revelation 2 say? Repent. Let's make a U-turn and let's, with the Holy Spirit's help, let's put Him back where He belongs, the Lord Jesus, in our life. And with the Holy Spirit's help, let's keep Him there.
Let's pray. Heavenly Father, you know, as I said, that every one of us is human beings. We are hopeless idolaters.
We don't mean to do anything wrong. It's just that our flesh is so strong that, Lord, it overpowers us and it displaces you from the role in our lives that we want you to be in. And so, Father, I pray that you would really speak to our hearts today and if we, like the Ephesians, if we have a whole bunch of outward things going on but we've lost our first love. If Jesus is not the number one preeminent love and passion of our life, then I pray that you would convict us of that today and that we would rise up and repent.
And by the power of the Holy Spirit each and every day, we would seek to place Jesus in position number one and keep Him there. Lord, remind us that those are the kind of folks that you show yourself mighty on their behalf. And Father, we want you to show yourself mighty on our behalf individually and as a church family.
You've told us how to do it. You're looking for people whose hearts are completely yours. May we be such people, Father, for your honor and for your glory. And we ask this in Jesus' name. And God's people said, Amen.
