An idol is almost never a bad thing in and of itself. Usually an idol is a good thing. that you have given godlike weight. That then turns into a bad thing for you. Or here's how you would say that: an idol is a good thing that you've turned into a god thing that then becomes a bad thing.
Welcome back to the Summit Life podcast with Pastor JD Greer. You know, one of the amazing things about gospel media is that it meets people exactly where they are. For some, that's a daily commute. For others, it's a quiet moment early in the morning or late at night. And through radio, podcasts, YouTube, and devotionals, Summit Life brings the truth of God's Word into everyday moments.
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If Summit Life has ever encouraged you, challenged you, or pointed you back to Jesus, know this. You're part of something God is using far beyond what you can see. To explore these resources or learn more about the mission, visit jdgreer.com. You know, much of what we seek in life Success, romance, family. It's actually a good thing.
But when we make these good things into essential things, we find ourselves eaten up with anxiety, strife, suffering, and sin. Only one identity is strong enough to be our foundation, and that is as a servant of God. Pastor J.D. echoes the warnings of Paul in 1 Corinthians 10, and he called this teaching pursuing dust. First Corinthians chapter 10.
In his book, The rest of God, Mark Buchanan, recounts the story of his grandmother-in-law, Grandma Alice, as he liked to call her. Grandma Alice, who had this huge boulder-like stone, he said, sitting right in the middle of her backyard garden. It had been there forever, as long as anybody could remember, and it was way, way, way too big for her to actually move, but it was kind of pretty, and it was round and smooth, and it had these glittery, you know, mineral chunks scattered throughout it. And so she figured if she couldn't move it, she might as well polish it up and make it an attractive centerpiece in her garden.
Well, as she got her sandpaper out and she began to sand this gigantic boulder, she said she noticed a thin sifting of gold beginning to gather on the stone. She moistened her fingertip and put it into this dust, and sure enough, y'all, it was gold. She said her heart started racing. She started to sand faster, now leaning her whole body into it, and more gold dust appeared.
Now she was scrubbing that lot rock, she said, like it was a bloodstain. Gold dust began to accumulate rapidly, and in a split second, she had caught the infamous gold fever. Gold fever, that same fever that made grown men in the 1800s squander their homes and families and go out in the West in search of treasure. She could feel it. She was going to be rich.
She stopped for a moment to wipe her brow, and that's when she noticed that something was wrong with her wedding ring. The top side was normal, but the underside, the part that nestles in the crease of her finger, that was wire thin. And that's when she realized that all the gold dust that she'd seen come from on the rock had come from the sandpaper filing down her ring. In just a moment, her greatest treasure, a family heirloom, had been reduced to dust in pursuit of a treasure that had never really been there to begin with. Mark Buchanan, the author, said he laughed the first time his wife told him that story, but only the first time, he said.
After that, After that, he said, it made me sad. It made me sad, an aging woman, giddy as a schoolgirl, heady with a sense of windfall. Dreaming of great riches, and the next moment crestfallen, stinging with shame over her coveting and naivete. But it's also sad, he said, because much of my own life I have repeated again and again Grandma Alice's mistake. I have squandered treasures in pursuit.
of dust. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul is going to explain how Grandma Alice's mistake is one every follower of God since the beginning of time has been tempted to make. It is called idolatry, and it is the source of all of our sin. And it is also the source of a lot of the anxiety, strife, and bad choices that the Corinthian believers are making. 1 Corinthians 10, let me give you the context for this discussion.
If you remember, Paul has been trying. to help the Corinthians navigate a controversy in the early church about whether or not it was okay for a Christian to eat meat that had previously been offered to an idol. Many of the new Christians, particularly the Jewish ones, felt like eating meat that had been blessed by an idol meant A, you were condoning the idol worship, and B, that you were eating meat that had a lingering demonic curse on it. But other Christians were like, no, no, no, that's ridiculous. God's power is stronger than any idol's curse, and Jesus' death, for that matter, has cleansed all things for us.
In chapter eight, Paul weighed in on that controversy, and he actually is pretty clear: the meat eaters are correct. Jesus' death has indeed cleansed all things for us, and so he says it's okay to eat meat that has been offered to idols. But then he goes on to say, if you remember in chapter nine, that if exercising that right to eat meat had made it hard for somebody else to hear the gospel, well, that is a right that he would gladly forego for the sake of reaching people, right? That's what brings us to chapter 10.
Okay, chapter 10. In making the point that it was okay to eat meat offered to idols, Paul then thinks, I need to make it clear. that I am not trying to imply that idol worship is no big deal. No, he's like idolatry is a huge deal. Idolatry is the heart of all sin.
going from Adam and Eve to the children of Israel down to Grandma Alice. He wants to show you that in saying that it's okay to eat meat that has been offered to an idol, he's not trying to say any form of worshiping an idol is okay. Verse one.
Now, I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all led by the cloud, all passed of the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food. He's talking here, of course, about the Exodus, the deliverance to the Red Sea. The spiritual food is the manna that they ate every day. Verse 5: Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, since they were struck down in the wilderness. In fact, he was not pleased with any of them except for two of them, Joshua and Caleb.
Now, watch this: these things took place as examples for us, so that we would not desire evil things. As they did. Verse 7, don't become idolaters, as some of them were. As it is written, the people sat down to eat and drink and got up to parte. Verse 8, let us not commit sexual immorality, as some of them did.
And in a single day, 23,000 people died. Let us not test Christ, as some of them did, and were destroyed by snakes. And do not grumble as some of them did, and were killed by the death angel. These things, again, he says, these things happened to them as examples. They were written for our instruction.
Verse 14: So then, my dear friends, flee from idolatry. I want you to notice that Paul summarizes all of Israel's problems in the wilderness wandering. He summarizes them all under that one heading: idolatry. All these different things. He said they're all idolatry.
Idolatry is in all of it. Flee from idolatry. Verse 18, consider the people of Israel. Do not those who eat sacrifices participate in the altar? In other words, when you worship an idol, you are opening up a portal for the power of that idol to infect your life.
Verse 19, what am I saying then? That food sacrificed to an idol is anything. I'm not going back on what I said previously: that you can eat meat offered to an idol. I'm not going back on that, but I do say that what they sacrifice, they're sacrificing to demons and not to God.
So do not be any part of the actual worship ceremony. It is true, idol statues may be inanimate pieces of wood, but demons are actually behind those idols. And when you worship an idol, you are inviting the power of that demon into your life.
So while eating food that has previously been offered to an idol, while that's not a problem, any kind of worship of an idol is going to open you up to the demonic, and that's a huge problem.
So, we're going to use those 20 verses to answer three questions. Number one, what is idolatry? And how is this even relevant to you at all? Number two, how does idolatry corrupt our behavior? And then number three, does idolatry really put us into contact with demons?
All right, number one. Number one, what is idolatry? What is idolatry? In verse 6, you're gonna see the word desire. You see it?
They desired evil things. The word there in Greek is epithumia. Epithemy. You want to learn a Greek word? Epithemia.
Say it with me. I'll say it. You say, epithemia. Epistemia. Here's the thing about the word epistemia.
We do not have a great English word to translate it. Fumia Fumia just means desire. Epi is like saying super. Epiphymia is like saying a super desire that has become so large in your heart that it begins to control you. Think of it like a deep soul craving.
Something you become so driven to obtain in life because without that thing. you're not sure if life would even be worth living. That is idolatry. Many of us assume that idol worship means bowing down to little gold statues. And since you don't have any of those little gold statues in your basement and your family doesn't gather on a regular basis to go down in the basement and bow down to these statues, you, the moment I started to read, you thought, this is not relevant to me.
I'm not an idolater. I don't have a bunch of statues I bow down to. And so I'm not an idolater. But, friend, don't be so naive. Biblically, an idol is anything that takes the place of God in your life.
That's why I pointed out in verse 14, Paul summarizes all of Israel's wilderness wanderings, all their sins as idolatry. Not just the creation of the golden calf, but also the sexual immorality, the complaining, the disobedience, all of it. All of it was idolatry. Idolatry is when something becomes so central and essential to your life that you could not imagine life being happy without the presence of that thing.
Something so important to you that if you lost that thing, you would feel like life is hardly worth living. Write this down. Idolatry is not so much about what you bow your knees to. It's about what you lean your soul on. Let me say that again for the people in the back.
Idolatry is not so much about what you bow your knees to. Idolatry is about what you lean your soul on. Or here's another way to think about it. One of the Hebrew words for worship is the word chabbod.
Now, you did so amazing with the Greek word epiphymia. Do you want to say the word kabbod? It's got that little funny letter at the beginning of it, which sounds like you got a hawker when you say it to sound like a real Hebrew speaker, okay? Kabbod. Say it.
If the person in front of you is not kind of wiping stuff off the back of their head, you didn't say it right. Chabod. Kabbod, okay? Kabbod literally means wait. To worship something in the Jewish mindset, at least, is to give it weight in your heart.
An idol is whatever in your heart is so weighty. That you could not imagine life without that thing being any good. Our English word worship actually captures this. Worship is, of course, a combination of two words: worthship.
So you are worshiping something when you are assigning a lot of worth to it. Here's the tricky part. An idol is almost never a bad thing in and of itself. Usually an idol is a good thing. That you have given godlike weight.
that then turns into a bad thing for you. Or here's how you would say that: an idol is a good thing that you've turned into a God thing that then becomes a bad thing. For Adam and Eve, that idol was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Remember, God had given them free reign of the entire garden and told them to eat whatever they wanted whenever they wanted to, but told them this one tree, they should not touch that tree, but they wanted that tree. They needed that tree.
They epithemia. They craved that tree. And they were willing to compromise their relationship with God to get a hold of that tree. For the children of Israel, their epiphania was a desire for safety and the delicacies of Egypt. They didn't like being exposed out there in the wilderness all by themselves with nothing.
But the promise of God to protect them, they didn't like having nothing to eat except for the manna that God provided for them each morning on the ground. And so they turned their back on God to pursue other things. Because those things had greater weight in their heart than their relationship with God did.
So, the question for you is this: What do you epithemia? What carries the most weight in your heart? To what do you assign the most worth? What is it that you would say about that thing? This constitutes a happy and complete life, and without the presence of that thing, life is not hardly worth living.
What is that for you? Let me run through a little top 10 list. Not exactly 10, but it's the spirit of a top 10. Marriage. Just give me a good marriage.
And I'll be happy. The key to a happy life. It's to find that special somebody. And when you do that, everything else in your life is going to fall into place. And if you find that person...
Life will be good, but if you don't find that person, you're always going to feel like you're missing something. And you're always going to feel a little bit incomplete. Y'all, this might be our society's biggest idol. as evidenced by how frequently this theme appears in our music and our movies. I don't mean to pick on these too much because yes, I do read your emails.
But is this not the theme of every Hallmark movie that was showed over Christmas or every Hallmark movie ever written? I was a highly paid corporate lawyer and realized on my trip back to my parents' house that my life was empty without love.
So I gave up my career to get married to my high school sweetheart, and now we run a cattle ranch together in Connecticut and a coffee shop with a crazy profitable Etsy business, hashtag trendy.
Now romance is an idol for a lot of people, or on the flip side, independence is an idol for a lot of other people. I never saw a lot of singles who struggle, not like most of them, but I know some of them, a number of them, who struggle with commitment to somebody else because they couldn't imagine being happy in life without complete freedom to do whatever they want to do when they want to do it. And so that makes him scared to commit. Might just say, I don't want to commit because I couldn't imagine life being happy, being tied down an obligation to somebody else. Independence has become an idol.
For other people, it's money. If I get enough money in the bank, things are going to be fine. I read an economic book. It was called The Psychology of Money. It was actually pretty good.
I would recommend it to you. It's not a Christian book, but the guy basically said that in the book, he was working off the premise that happiness is having enough money in the bank that you can do what you want to do when you want to do it.
Now, just for the record, I agree. I agree that that is a great thing to be in a place where you can do what you want to do when you want to do it. But here's the question, is that the most weighty thing in your heart? Is that the one thing that you feel like you really need to have in order for life to be good? in order to be happy, to feel free, to feel secure?
If so, then financial freedom will drive all the rest of your choices. The path to financial security will be the one voice that you will obey above all others. I don't care how much you come to church. Because that thing, that is the obedient, like that's the good life. Maybe you're driven by a sense of accomplishment.
Feeling like if you could ever get the respect that just comes from being the best in your field, then then life would be good. And that just drives you. It's driven you for years. Several years ago, I read an interview of Madonna.
Now, if you were younger than 30 years old, you probably do not know who that is. Think of her as the lady gaga of my generation, but weirder. I'm gonna tell you, you Gen Z's got nothing on us when it comes to producing weird artists. Right, we did in the 80s we took that to a whole new level. Madonna was forever doing something weird to try to set herself apart, more outrageous than the thing before it.
She said in an interview in Vogue magazine, which I read religiously for your benefit, so I can share stuff like this. She said, My drive in life Listen to this, comes from a fear of being mediocre. That's always pushing me. I'll do something, accomplish something that makes me feel special. And that lasts for a while, but then the feeling goes away.
And I feel uninteresting unless I do something else. Even though everybody tells me I've become somebody. I still feel like I have to prove that I am somebody. My struggle has never ended, and I guess it never will.
Some of you, you don't do outrageous things like Madonna, but you probably resonate with that a little bit. It's just always been this drive to set yourself apart.
Some of you are driven by the opinions of others. That's the weightiest thing in your heart.
Some of you are still trying to earn the approval of your father. Or maybe some unnamed group of people. I was that way in high school. Yo, I spent my entire high school career trying to impress a bunch of people I didn't really even like. I wore what they thought I should wear every day.
I talked the way they thought I should talk. Their approval, their opinion was the weightiest thing in my heart, weightier even than God's approval. I gave it kabode. You say, well, JD, listen, I'm old enough to know. I'm not even like, I'm even older than you.
And I'm, you know, forget Gen Z and millennials. They're crazy. You know, I'm Gen X. I'm a boomer. I'm old enough to know that chasing other people's opinions or career or money, that's going to get you nowhere.
No, in my old, wise age, I realized that life is about having a strong family and good friends. And listen. I agree that those things are way better than money. But you understand those things can become idols also. I watched a great movie over the weekend with my son called American Underdog.
The true story of Kurt Warner. Who literally went from bagging groceries as a football dropout to Super Bowl champ for the St. Louis Rams and NFL MVP? It is a great movie. Right, I would encourage you to watch it, but at one of the crisis points in the movie, it does what a lot of Christian-themed movies do.
I'm not sure how accurate this is of the story. I'm sure they're just trying to make it more palatable for a wider audience. But basically, after Kurt Warner realizes that building his identity on being good at football has gotten him nowhere and led him only to brokenness, he decides in one of this climatic point of the moment that he's going to build his identity not on that anymore, but on being a good husband and dad.
Now again, y'all, I think that's way better than football. But family can become an idol also. God and God alone was to be the source of our identity. God was supposed to be the one relationship that we lean the weight of our souls upon. And when family becomes an idol, that messes everything else up also.
An idol is not usually a bad thing, it's a good thing that takes on godlike weight.
Now, think about it. Have you ever seen a parent?
Now, I know you don't think this is true about you, so think about somebody else, okay? Have you ever seen a parent who wraps up their identity, their self-worth, and how well their kids do? You get the same Christmas cards I do every Christmas. Where you got some parent talking about their kids and you can tell it's really about them. They're always comparing their kids to others.
They're feeling jealous about what others are going on in other people's families. Then they start to put a lot of pressure on their kids to do well because how well their kids do is a reflection of them. And they start to feel personally betrayed when their kids don't do well. And they start to say really destructive things to their kids: like, how could you do this to me? After all that I've done for you.
So, yeah, it's better to pour yourself into your family than it is your career, but family can become an idol also. My identity as a Christian is not supposed to be football star, it's not supposed to be successful pastor, model husband, or good dad. My identity as a Christian is servant of God and child of his that has been redeemed by his blood. Tim Keller says it this way, an idol is whatever you envision. enabling you to live a life of power and joy without God.
When you look into the future and you think that's a life of power and joy. Unless the central thing in that, the one essential is God and God alone, then that other thing has become an idol for you, whether that's marriage, family, grandkids, career success, or the size of a church. What is the one central thing for you? The one thing that has the most kabod in your heart, the one thing that you attach the most worth to, the one or two things that drive your life. That's idolatry.
So question number two. How does idolatry then corrupt our behavior? I showed you in chapter 10, Paul ties. Idolatry to all forms of their corrupted behavior. Verse 6: Because of their idolatry, the children of Israel, verse 8, gave themselves to sexual immorality.
Then they started complaining and grumbling against God. Paul tells us to learn from their example and avoid that trap.
So let's just consider, okay? How is your idolatry corrupting your behavior?
Well, see, whatever you feel like you have to have for life to be complete, you'll be willing to do whatever it takes to obtain. Does that make sense? Whatever you feel like you need for life to be complete, you'll be willing to do whatever it takes to obtain that thing. Martin Luther said this about 500 years ago. I love this.
Martin Luther said: when you read the Ten Commandments, you should notice that God bookended the Ten Commandments. with two commandments about idolatry.
Now, the first one is explicitly about idolatry. You should have no other gods but God, which means he should be the one essential for happiness. But the tenth commandment says not to covet. Which literally means to yearn for something. Literally, in the Greek, the Greek version of the Old Testament, it uses the word epithemia.
Thou shalt not epithemia. You shall not yearn deep in your soul for something that you feel like you could not be happy without. When you're coveting, you're like, I don't have this thing, but my neighbor has that thing, and my life is miserable because I don't have that thing, so I want that thing. Thou shalt not epithemia. And what what Martin Luther said is the reason God bookended the Ten Commandments with those two commandments is because if you kept those two, then you would keep all the other eight naturally as if they were a cakewalk.
Right? I mean, think about it. It's because you idolize sex and romance that you break your marriage vows and commit adultery. You just couldn't imagine life being happy and fulfilled without that kind of relationship, and your marriage isn't giving it to you. I mean So you step out on your marriage.
It's not that you're just an inherently bad person, it's that you epithymia a certain kind of love and romance, and that's not being found in your marriage right now. At Summit Life, our mission is simple but profound: to take people deeper into the gospel and to advance it wider across the world. With your support, we are able to meet people right where they are, whether it's in their homes, cars, or workplaces. As a media ministry, we share God's word through a variety of platforms. Our nationwide radio programs deliver powerful, gospel-centered teaching each day.
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Join us today as a monthly gospel partner. Your ongoing gift supports our radio and digital ministries plus print resources. As a thank you, we'll send you Pastor JD's signature book, Gospel. This book cuts through religious superficiality, revealing the revolutionary truth of God's acceptance of us in Christ. It introduces a gospel prayer to help you experience new depths of passion for God and fresh obedience to his calling.
Become a gospel partner today. Visit jdgreer.com or call 866-335-5220. Together, let's bring God's healing and truth to the world. It's because you idolize money. That you steal.
You're not naturally a dishonest person. Very few people are. It's just that you've learned that this little fudge here or this little cut corner there. That can get you that cherished extra money. Again, you're not a naturally dishonest person.
You're just driven by epiphymia. It's because you idolize money. that you break God's commandments to be generous in the tithe. That might be more common in some parts of our church. It's not that you're a stingy person.
It's just that you cannot give away money because you depend on... Money for happiness and security.
So you can't obey God there because you, you epithemia, this financial freedom. It's because you idolize the opinions of others that you lie. That's always been my problem. You realize as an adult. Look at yourself.
The times that you lie are usually to protect your image. Because you still idolize what people think. You bend the truth to make them think well of you. Idolatry drives our sinful choices. It corrupts our hearts, which in turn corrupts our behavior.
Ironically, one of the best places I've ever heard that expressed was. By a guy named David Foster Wallace, who is not a Christian. He's the acclaimed postmodern novelist in a famous commencement address that he gave at Kenyon College. David Foster Wallace said this. He said, and I quote, in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as not worshiping.
I'm not a religious man talking to other religious people. He's just talking to. to everybody. Everybody worships. Everybody worships.
The only choice we get is what to worship. If you worship money and material possessions. If they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough. You'll always find yourself, no matter what you get to, needing just a little bit more. You can never be content.
Watch this. Worship your own body and beauty or sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally bury you. Worship power. Worship power and you will end up feeling weak and afraid.
And you will need ever more power over others. to keep that fear at bay. Worship your intellect. Worship being seen as smart and you will end up feeling stupid. A fraud.
Always feeling like you're on the verge of being found out.
Some of you look around right now. In your life, at a destroyed part of your life, maybe your family is in tatters. And what you'll do, if you're honest, is you'll acknowledge that was sacrificed to some idol. You brought destruction into your life. Because you had to have some idol, and you were driven by it.
Peel back the layers of your sin, and you will find an altar to an idol there, I guarantee you. In fact, I've told you this before. St. Augustine, 1,500 years ago, said that in many ways our sinful actions and our sinful emotions, he said, they're like smoke from a fire. Like smoke, a trail of smoke from a fire.
And he said, when you see a trail of smoke, you can follow that trail of smoke back down to the fire from which it originates. He said, look at the smoke of your sinful behavior and sinful emotions and trace it back down. And you'll find the altar of the idol that you're worshiping at. In some ways, friends, the worst possible thing for you to do if there's smoke in your house is just to try to get rid of the smoke. Honey, there is smoke billowing everywhere in here.
Could you go open a window? No, if you see smoke in your house, you need to figure out where that fire is coming from and put out that fire. When you see the smoke of bad behaviors or complicated emotions in your heart, don't just wave away the smoke. Figure out what idol that smoke is coming from. It's like Paul Tripp always says: if you worship your way into sin, And you're going to have to worship your way out.
It's not behavior change that you need. It's not New Year's resolutions you need. It is a change of what you worship. That's the source of everything. I remember one of the first times I was teaching on this, I was trying to illustrate it for all of you.
I was trying to be humble. You know, trying to show you how my own sins were driven by idolatry.
So I asked my wife Veronica to help me come up with a list of sins that I struggled with that I could share with you. to see if we could determine in my top five list of sins, if there was a pattern of idolatry behind them. For the record, that was a huge mistake. I feel like my wife must have had a little list over on the bedside that she kept ready for just this moment. She started rattling them off like something she'd memorized for years.
Next time, I thought, I'm doing this all by myself, okay? But as we talked, it did begin to seem like every fault I had was connected to image management. My worries, my worries in life are driven by fear of not being successful and other people concluding that I'm a failure. I've already told you that any tendencies I have to lie are almost always to protect my image and guard my reputation. And I exaggerate my accomplishments.
I'll kind of hide a certain failure. because it's image management, a lot of my anger. gets driven by somebody disrespecting me or making me look foolish in the eyes of others. Sinful anger in my heart comes from this idol of worshiping other people's opinions that I've struggled with all my life. And you're like, man, you really got problems.
Are you sure you should be a pastor? No? But see, here's the thing: I'm the same as you. I just got the courage to stand up here and be honest about my failures. Of course, maybe the reason I'm doing this is so you will admire me for my transparency and my honesty and my humility.
I don't know. I'm just telling you, my heart is so messed up in all this. I can't tell where up and down is sometimes. But the point is, I know that my own sin is driven by idolatry, and so is yours. I know that I can't just brush away the smoke.
I need to be looking to my heart and finding out where. that fire is coming from. Which leads me to number three. Does idolatry really bring us into contact with demons? See verse 18.
Do not those who eat the sacrifices participate in the altar? Like. Don't you actually participate in the worship of it? Verse 20, what they sacrificed, they sacrificed to demons and not to God. Meaning, when you make a sacrifice to an idol, you are in communion.
With the power of that idol, and for idols in the world, there are demons behind them. You say, Well, come on, come on, come on. I mean, craving marriage too much, being too driven by success, being too into your kids, caring too much about the opinions of others. Sure, maybe those things aren't good, but surely Paul is going too far and say that in idolizing those things, we are communing with demons. No, he is not.
You see, Satan has power over everything in this world that has not been submitted to God. How do I know that? Because Jesus calls Satan the ruler of this world. The prince of the power of the air. Think about that imagery, by the way.
Air is everywhere. There's nowhere you can go on earth and not encounter air. You just Breathe it in. Satan's power and influence are everywhere all around you. You cannot escape it.
And every sacrifice made in pursuit of an idol opens you up to his influence. If it hasn't been submitted to God, it is still charged with the power of the ruler of this world. And that's a huge thing to say. But it is true. Idolizing your family, idolizing marriage, idolizing money, idolizing the opinions of others opens yourself up to demonic control in your life.
You say, wait a minute, isn't Paul here talking about actual pagan temple rituals? Yes. But as we have seen, it's not just in a temple that you make a sacrifice to an idol. We make sacrifices to idols every day. It's when you compromise your integrity because you need to be married.
That you make a sacrifice to an idol. It's when you stay late and overwork at the expense of your family that you make a sacrifice to an idol. It's when you tell a lie or brag or boast so that you can maintain your image before others that you make a sacrifice to an idol. It's when you cut corners to get ahead that you are making sacrifice to an idol. Satan is the spirit at work in all false worship.
And sacrifices are the portals by which he gains control over your life. Remember a few weeks ago, I pointed out how when Jesus spoke about the power of money in our lives, Matthew 6. He used a proper noun for money, memon. You cannot serve God in mammon. And when gospel writers wrote down Jesus' statement, they left the word mammon untranslated because they recognized that Jesus was speaking about money not as a thing, but as a personal supernatural force.
And so they left in the word for money as a proper noun. In English, we would capitalize it. Because they were trying to communicate, this is not a thing, it's a person. There is a spirit at work behind money. And when you trust in money rather than God, you are allowing that spirit, a demonic spirit, to take over your life.
You may never know that you're communion with demons. You're not going to grow little horns or speak in parcel tongue or whatever, but you are. Friend, verse 14, so then my dear friends, flee from idolatry. Run from it like your life depends on it. Run away from it because this is the battle for your soul.
There's two incredible Jewish scholars, Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Markalit. And they say this, the central principle of the whole Bible. is the rejection of idolatry. I actually disagree. I think the central premise is Jesus.
For two Jewish scholars reading the Old Testament, that's significant for them to pick up because it is true that the dominant theme that runs from cover to cover in your Bible. Is who's going to win the battle for your heart? Is it going to be God or is it going to be some lesser thing? What are you going to worship? Are you going to give yourself to the worship of the living God or are you going to give yourself to some lesser thing, some dead idol, some created thing?
Paul says in Romans 1 that this is the battleground of the human soul. Are you going to worship God or worship an idol?
So heed what Paul says. To these Corinthians, flee. Idolatry is like your life depends on it.
So let's close with this. How do we escape idolatry? How are you going to escape idolatry? And you gotta believe your way into it. Watch this, verse 13.
Paul puts the key right in the middle of the chapter. There's no temptation that is taking you, overtaking you, but such... as is common to man. But God Is Faithful. There's your phrase right there.
Three words. The idolatry killer. God is faithful. If you got a Bible out, I want you to highlight that, star it, underline it, take a tube of lipstick, smear it, prick your finger, dab it in blood, whatever it takes. God is faithful, and He will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but will, with the temptation, also make a way of escape that you might be able to bear it.
God is faithful. The way to overcome idolatry is to lean into the presence and the faithfulness of God. Because when you believe that God is present and that God is real and that he is filled with unconditional and unrelenting love towards you, that he is ready to help you, then your captivity to idols will be broken. Again, if you worship your way into sin, you're going to have to worship your way out. Look how the writer of Hebrews explains it.
Y'all, this is one of my favorite verses in the Bible, Hebrews 13:5. Keep your life free from covetousness. Remember, that's another word for idolatry. Keep your life free from epiphymia. Don't let it control your behavior.
and be content with what you have. Why can you be content with what you have?
Well, because he has said, I'll never leave you or forsake you. And because of that, you can confidently say, the Lord is my helper. I will not fear. What could man do to me? Freedom from the fear and the craving that leads to idolatry is found in confidence in the presence and the love of God.
Y'all over break, I spent a lot of time in Psalm 23. Such an amazing... Amazing passage. I've had it memorized since I was a kid, and I feel like it's like going out into the ocean. And you suddenly have a wave goes over your head, and you feel like you're in deep, and you're like, man, this feels so deep.
And then you realize that, like, you know, a couple miles out there. It's a couple miles deep. And this is what that psalm is to me. I'm going to come back and do a whole series on it, I think. But the promises of that psalm are almost too good to be true, are they not?
It's not socially poetry, it's theology. The Lord is my shepherd, therefore I have no needs. Can you say that? Can you save this one? I have no needs.
When I read that, I'm like, well, David had needs. Scholars say that David probably wrote this when he was on the run from Saul, living in caves.
Sounds to me like he's got needs. He's like, I got no needs. Why? Because the Lord is my shepherd. He makes me lie down in green pastures.
But what do sheep do in green pastures? They eat. David's like, look, I'm so full. With the presence of God, that even when I'm a green pasture, I don't have to eat because I'm already. filled up he leads me beside still water what does sheep do beside still waters They drink.
David's like, I don't need to drink because I'm not thirsty anymore. My cop runs over. I don't know. There's nothing. Like, it literally is running over.
I got enough for me, I got enough for you. He's just running over, and then you prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. Yo, when I'm in the presence of my enemies, I want to either fight or hide. What David says is that the presence of Jesus causes me to rest even in the midst of my enemies. Because you're standing there with me, and therefore I have no needs.
And that means even when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I'm not going to be afraid. Why? Why? Because thou art with me. When I feel the assurance of his presence, I can be content even when I'm surrounded by many enemies, dangerous toils, and snares, because surely goodness and mercy are going to follow me all the days of my life.
I could not get away from them if I tried, because God is my shepherd and he is always present, always there. And therefore, whatever situation I'm in, it's not dangerous to me and I don't have needs in it. Here's the question: Do you believe that? Do you actually believe it that you this morning, whatever your situation is, however enemies there are, whatever dangers and toils and snares are around you, that you don't have any needs because he's with you?
Some of you say, Pastor, I want to believe that. I want to believe that. I just don't feel it. I don't see it. It doesn't seem like goodness and mercy are following me.
Friend, listen, I understand that. In fact, my question is, if the Lord is my shepherd, why am I on the run for my enemies anyway? Why am I in my enemy's presence? Why do I have these difficulties? Yet what I see from Psalm 23 by the testimony of David is, even in the midst of difficulty and disappointment and unanswered prayer, I can still be assured the Lord is my shepherd.
I may not understand all that he's doing. I may not understand why I'm on the run from Saul. I may not understand why he hadn't answered this prayer yet. I may not understand why this difficulty, this pain, this disease, if that's what it is, why it doesn't go away. And I've learned that the arc of God's goodness in my life, His surely goodness and mercy, is often longer than mine.
I want it to go like that. His goes like this. And I'm like, God, it doesn't feel like goodness and mercy is following me. But even now, in the midst of whatever valley of the shadow of death I'm in, in the presence of these enemies, I can cling to you. And my cup runs over with you and I'm not even hungry in the presence of these green pastures.
I'm not thirsty anymore because I trust you and I see you. I see you in your goodness and your love. I see that in the cross. Brief, you may not understand how God is going to turn these things in your life for good. I don't with a lot of things, but what you can see is what he revealed about himself at the cross.
Just say that. Just see it and rest. And then, like the writer of Hebrews says, you'll find that your cravings and your fears just. Evaporate. Epithemia just begins to dissipate.
Dallas Willard says it this way: the freedom from frantic desire to have. is grounded in God's promise. to never leave us. The freedom from the frantic desire caused by fear. The freedom from the frantic desire caused by coveting that is grounded in God's promise to never leave us and to always be our helper.
What takes first place in your life? We trust that God will keep using this message long after the episode ends. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.
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