In the last article I presented a message titled... Place God at the Center of your Life Choices. I want to carry on with that theme this week by pointing to the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. He dealt with many things in his counsel to the Corinthian congregation, significant among them was a section on liberty and love, two essential elements of the human spirit. The ideals of liberty and love influence every aspect of our lives and they weigh heavily on our choices and decisions for a spiritually healthy Christian life.
Paul began his liberty and love focus (chapter 8) with a discussion about meat sacrificed to idols. Idols are commonplace in Greek culture so his analogy will be quickly understood. Paul says idols are nothing, they’re worthless. However he takes the analogy a step further by saying it would be better not to eat meat at all, than to cause an immature Christian to think communing with idols is acceptable. There was an ongoing debate among the corinthian Christians about such meat sacrificed to idols and then later sold in the open market to anyone. Some Christians believed eating such meat meant they were participating in pagan worship, thus compromising their relationship with Christ, other Christians did not feel that way. Paul used himself as an example of on who had chosen to deny himself certain rights and privileges for the sake of the gospel. In other words, Paul would not do something even though it might be permissible, if it might possibly harm another Christians walk with the Lord. Finally, at the beginning of chapter 10 Paul warned the Corinthians to beware [of their conduct, their choices, their actions]... “lest they fall.” (If you have not read the letters to the Corinthians, please do so, the counsel and wisdom is pertinent for today’s Christians).
Sobering counsel indeed. Christians know better than to keep idols of stone, wood, or metal in their homes. No one professing Christ would do such a thing. Nevertheless, many Christians are at risk of practicing idolatry, subtle as it may be, in their hearts manifested by their choices and actions.
True obedience and submission begins in the heart. It would then stand to reason that idolatry and rebellion also begins there. The prophet Samuel revealed that truth a thousand years before Christ when he told King Saul, "For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness as idolatry" (1 Sam. 15:23). The Apostle Paul also linked idolatry to the heart when he wrote to the Colossian Christians about "sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry" (Col. 3:1-5). His counsel was simple... “set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated...” Things “above” are good, “earthly things”... not so good.
Being a Christian is no guarantee that you cannot be lured by the subtleties of idolatry. Before reacting in smug self-assurance that such a thing could never happen to you, bear in mind that following the Exodus, the whole nation of Israel fell into idolatry. They had God himself visibly in their presence day and night, and only two men out of hundreds of thousands resisted the allure of disobedience and idolatry. Before we begin patting ourselves on the back for not having physical idols sitting about the house, consider the temptations to plant idols in the recesses and corridors of our hearts.
False gods have not gone away in today’s communities of Christians, they just go by different names. None of us bow down to statues of Aphrodite, but are you guilty of looking at pornography on the Internet? Do you allow yourself to be titillated by provocative images in R-rated movies and edgy programs on television? We no longer worship the Olympian gods, but how many of us have made idols of our favorite entertainers or sports stars, to the extent that we make choices and decisions based on the influence they have on us? We don't offer burnt offerings to Mammon, but has our infatuation with earning, spending, and hoarding money become idols in our hearts? Do we place love for our biological families before love for God and his church? If we have done any of these things, if any of these things take a priority position in our lives, dominate our choices and decisions, then we are guilty of idolatrous conduct before Almighty God.
Here’s a hard one to handle. Do we think of ourselves more as Americans than as Christians? Unbridled patriotism, placing the state before God, being consumed by the political machinations of manmade government... is idolatry. Being a good citizen, and an active participant in the political process, our right as a citizen, must be tempered by our focused allegiance on God’s Kingdom, and the realities of this world and all earthly governments. (1 Corinthians 7:31; 1 John 2:17; Matthew 7:24-28)
We can even commit idolatry in the name of the church, sabotaging our our walk with God. Human beings, every one of us, have been created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-28). Yet we are constantly tempted to shift the relationship to our advantage... to view God as no more than a super-human, someone created in our image to satisfy our every whim and desire. We do that by transforming Him into a God that performs like a genie in a bottle... a grantor of our wishes and desires. Someone once said, "Satan is the master counterfeiter" with the ability to make evil look good to eyes untrained in spiritual discernment. No kidding!Trying to reshape God in our own image is idolatry of a very serious nature, especially when we can fall into it without even knowing we're being engulfed.
That's all the more reason to know who God really is as revealed in Scripture. All the more reason to know God at the deepest level, to pray constantly, to be in fellowship with like-minded believers with whom you can share the challenges and travails of your journey in Christ. Your choices in life, must reflect obedient, patient submission [conformity] to the holy and righteous standards of God. All else becomes the seeds of idolatry.
Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, Christians choose every day between the tables of demons and the table of the Lord. Who will you commune with?
It's very sobering to read about the Corinthians, because the so-called stronger Christians don't seem to have been aware of the danger they faced from doing everyday simple things... pursuing their rights and freedoms but in do so communing with demons. They didn't realize the implications of the choices before them, but they were choosing nevertheless... and it was the wrong choice.
Think and pray on these things and review the choices and the influences that bear heavily on your life.
