Two weeks ago at BC we began a series on being a follower of Christ, namely on what it looks like, what the signs or the marks of a follower of Christ are. The first thing we nailed down is what it’s not. Following Christ is NOT simply reading your Bible, praying, and going to church stuff. As a matter of fact, if you read the Gospels you’ll see that in the days when Jesus walked the earth, the folks that read the Scriptures most and prayed the most (outside of Jesus) and went to all the church stuff were not the followers of Jesus. Rather, it was the religious leaders that opposed Jesus and tried to discredit Him and finally had Him put to death.
The best way to find out what’s important for a follower of Christ is to look at what Jesus said. So we began by looking at Mark 12:28-30. There we find out that out of the 613 commandments that God gave the Jewish people to 1) govern them as the people of God, 2) teach them how to be distinct from the nations around them, and 3) how to worship God, the most important of all was to love God with our everything. We discovered that to love God completely, with no reservations and with no regrets required first of all a work of God in our hearts bringing us to a confident trust in Jesus as our Savior who died in our place to save us from sin, Satan, and death and to restore us to God our creator as sons and daughters of God.
Yet even after we experience this work of God in our hearts, we’re still not set to automatically love God with our everything. We still need God’s work in our hearts to help us go after Him and keep us from going after the things of the world and the desires of our flesh. We need God’ s grace to keep ourselves from idols, which we are commanded to do at the close of 1 John 5. It’s not statues of wood or stone that John is talking about either, but functional gods that our hearts have fixed themselves on. Consider some of the following quotes:
“An idol is not simply a statue of wood, stone, or metal; it is anything we love and pursue in place of God, and can also be referred to as a ‘false god’ or a ‘functional god.’ In biblical terms, an idol is something other than God that we set our hearts on ( Luke 12:29;1 Cor. 10:6), that motivates us (1 Cor. 4:5), that masters or rules us (Ps. 119:133), or that we serve (Matt. 6:24).” –Ken Sande
“An idol is something within creation that is inflated to function as God. All sorts of things are potential idols, depending only on our attitudes and actions toward them…Idolatry may not involve explicit denials of God’s existence or character. It may well come in the form of an over-attachment to something that is, in itself, perfectly good…An idol can be a physical object, a property, a person, an activity, a role, an institution, a hope, an image, an idea, a pleasure, a hero – anything that can substitute for God.” –Richard Keyes
“The evil in our desire typically does not lie in what we want, but that we want it too much.”
“The human heart is a factory of idols…Everyone of us is, from his mother’s womb, expert in inventing idols.” –John Calvin
We have more than enough idols crafted for us by the world around us, our hearts need only choose what they will be more satisfied with than God. Scripture is undeniably clear however that we can not love stuff, love success, love notoriety and recognition or whatever bill of goods the world, the flesh, and the devil try to sell us and love God simultaneously. Just read 1 John 2:15-17.
So how do we overcome and keep ourselves from idols to love the true and living God?
- We keep our focus on the Cross. The cross reminds us that we are no longer slaves to sin, we are no longer meant to serve idols. We have been redeemed from this kind of wasted living. The cross sets us free from legalism (trying to earn righteousness) and from lacsiviousness (perverseness and wanton sinful living). These truths are highlighted beautifully in passages like Acts 13:38-39 and Galatians 2:20.
- We focus on the supreme satisfaction of God and knowing and loving Him. What can we learn from passages like Psalm 37:4, Psalm 34:8-10, and Psalm 73:25-26? That God is not a means to an end. He not the path to prosperity, the way to healthier and happier life. Instead we learn that God is our treasure, God is our happiness, God is our life.
5th Century bishop Augustin of Hippo said it this way in a written prayer:
You made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.
Augustine didn’t say, “Our hearts our restless until we say ‘the prayer’” but rather until they rest in you, until they delight in you, until they quit running hard and striving to be fulfilled in everything else under heaven but God.
This is a picture of what it looks like to love God with our everything: it’s when He is our treasure and our desire to know Him and make Him known colors our every decision about what’s important and how we live because He is good, and He is best, and He greatest, and He is most-satisfying, most-fulfilling and most-worthy.
This is a mark of following Christ.
