Shocking the Heavens!

"Dear children, keep away from anything that might take God’s place in your hearts” 1 John 5:21.

As gently as John states these words we cannot lose the important truth that this is a strong command from God: ‘I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself an idol’ Exodus 20:2-4. This command is found throughout the Bible when God is dealing with His children which tells me that we need to be cautious in our day to day lives. It is easy to identify obvious idols that come as faces of sin like excessive drinking, eating, or spending but idols are also built in the good things God has given us.

What about the person who places their children above everything else? What about the person who allows their spouse to control their decisions instead of God’s? What about the job/ministry that we allow to consume us beyond healthy boundaries? These are all wonderful blessings from God that we distort into something negative. We move our blessed living in this gifts to cursed living as they enslave us and move us away from fellowship with God. ‘We know a good thing has become a counterfeit god when its demands on you exceed proper boundaries...to practice idolatry is to be a slave’ Counterfeit Gods, Timothy Keller. If we are all completely honest with ourselves we don’t have to search to find our false gods any further than our behavior and habits. Melissa Spoelstra author of Jeremiah – Daring to Hope in an Unstable World writes, ‘There is no end to the list of things that can take God’s place in our hearts. Something crosses the line into idolatry based on its elevation in our heart and mind’ p. 50.

What does this look like for us? Elevating worry over God’s faithfulness...Habitually doing anything in excess over enforcing God-given boundaries...Allowing work to bleed into time with our family who God entrusted and blessed us with...Using our mouths to tear down instead of our words to build up. We must focus on our behaviors and choices to recognize our idols and then do something about it. We must ask God to reveal them to us and then remove them from our lives. If we have idols that we know about and continue to serve them and pour out to them God will discipline us and take actions to remove them. ‘Yet my people have exchanged their glorious God for worthless idols! The heavens are shocked at such a thing and shrink back in horror and dismay, says the LORD' Jeremiah 2:11-12.

If we are going to shock the heavens let us shock them in amazement of how we smash our idols and destroy their high places in our lives!