Why can’t I shake my idols?

Watch the complete sermon here: https://www.bridges.church/messages/hope-in-exile-colossians-3-1-15/

Hey, thanks again for sending in questions related to our recent sermons. As you know, we just completed our six week focus on exiled, living in a place that isn’t home. This last week, when we talked about hope in exile, we said, there’s multiple places to put your hope, and not all of them are equal. Depending on where you put your hope will come with strings attached either way. And we can put our hope above in Christ, or we can put our hope below in this world.

So if we really put our ultimate hope in anything in this world, that’s what the Bible refers to as idolatry. And sometimes we don’t even know what we have placed up as our ultimate hope until maybe it is taken away. We get very frustrated and angry, and then we realize how much hope we were placing in something. We had over focused on it. It had become an over desire.

And that then is an opportunity to refocus on Christ all over again. The question for this week is, why does this keep happening? Why won’t idols die? Why do they keep popping up? Why is it, I think I have one defeated and then another one pops up?

Or the one I thought defeated comes back raging to the forefront? I’d first affirm, yes, that is what happens. An ancient theologian, John Calvin, said that the human heart is an idol factory. It just continuously pumps out more and more and more idols. As far as why it happens, I think it goes down into our nature of sin that we won’t be totally free from until new heavens, new earth.

We are remade with glorified bodies, living with Christ forever. C. S. Lewis said, a man doesn’t really know how bad he is until he has tried very hard to be good. And so if you are out there fighting idols and you are realizing, hey, there’s another one, and another one and another one, I would say the more important question is, have you had the revelation that sin goes really deep in you?

That shouldn’t lead you to despair. That should lead you to even more hope in Christ, because as big as our sin is, Christ is bigger. His grace is sufficient to save us even when we cannot slay these idols that keep popping up in our heart. And to end on hope. I would say in my life, whenever an idol pops up, and yes, it’s frustrating, and yes, it’s hard to detach that from our heart.

But I’d say when Christ finally does bring liberation, that it is then a new level of intimacy with him. And so these idols, which Satan in the world would want to use for evil in our lives, Christ actually has a good plan for. And his good plan is to use them to bring us closer to him, which he does through saving us from them, one idol at a time. So when a new one pops up, part of you rejoice that Christ will use this for your good as he detaches it from your heart and brings you even closer to him.

Thanks for with a question.

We’ll see you next time. Bye.