This message was delivered to Tabor College Combined Chapel in September 2013.
I have lost a lot of weight since the start of this year. If you pay attention you may have noticed that I don’t eat chocolate anymore, and I say no to the cakes etc which sometimes appear at morning tea time.
I have not been to weight watchers or drunken shakes or some other weight loss method. I did not have gastric bypass surgery. I am not on a diet. I do not count calories. I have not suddenly acquired amazing will power.
How did this happen then?
Some time last year I began to pray about a promise which is found in Ezekiel 36:25, “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols.” What I desired was that my life would be free from idolatry. I wanted my only God to be Jesus. I asked God to cleanse me from my idols. In fact I prayed this prayer several times. At the time I had no real idea what these idols were, only that there were some and I did not want to hold on to these anymore.
Early in January, I thought that I might try eating a little less food for breakfast and see what happened. I have tried many times to go on a diet and to lose weight. This succeeds for a little while and then, after feeling like I cannot take the deprivation any longer, I go back to eating exactly as I did before and gain all the weight back again. If anyone has ever been on a diet then you know that the end result of diets is usually that you end up heavier than before. For this reason I had given up trying. But on this day in January, I did not decide to go on a new diet, only to eat a little less for breakfast. This must, I believe, have been a prompt from the Holy Spirit, because I also ate a little less for lunch. I found that I did not want to eat as much. After a few weeks, when I thought that something profound seemed to be happening, I told a couple of people and asked for prayer.
I was quite worried that this might be like previous occasions and that I would soon fail and go back to my old self. My old self was a person who ate for all sorts of reasons. I ate when I was hungry. I ate when I was bored. I ate when I was stressed. I ate when I was tired. I ate when I was angry. When I described what had been happening to John Yates in about March this year, he said, “Food was like the Holy Spirit to you.” This was in a sense quite true, in that whenever I did could not cope with life I would turn to the comfort of eating. If you want to use psychological language you would say that I was addicted to eating. But I do not want to use psychological language, but rather theological language. Food was an idol.
I want to tell you today that I have been set free from this idolatry. I am no longer a compulsive eater. I do not need to use food to deal with life. This is why I don’t need to count calories or be on a diet. I no longer crave sugar and I have not had chocolate in nine months. I don’t want it anymore. Jesus is the one who has freed me from this problem which has been present in my life for probably 43 years. This is not some kind of super self control. I don’t have an iron will with which to resist chocolate biscuits. This is utterly the power of God at work in me.
This is not to say that there are never any times in which I have experienced temptation and struggle. On one particular day this year I had been to speak to the minster at church and had a disagreement. If you know me, you know that I have major disagreements, not minor ones. I came home really angry and upset by what this man had said and his attitude towards the issue. What I wanted to do was go straight to the fridge and go back to eating myself to death. Knowing that I did not want to return to the old me, I prayed for help and received a verse from Romans 6:21, “What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death!” So instead of eating I got on the treadmill for a while and worked up a sweat to work off the anger.
I still have days when I need to repent of the way I view food. However, I am not the old me. I am the new me. I don’t want to go back to the way I was. But, let’s get some perspective on what this is about. I am much healthier than I was last year. My blood pressure went down. I don’t have pains in various internal organs any more. I am faster on my feet and can go up hills without puffing. All of this is great. But the benefits are not merely physical. They are not even primarily physical. There is a difference in my relationship with God. I am more able to deal with stress than before. This year has involved some very stressful events, which I won’t recount. However, in those things I have been able to trust God in way I could not when my default strategy was eating to deal with life. This is because I have been freed, not simply from eating too much, but from worshipping an idol which cannot deliver what it promises.
This brings me to what I would like to speak about today, which is idolatry. There are two things which God hates and those are injustice and idolatry. The OT is full of injunctions against these two things, but I am not going to speak about injustice today but only about idolatry. The first two of the Ten Commandments are important here.
Exodus 20:1 And God spoke all these words: 2 “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 3 “You shall have no other gods before me. 4 “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
There are several things I want to say about idols:
1) Idolatry stirs God to jealousy. Deuteronomy 32:21 “They made me jealous by what is no god and angered me with their worthless idols.”
2) Idols are worthless. Jeremiah 2:5 “This is what the LORD says: “What fault did your fathers find in me, that they strayed so far from me? They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves.”
3) They deceive people into believing what is false. Zechariah 10:2 The idols speak deceit, diviners see visions that lie; they tell dreams that are false, they give comfort in vain.
4) Idols are a snare. Psalm 106:36 “They worshiped their idols, which became a snare to them.” Idols are a trap; they lure you in to imprison you.
But there are two specific passages I want to concentrate on today. The first is from 2 Kings 18. In this story the King of Assyria is threatening to attack Judah. His emissaries come and taunt the people in Jerusalem. They say to the people:
2 Kings 18:31 “Do not listen to Hezekiah. This is what the king of Assyria says: Make peace with me and come out to me. Then every one of you will eat from his own vine and fig tree and drink water from his own cistern, 32 until I come and take you to a land like your own, a land of grain and new wine, a land of bread and vineyards, a land of olive trees and honey. Choose life and not death! “Do not listen to Hezekiah, for he is misleading you when he says, ‘The LORD will deliver us.’
Notice how these promises are promises which God had made to Israel. Each one will eat from his own vine and fig tree. They will be given a wonderful land. And then they are promised life. The king of Assyria cannot actually deliver these things, because these things are a gift from the God of Israel. This does not mention idols specifically but the same principle applies. You see the point I hope. Idols make promises about what they can give you. They promise you peace and comfort and life. Yet they do not deliver. What you get instead is disquiet and yearning and death. All the while you keep on seeking after these things as if the idol could deliver them. But that is a lie. If you want life then you can only get that from the true source of life and that is Jesus Christ.
The second passage is in Isaiah. I will just read a small part of it.
Isaiah 44:13 The carpenter measures with a line and makes an outline with a marker; he roughs it out with chisels and marks it with compasses. He shapes it in the form of man, of man in all his glory, that it may dwell in a shrine. 14 He cut down cedars, or perhaps took a cypress or oak. He let it grow among the trees of the forest, or planted a pine, and the rain made it grow. 15 It is man’s fuel for burning; some of it he takes and warms himself, he kindles a fire and bakes bread. But he also fashions a god and worships it; he makes an idol and bows down to it. 16 Half of the wood he burns in the fire; over it he prepares his meal, he roasts his meat and eats his fill. He also warms himself and says, “Ah! I am warm; I see the fire.” 17 From the rest he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships. He prays to it and says, “Save me; you are my god.”
This says that anything can be an idol. Since idols are made out of ordinary things, which are good and given by God for our benefit, there is nothing which cannot become an idol if we make it into one. So, like me you may have made food into an idol. Perhaps you eat chocolate when you are depressed, or perhaps it is a favourite food which comforts you when things are stressful. Or perhaps you have an addiction to something else, like television or you-tube or facebook or twitter. It might be a sporting team or an online game. As Christians we are not exempt from addictions to pornography or gambling, although perhaps you have not told anyone about those problems. There are other idols which seem to be quite healthy are even virtuous, for example some people have made being healthy an idol. If that is you, perhaps you are spending a lot of energy making sure you spend enough time at the gym or never eat carbs. Other people make Christian ministry into an idol, seeking something in ministry which only God can give. Others are given to seeking achievement. Other people want to be married at all costs. Perhaps you have made your spouse or your children into an idol.
But there is an even more insidious idol which many of you worship. It is insidious because it looks so very much like God, but it is not God. To this idol you pray and seek comfort in times of trouble. You sing to this idol and give it your devotion. This idol is the god who will give you worldly peace and safety, who will always heal you when you are sick, who will give you the things which you want the most. You pray to this idol to make your life wonderful and happy and trouble free. You want this idol to make sure that you never suffer. The problem is that you think that this idol is actually God. But it is not God, but only an idol you have constructed in your mind to suit your own desires. That god cannot answer your prayers and he does not. When this idol does not answer you then you get upset and wonder what is going on. I know what is going on. You need to repent of making a god to suit yourself.
The true and living God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, calls you to surrender everything to himself. He asks you to give over every desire of your heart to him and to follow him, even to take up your cross each day and be willing to suffer shame and persecution for his sake. He does not promise that life will be easy or that you will always be healed. He does not promise that you will never suffer. In fact he promises the opposite. You cannot manipulate the true God to do what you want him to do. You can only obey him.
But this true God is the one who is worthy of your worship. Jesus is the one who gave his life for you, dying on a cross. He is the one who gives life, even though you die. He alone can give true peace and true joy. All the other so called gods are false and all their promises are lies. Those idols which you worship keep you from trusting in Jesus Christ. They get in the way of you knowing God. When you turn to your idols for comfort or help or supposed peace and joy, then you are not turning to Jesus for these things. God does not stop loving you because you worship idols. He does not stop being gracious. On the contrary, his love and grace want to turn you away from the idols and back to himself. It is only in knowing Jesus that you can be who you are meant to be. Therefore, you and I need to come to repentance.
So today I want to ask you to be willing to repent of the idols which you worship. Perhaps you don’t actually know what they are. But let me offer four idol tests.
1) Where do you turn when you are distressed or stressed?
2) What thing do you expect to make you happy and are surprised when it fails?
3) What would you be unable or unwilling to give up if Jesus asked you to?
4) If you have an addition then you are probably hiding something and ashamed of it.
Chances are these will point you to your idols.
You might know what they are but you think that you cannot give them up. I say to you that you need to ask Jesus to cleanse you from your idols and then he will. I did not know what would happen when I prayed that prayer. Now I do. I could not deliver myself and you cannot deliver yourself. But Jesus is able to do so because that is the power of the cross. Paul says in Rom 7: 21 So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God– through Jesus Christ our Lord!