What? All of this and Jesus Christ too?

Jesus is enough, and idolatry is dumb.

God’s intention is to restore believers in Christ and turn them into new people. “If anyone is in Christ,” the Scripture says, “he is a new creation. The old has gone and the new has come” (2 Cor 5:17). As Christians, we are invited to cooperate with this “new creation” vision for our lives.

Our motivation for embracing newness of life in Jesus is different than moralistic motivation. Religious moralists comply with God’s rules to feel morally straight and morally superior, and also to earn applause from God, others, and themselves. Christians, on the other hand, are able to obey God because they don’t have to.

Allow me to explain that.

If you are a Christian—that is, if you have anchored your trust in the perfect life and self-donating death of Jesus on your behalf, then you must know that God smiles over you before you lift a finger to do anything good. Christianity is different than moralism because unlike moralism, God’s embrace is given at the beginning of our journey versus having to wait until the end.

This means God approves of us not because we are good people, but because Jesus was a truly “good person” in our stead. His moral straightness, righteousness, and beauty have been placed upon us as a gift. That, and that alone, is why we obey: because it makes us want to obey.

God does not love us because we first loved him. No, we love God because he first loved us. That is biblical Christianity.

HOW IDOLATRY WORKS

Imagine you are married woman and your husband tells you he wants to start dating around. “It’s not that I don’t love you,” he says. “I’m not saying that I want a divorce. You are extremely important to me. We have been through so much together. But I think my life will be better if I also date some other women. Mind if I play the field a little bit?”

As absurd as this sounds, this is what we do to God when we stray from him and disobey. Every disobedience flows from a desire for something or someone besides God to be our first love, our true north, our reason for being. Each of us has his/her own unique potential “mistresses”—whether it be money, power, cleanliness, control, a relationship, material things, entertainment, or even a spouse or children.

Idolatry is relational poison of the heart. As such, it is the opposite of love for God, neighbor, and oneself.

When anything becomes more essential to us than God—even if “anything” is itself a good thing—it becomes as a poison. It becomes to us an idol, a false deity, a a controlling functional lord, an impotent messiah, a pretend Jesus. According to God, who is our true and everlasting Husband, we become spiritual adulterers.

An idol is any person or idea, any created thing that captures our deepest affections and loyalties and will, and in doing so steals our attention from God. An idol is anything that has become more precious to us than he. It’s not that we love the thing too much, but rather that we love God too little in comparison to it.

THE SIN BENEATH ALL OTHER SINS

Idolatry is the root beneath all sin and beneath every choice we ever make to go our own way instead of following Jesus in faith and obedience. Sin, ultimately, is not a matter of behavior, but a matter of desire.

We always obey whatever it is that we desire most.

When we desire something more than we desire God, we will obey that something whenever we are faced with a choice to obey God or obey it. This is what keeps us from being good in the purest sense. Our distorted over-desires escort us into the arms of adulterous lovers, pseudo-saviors, counterfeit Jesuses that put a spell on us and distract our affections away from the One who loved us and gave himself for us.

How do we do this? Thanks to David Powlison and his insightful essay, Idols of the Heart and Vanity Fair, there are several diagnostic questions that can help us effectively identify and name our specific spiritual mistresses:

1. What do I feel I cannot survive or function without?
   What do I feel I must have in order to enjoy life, be acceptable as a person, etc.? What are the things I am terrified of losing or obsessed about having?

2. Where do I spend my time and money with the least amount of effort?
   The things we give time and money to most effortlessly are absolutely the things that we worship and serve. They are the things that we believe in our hearts will give our lives the most meaning.

3. What do I think and talk about the most?
   Where do my thoughts go most quickly and most instinctively when I am alone in the car, when I awake, when I am alone in a quiet, undistracted place? As Archbishop William Temple once said, “Your religion is your solitude.”

4. Which biblical commands am I most reluctant to obey?
   What do I treasure so much that, if it is threatened, I will disobey God to keep it? What is so essential to me that I will disobey God to get it?

5. What things anger me the most?
   What kinds of people, things, or circumstances irritate me the most, and what about these people, things, or circumstances give them this kind of power over me? What, if it happened, would strongly tempt me to curse God or push Him out of my life? Remember Job’s wife (Job 2:9).

6. How would I fill in the blank?
   I cannot and will not be happy unless _______________.

DISMANTLING IDOLS AFTER THEY ARE IDENTIFIED

The Puritan John Owen famously said:

Always be killing sin or sin will be killing you.

This is especially true of the root sin of idolatry. It must be uprooted and dismantled, lest it return in different form.

Idols are dismantled when they are exposed and then replaced. The dismantling requires that we labor in our meditation of Scripture to understand the many ways Jesus fills our emptiness in a much more adequate, life-giving way than any Jesus-substitute we may be tempted to worship and serve.

Replacing our spiritual mistresses means giving them a back seat to Jesus in our hearts and lives. Every idol (and every sin) traces back to a self-salvation strategy. We use this strategy whenever we try to replace something that only Jesus can provide, with a counterfeit. What does this mean for us?

It means that we must face head-on our own idols, and humbly admit exactly how the things we love more than Jesus will reduce us, empty us of ultimate meaning, and even destroy us. We must admit that our “over-desires” cannot bring us the wholeness, happiness, or fulfillment (salvation!) we desire. Only Jesus can.

Ironically, only when we love Jesus more than these things, we actually end up enjoying these things to a much fuller extent! As C.S. Lewis once said:

“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither.”

When our love for Jesus exceeds our love for other things, we end up loving, cherishing, and enjoying these other things even more than we would if we had loved these other things more than we love Jesus. But if we put the gifts in the place of the Giver, our enjoyment of the gifts ends up getting spoiled. Why? Because we are made in the image of God.

The human soul is so magnificent that only God is big enough to fill it. As Pascal is famous for saying, only God can fill the God-shaped vacuum in the human heart.

Be possessive of anything but God—a romantic interest, a career, a financial portfolio, a life goal, a reputation, or a hobby—and you will never possess that thing. Instead, it will take possession of you. It will have you and it will hold you, right around the neck. This is why we are much better off when we learn to pray like the Puritan who had nothing to his name but one piece of bread and a glass of water:

“What? All of this and Jesus Christ too?!”

REDIRECTING OUR DEEPEST LOVES

Christian growth is about learning to see clearly that Jesus will fill our hearts in more adequate and enduring ways than any Jesus-counterfeit will. Using Scripture, we must immerse our minds and stir our affections with the many ways Jesus delivers on the promises our chosen idols falsely make to us.

For example, if we thirst for approval, only the unwavering smile of God over us through Jesus can free us from enslavement to human approval. Or, if we hunger for secure provision, only the God’s sure promise to take care of us like he does the birds and the lilies can free us from our enslavement to money and things. Et cetera.

How about you? What are your spiritual mistresses? How are they working out for you? Have you talked yourself into believing they will nourish your soul better than Jesus will?

They will not.