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| Rev. Brian Wilkie |
By Rev.
Brian Wilkie
Pastor of St. Andrew's Christian Community
Rockland, Ontario
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PODCAST LINK to CFRA
broadcast - Sunday, November 22nd, 2015:
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Broadcast Notes:
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Welcome to Good News In the Morning a program of words and music
bringing a Christian message of hope and encouragement to those who are looking
for intelligent meaningful and spirited approach to faith and to life.
This program is sponsored by Good News Christian Ministries PO Box 184
Rideau Ferry, Ontario K0G 1W0. I'm your host today, Brian Wilkie of St.
Andrew's Christian Church in Rockland. As always I want to start by thanking
you our listeners. We are so grateful for your encouragement and support. Your
feedback on the website is something that really stirs our hearts. Seeing the
number of downloads that are coming from across the globe helps us to recognize
that God is using this ministry throughout the world. Please remember that you
can always visit our website for materials to encourage and support you in your
Christian walk.
If you miss an episode of the show you can go to our website and
download the podcast or the MP3 of our broadcast. Details can be found on our
website, www.GNCM.ca
On today's program I want to give thanks to another Christian community
that has sponsored a show - this show, and that community is Lift Jesus Higher, the Catholic
Charismatic community, based in Vanier. I've been so delighted by their
participation and in the wider Christian work within city of Ottawa, and we as
a ministry are pleased that they are recognizing the work we are doing on the
radio.
'Idolatry In Our Day'
Idols in our Hearts
Here, today, I want to speak to you about idolatry: idolatry in our
hearts. I am going to read to you a Scripture that addresses this, from the
prophet Ezekiel chapter 14 verses 1 to 11. Here's something that happened in
life of the prophet:
Scripture Ezekiel 14:1–11
14 Some of the elders of Israel came to me
and sat down in front of me. 2 Then the word of the Lord came to me: 3 “Son of
man, these men have set up idols in their hearts and put wicked stumbling
blocks before their faces. Should I let them inquire of me at all? 4 Therefore
speak to them and tell them, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: When any Israelite sets up
idols in his heart and puts a wicked stumbling block before his face and then
goes to a prophet, I the Lord will
answer him myself in keeping with his great idolatry. 5 I will do
this to recapture the hearts of the people of Israel, who have all deserted me
for their idols.’
6
“Therefore
say to the house of Israel, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Repent! Turn from your idols and renounce all
your detestable practices!
7
“
‘When any Israelite or any alien living in Israel separates himself from me and
sets up idols in his heart and puts a wicked stumbling block before his face
and then goes to a prophet to inquire of me, I the Lord will answer him myself. 8 I will set my face
against that man and make him an example and a byword. I will cut him off from
my people. Then you will know that I am the Lord.
9
“
‘And if the prophet is enticed to utter a prophecy, I the Lord have enticed that prophet, and I
will stretch out my hand against him and destroy him from among my people
Israel. 10 They will bear their guilt—the prophet will be as guilty
as the one who consults him. 11 Then the people of Israel will no
longer stray from me, nor will they defile themselves anymore with all their
sins. They will be my people, and I will be their God, declares the Sovereign Lord.’ ”
Wow, that's a strong message from Scripture about idolatry. Normally we
think of idols as the things that people used to worship that were made of wood,
or stone, or precious metal and they were carved into various shapes to
represent the characteristics of what they thought God was like. They would
carve idols of beasts of great strength to show that the Lord was powerful or that
a 'god' was powerful. They would carve things that they thought were likenesses
of whatever god it was which they were worshiping. They would carve images with
fertility themes. They would carve images with themes of wisdom or with themes
of vengeance or war. These idols that they would set in their homes and in
their temples were objects of worship, objects of attention to their gods.
That's what we think of when we think of idolatry.
Now here's the odd thing about this: the Lord says that that the people
of Israel had set up idols in their hearts! In their hearts, not on their hearths,
not in their temples not in the high places. We're used to that kind of talk
about idolatry because idolatry is a huge theme of the Bible. We see idolatry
happening among the people of Israel, even before there is an Israel. We see
idolatry happening in various forms in the church of the New Testament. We see
a strong concern throughout the Scriptures that the people let go of idolatry,
but here Ezekiel is told by God of an idol that is set up in the heart. We know
that we're talking metaphorically or at least we are talking about idols that
aren't carved out of gold or stone or wood. Not idols that are physically
present, but idols which are nevertheless distracting people from devotion to
God, idols that are keeping people from the word of God. Could it be possible
that the message for Ezekiel still stands today as a warning and reminder, even
to the people of God today, about idolatry in their hearts?
We will certainly look at what
that means in a few moments but first I would like you to hear a song by
Michael Card which speaks very specifically to the way that people will make
sacrifices to the things that are most important to them and he describes this
in the song The Spirit of the Age. This is from his album The Life, Part One.
I find the song which we just heard a very moving one. The idea of what
we worship really talks about the things we give up, the things we sacrifice in
order to achieve the goals that we have, and to appease the demands that our
'god' places on us.
Now, the God of Jesus Christ requires that we believe in his Son, but
the 'gods' of the ancient world required much harsher service they sometimes
required the sacrifice of children in order to cause the crops to grow. Even in
old Britain they used to appease the river gods by sacrificing a child in the
foundations of a bridge. The sacrifices that idolatry made were some things
that God absolutely abhorred. He even goes to great length with the with the
patriarch Abraham to show him that he would not require Abraham to give his own
son. By making a command to go to the mountain and leaving Abraham thinking
that he was going to end up sacrificing his son, God forever destroys the
notion that he, the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Jacob and Isaac, God,
the Father of Jesus Christ, he completely destroys the idea that he would
require us to sacrifice other humans in order to please him.
So why is it that God despises idolatry? Why is God a jealous God, a God
who demands that we worship him and him alone? It is precisely because
worshiping anything else destroys us. Worshiping anything else makes us into
the kind of people that we should not be: People who will sacrifice anything to
achieve our goals, people who will sacrifice others, who will sacrifice justice,
who will sacrifice purity, who will sacrifice love, in order to achieve our
goals.
We all run into those people. in life haven't we? The people who will
just walk over anybody in order to get to where they're going. That is the kind
of thing that God never wants for his people. That's why he says you must
worship him alone. We must worship only God because he alone calls us to love
with all our hearts, to trust with all our hearts, to be even willing to lay
down our own lives in order to bless others, instead of taking others people's
lives, taking others people's joy, in order to please our own hearts. Idolatry
causes destruction.
I've got to let you know, and I really want to let you know that I'm
influenced in today's talk by a really powerful book by Kyle Idleman called gods at war. You might want to take down
that name and title: Kyle Idleman, gods
at war, because I think it is a very helpful workbook in examining the
idols in our own life. I want to share with you some of the things that that
come about book and come out of Scripture as we talk today about idolatry.
How can you identify if you have set up an idol in your heart? In Ezekiel
it is made clear that people who have set up idols in their heart have given up
the right to seek direction from God, to seek a prophecy from God. In that day
people were coming thing to the prophet saying, " tell us what we need to
do." What they want to know was how they could be more profitable in what
they did, or what they were achieving in their own lives. What they wanted was
some guidance about how to win a battle, or how to win in the marketplace. They
wanted guidance from God, but their real heart was set on something else, the idols in their heart. They weren't
pursuing God's purposes, instead they were pursuing their own purposes and
treating God is an advisor rather than as a Lord. So the God of Israel said to
Ezekiel, "When they come to you and ask you for guidance about this or that
the other thing, just tell them, 'Repent' tell them to turn away from their
idols to start worshiping the Lord." Then maybe they'll hear something from him. If
instead a prophet were to give them the message they wanted, to say some
soothing words and some worldly guidance to try and sound like they had a word
from God, then that prophet too was condemned, just as much is the people who
were setting up idols in their hearts.
The prophets were disobeying God if they gave guidance while they were
overlooking the idols that were set up in people's hearts. What are the idols
they had set up in hearts? We can
imagine the idols, as we probably have experience with them. The idols are the
things that we desire that go beyond God's will. They are the things that we
want so much that we would do anything to achieve them. They are the things we
think we need.
What are those kinds of things? Sometimes people are driven by success.
Now that comes from many reasons. Greed, which Paul identifies as idolatry in
his letters to the church, greed is idolatry: they so much want success that
they're willing to set aside godliness, willing to set aside the commands of
God, willing to devote their lives to this cause, to success, and ignore God in
their lives. Let's face it sometimes we have been guilty of that.
Sometimes the idol is something that we do not trust God to provide
through godly means. You know, idols sometimes are made up of precious things! There
is nothing evil about the wood or stone or precious metals that people have used
to carve idols. Those things are good,
but to carve idols out of them, to make idols out of them, makes them into
something that is evil, something wicked. Sometimes we don't trust God in areas
where he wants to provide a good thing in our lives and so we start to seek it
through ungodly means.
Family! How many times the Scripture speaks about God's blessing people
in their families, and yet sometimes when people are looking for the right
person they don't trust God to provide a good godly partner and they're willing
to go with whomever they find. They settle for less. To have a good, godly
partner can be God's will for you, but to choose a partner that is unsuitable
just because you want to fill the loneliness in your heart usually doesn't end
well. God wants to spare you that that's why he sometimes calls people to wait.
There are other places where we can have a idols. I think one of the
things we can test in our hearts is what makes you anxious. What makes you
fearful? What are the things that you're afraid you won't get, that you don't
really trust God to provide. Are they things that God wants to provide, but you
just aren't sure he's going to come through? or are they things that have
really nothing to do with your purpose, nothing to do with the happiness he
wants to give, but instead are things that you shouldn't be pursuing in the
first place? Maybe you are anxious because you know that that's really not
God's purpose and plan for you.
What are the things you do by ungodly means? What are the things you
cheat on, things you twist, the things you lie about in order to achieve them? You've
put achieving those goals above honoring God and above obedience to God. Your
faith in God is lacking and you need to turn from that.
Imagine an ancient farmer who worships Yahweh, the God of Israel, but he
doesn't fully trust him, so in addition to praying to God, he appeals to gods
of rain and fertility. He thinks his harvest is more important than
faithfulness. You'd agree that is idolatry, wouldn't you?
Now imagine the modern farmer, He worships God but doesn't trust God
fully, so he cheats his employees, falsifies his taxes and, in his anxiety, he
mistreats or neglects his family. He too thinks success is more important
godliness, and success has become his idol.
Now has as we look at this thing, God says something to the people of
Israel. At one point (in the book of the prophet Micah) he says, "I have
two things that I accuse you of," he says, "you have abandoned the
spring of living water," by which he means they'd abandoned God, and then
he tells them, "and what's more you have turned to cisterns of your own"
-which are - Cisterns are storage places for water- "but these are not ordinary cisterns that you've turn to these
are broken cisterns that won't hold any water." How foolish the people of
Israel were: they turned from the spring of living water and built cisterns
that were broken and didn't even hold any water.
Here's a song that speaks about the Christian hope in terms of a
fountain that is given to us from which we can find love, life, cleanliness and
peace. There is a Fountain sung by this hope from their album a cappella hymns. (Actually this
was Fairest Lord Jesus on the broadcast)
It is a hard message, the message of idolatry, but there is actually a
very simple solution. Ezekiel puts it in very few words. He says, "repent
turn from your idols and renounce all your detestable practices." That's
what we're called to in Jesus Christ, to repent: decide that we are going to follow
God, and accept and settle for his plans, trusting that his plans are better
than our plans; That we're going to do things his way. So you can examine your cheque
book and your calendar and your temperament for signs of idolatry. What are you
spending your money and your time on? How are you distracted from the purposes
that God has for you? Confess to God your unhappiness, confess your ingratitude
confess that you been seeking happiness above godliness, and ask him to cleanse
and renew your spirit. Remember that God is faithful. Remember that God is
faithful! You can trust that he, alone, and only he, can give you life.
Let's come before God in prayer and put this before him today.
Lord, we have,
very possibly, got idols in our hearts some of us having heard your Word are
aware of them right now and we want to turn away from them. We want to have
clean heart again and we want to live for you.
Some of us are
asking you to search our hearts and see if there's a wicked way in us, as we do
want to be clean even if we currently unaware of any unfaithfulness in our
lives. Search us and find if there's anything that needs to change and help us to
change, to live solely and fully for you. Let us return to you and be healed
and cleansed and embraced by your great love, in Jesus' name, amen.
Once again I want to thank you, our listeners, for your encouragement
and support. We do thank you that you keep us on the air week by week through
your financial support. If you wish to make a donation you can do so on our
website www.GNCM.ca, www.GoodNewsChristianMinistries.ca and you can also write
a cheque and send it to Good News Christian Ministries at P.O. Box 184 Rideau
Ferry, Ontario K0G 1W0. Canadian residents will get a tax receipt for any
donations that they've made.
I do want to encourage you to tell others about the program. Be sure to
worship in a church where the gospel is soundly proclaimed and lived out with
compassion integrity and resolve. Now to conclude our program I'd like to have
you listen to a song called My Redeemer
is Faithful by Steven Curtis Chapman from his album Firsthand. This is a reminder that you can trust God, forsake all
other idols, and let him lead you in his ways.
I do pray that the Lord will hold your heart and you would know Jesus
personally and profoundly. May the Holy Spirit reside deep within your heart,
may the heavenly Father surround you with his constant and abiding and
accompanying love.
Good News In The Morning is produced in the Studios of News Talk Radio 580
CFRA.
Rev. Brian Wilkie
St.
Andrew's Christian Community,
Rockland, Ontario
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To listen to the
above broadcast, click on the following link:
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