13 Questions to Diagnose Your Idolatries

By: Tyler Kenney
http://www.desiringgod.org/Blog/2624_13_questions_to_diagnose_your_idolatries/

http://www.hopeingod.org/player?url=sermons/20100822_KStokes.mp3&nid=42641


Idolatry is a word to describe what happens when we turn our worship away from God and attach it to anyone and anything else. Thereby, idolatry gives rise to the myriad of sinful desires and sinful actions that characterize humanity apart from grace. Romans 1:24-25 says, as a form of judgment, that God has given humanity over to our idolatry-driven desires. “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.” As judgment, God has given them up to vain, idol worship.
This is like this week’s Fighter Verse, Matthew 6:24, “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.
Overall the biblical teaching is consistent. An idol is anything or anyone that takes the rightful place of God. It doesn’t matter if it is an object or a person or anything else. It doesn’t matter if there is an actual “carved image” or not. It is true to observe that in the New Testament there is more of a focus on “idolatry of the heart” and less of a focus on idolatry of carved images.
David Powlison observes, “If ‘idolatry’ is the characteristic and summary of the Old Testament word for our drift from God, then ‘desires’ is the characteristic and summary New Testament word for the same drift…Interestingly (and surprisingly) the New Testament merges the concept of idolatry and the concept of inordinate, life-ruling desires. Idolatry becomes a problem of the heart” (Powlison, 36). When a created thing takes the place of worth, value, beauty, honor, trust, fear or love that rightly belongs to God, it is an idol.
How does this biblical perspective inform our understanding of 1 John 5:21? Since 1 John says nothing about worshipping carved images, verse 21 most likely refers to idols in their broader New Testament metaphorical sense of “idols of the heart.”[3] The warning is to cast out the myriad of idols within own hearts. And the warning is to keep yourselves from the idols that you create in your heart to satisfy “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions” (1 John 2:16).
Search Your Heart
How do we search our hearts for idols? First, don’t think of idols as primarily bad things. More often, they are good things that we have exalted to become ultimate. So don’t think if idols as primarily bad things but more often as good things. I find it most help to put it this way: Idolatry is when God’s gifts become gods.
Thomas Oden writes,
When a finite value [becomes a center of value by which other values are judges and] has been elevated to centrality and imagined as a final source of meaning, then one has chosen what Jews and Christians call a god…To be worshipped as a god, something must be sufficiently good to be plausibly regarded as the rightful center of one’s valuing…One has a god when a finite value is worshipped and adored and viewed as that without which one cannot receive life joyfully.[4]
In his sermon titled “Soul Idolatry Excludes Men Out of Heaven,” English Puritan Pastor David Clarkson (1621-1686) gives us thirteen pointers I’ll draw from to help us identify the idols of our hearts and I will frame them as questions.[5]
1.What do you most highly value?
2.What do you think about by default?
3.What is your hightest goal?
4.To what or whom are you most commited?
5.Who or what do you love the most?
6.Who or what do you trust or depend upon the most?
7.Who or what do you fear the most?
8.Who or what do you hope in and hope for most?
9.Who or what do you desire the most? Or, what desire makes you most angry or makes you despair when it is not satisfied?
10.Who or what do you most delight in, your greatest joy and treasure?
11.Who or what captures your greatest zeal?
12.To whom or for what are you most thankful?
13.For whom or what great purpose do you work?
Tim Keller says, Sin isn’t only doing bad things, it is more fundamentally making good things into ultimate things. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything, even a very good thing, more than on God. Whatever we build our life on will drive us and enslave us. Sin is primarily idolatry… Instead of telling them they are sinning because they are sleeping with their girlfriends or boyfriends, I tell them they are sinning because they are looking to their careers and romances to save them, to give them everything that they should be looking for in God. This idolatry leads to drivenness, addictions, sever anxiety, obsessiveness, envy of others and resentment. (Keller, “Talking About Idolatry in a Postmodern Age,” Gospel Coalition).
I would urge you to search your heart too. Ask God for help, and he will help you. Search your heart to identify your idols. They are there, shaping your values, birthing sinful desires and causing sinful actions. Search your heart by the light of the Word and presence of the Spirit. What or who functions as your ultimate value, your ultimate meaning, your ultimate joy? What is the center of your life? Whatever it is, if it isn’t God it is one of his gifts.
As you search your heart, don’t let yourself off the hook by identifying someone else’s idols. It is so easy to do. O how easy it is to see the idols in the lives of other people. On the one hand, this can be helpful in the context of a humble community of believers. We can help one another see our idols and fight the fight of faith together. On the other hand, this can be deadly in a people blinded by pride because the hardest idols to see are your own. The danger is that I may swell with the self-exalting delusion that “Everyone else has idols, except me!” Look in your heart. The hardest idols to see are your own.
Next week, Lord willing, come back and I hope to describe some of the workings of specific idols with the hope that God would grant us new awareness, new insight, new vigilance and new power to worship God in Christ alone. For his glory and our joy, now and forever.