Grace Thoughts

Guest (Male): Hello friends, welcome to Grace Thoughts, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelley. Grace Thoughts has been dedicated to preaching the clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: Healthy people on the inside—I'm not talking about healthy people on the outside—are not those who do not battle some life-controlling substance. A healthy person isn't necessarily somebody who attends and participates in a local church such as this. A healthy person isn't necessarily somebody who has a great family life or who maybe has made generally good decisions for their life. Healthy people, my friends, when I talk about healthy people, I'm talking about people who derive their internal life from the right sources.

That's what I would call a healthy person. I get my internal life, my thought life, my points of motivation, from the right source. I don't get them from exterior sources, nor do I look for them there, at least I don't look for them very long. It's very important, and we try in our teaching and preaching here at Grace Connection to always remember Jesus is all about the inward life more than the outward life. Christianity is wrought internally more than externally. We'll see a little bit later in the message that we flip that around sometimes. We make our Christian life external and not internal, even creating an idol out of it.

Mark 7:15 says, "It is not what goes into your body that defiles you." Jesus said, "You are defiled by what comes from the heart." The Lord is saying here it's not what we do that defiles us, but the corrupt soil in our souls that grows that behavior. Virtually all areas of human weakness—that would be outward weakness, besetting sin, addictions, and so forth—and inward weakness—fears, loneliness, insecurities, unmet needs—can be traced back to an ancient practice: idolatry.

We titled the message "Little Stone People." I was going to title the message "Stoned in St. Petersburg," but that might get me in trouble, so I didn't do that. So it's "Little Stone People." We don't worship idols like this—at least I hope you don't worship idols like this. We don't worship idols like this in 2014 in America, but there is idol worship going on in 2014 in America virtually, I would say, in almost every life. We want to look at that a little bit this morning.

The word "idolatry," "teraphim," which I named our little pal over here, comes from the root word that means "healer." He becomes a healer. He has a promise attached to him that "I can give you something, I can heal you." That's what the root word for idolatry means: healer. G. Campbell Morgan, a great commentator from a century and a half ago or so—not that long ago, maybe 100 years—wrote this on modern idolatry: "Materialism is a perpetual lust, an unanswered agony of desire. Sensualism is a deadly opiate. Novelty is a pernicious irritant. It is a fruitless search. There is no substitute for the Word of God directly heard by the spirit of man and obeyed. Restlessness is a fever, and fever is a destroying fire."

Now, today you came to church, and you're getting free food at Chick-fil-A. Life can't get any better than that. But if I told you this, if I said, "Hey, next week if you come back, I'm going to give you all a million dollars," do you think we might have a full house next week? Yeah, you'd bring friends, wouldn't you? You'd get your friends, you'd get everyone and say, "Hey, you come to church with me, I'll give you $10,000." You'd make a profit on that deal. And you could show up, and the preacher promised us a million dollars if we come to church. So you're all piling in here, and I'd say, "Hey, I want to give you a million dollars, I just don't have it. Sorry."

You're not going to like me, first of all. You see, the problem is I made you a promise, but I couldn't back it up. I couldn't deliver the promise. That's what idolatry is. It makes you a promise: "I'm the healer. I'm going to give you something you need. I'm going to meet a need that is unmet. I'm going to fulfill you in a way that you feel unfulfilled. I'm promising you this. I can be your healer." But it's just a little stone person. It has no life, it has no power, it has no ability. Idolatry is when my trust is transferred from God to another object, a person, a skill, a talent, or an experience.

Now, go to Isaiah 44, a popular passage on idolatry. God is talking to Israel through the prophet Isaiah here. Let me read you a good portion of this passage. "A carpenter," verse 13, "stretches a line, he marks it out with a pencil, he shapes it with the planes and marks it with a compass. He shapes it into the figure of a man, with the beauty of a man, to dwell in a house. He cuts down cedars, and he chooses a cypress tree or an oak and lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest. He plants a cedar in the rain to nourish it. Then it becomes fuel for a man."

"He takes part of it and warms himself, he kindles a fire and he bakes bread. Also, he makes a god and worships it. He makes an idol that falls down and falls down before it. Half of it burns in the fire, over the half he eats meat. He roasts it and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, 'Aha, I'm warm, I have seen the fire.' And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, and falls down to it and worships it. And he prays to it and says, 'Deliver me, for you are my god.'"

See what he's saying? The carpenter cuts down the wood, he builds things, takes some of that wood, makes a fire, cooks his food on the fire, then saves a little bit of that wood and makes a little idol. "I've got wood, I've got a fire, I've got a house, and now I've got a god. I'm going to worship my god. I just made it. Not a real big god, not a real powerful god because I made it, but that's my god." He worships it.

Verse 18: "They know not, nor do they discern, for he has shut their eyes so they cannot see and their hearts so they cannot understand. No one considers, nor is there knowledge or discernment to say, 'Half of it is burned in the fire, I have also baked bread on its coals, I roasted meat and have eaten, and shall I make the rest of it an abomination? Shall I fall down before a block of wood?'" An interpreter says this about this verse, warning about this type of empty, well-worn religion.

Behind it all stands his invincible faith in one God, exalted and sovereign in the earth, present in the hearts and the consciousness of man, available to all who cry to Him, yet invisible and holy, whom men apprehend not by seeing of the physical eye but of the eye of faith and the revelation of the Word of God. So I worship my block of wood. Verse 20: "He feeds on ashes, a deluded heart has led him astray. And he cannot deliver himself or say, 'Is there not a lie in my right hand?'"

Verse 20 in the *Message Bible* says this: "The lover of emptiness of nothing is so out of touch with reality, so far gone, that he can't even look and see what he's doing, can't even look at the no-god stick of wood in his hand and say, 'This is crazy.'" The idolater, Gill says, delights in his idol. He pleases himself and seeks comfort and satisfaction from it, fills and feeds himself with hopes and expectations of being helped and delivered by it. But this is all vain hope, a mere delusion. It is as if a man fed on ashes instead of food. It is feeding on that which has no savor, no substance, can yield no nourishment, but on the contrary is pernicious and hurtful.

So God's mocking the idol worshipers, saying, "You make this idol and you worship it. It's endless, it's feeding on ashes, it's empty. It has no power to do anything for you." Now, none of us are going to worship Teraphim up here, and none of us probably have a little thing at our house, we have a little wood here where we have a candle burned to it or a crystal or something like that. At least if you do, please see me or Dr. Lewis after church; we'll pray deliverance for you or something like that. We don't really deal with that type of idol worship today. It's not something that we really address, not in America anyway. Other nations may still deal with some of these things.

But do you think Satan is so narrow-minded that this is the only type of idolatry that he would use? He'll use anything to replace God. He'll use anything to convince you there's another healer than Jesus Christ. And that's what we want to look at a little bit today. How does idolatry happen, first of all? Where is the internal soil of our souls? How does that take place and let it grow? Well, we could probably have lots of things to say about this, but quickly I want to say three basic things about this.

Number one, we enter into idolatry because we lose our consciousness of God on a personal level. MacLaren says we ignore God. You see, we often draw close to God in trials and heartache, but become complacent when all is smooth. For instance, everything's going good: the marriage is good, the finances are good, the career's going good, no bad health checkups at the doctor. And not that this happens to everyone, but sometimes things are pretty good. "God, I'm just going to take you and place you over here for a little bit. But don't go too far away because I'm sure at some point I'll need you again." A crisis Christ, we call it.

Then the doctor's report comes in that wasn't very good, and it's like, "Oh God, remember how tight we were? Forgive me for walking away." We've all done it. That's why I don't think a lot of people can actually stand the test of prosperity. Prosperity makes us just relax, and our spiritual tautness, the bowstring (Hebrews 12:3), loosens. So we lose our consciousness of God on a personal level. In other words, we stop fearing Him. Fearing not in the sense we'd think in our English, but fear in the Hebrew and the Greek simply means I have an awe. I'm awed by God. I'm taken away by His presence. Meeting Him every morning puts me into this state of worship.

Thinking about redemption and the work of the cross captures my heart. There's an awe of God in my life. There's a sense—and this is what thankfulness will do for you and praise will do for you—you'll wake up and it'll keep the awe of God fervent in your life and high in your life. Because when God stops being God, when He stops being high and lifted up and majestic to us, something else has to fill that role. We're going to worship something. We're going to rely on something. We're going to try to derive life from something. And if it's not Him, it's being replaced with Teraphim.

Second, we enter into idolatry because we don't like God's provision. A good example of this is on Mount Sinai. Moses went up, and he was gone much longer than people thought he was going to be gone. Next thing you know, they're building a golden calf. We often don't think God is able to do for us what we want or think we need to be done, so we create our own idols. A good illustration of this is in Israel when Israel went into the Promised Land and they were supposed to drive the Canaanites out. And of course, we know they didn't. They did to a point, then they stopped and quit the job.

Then before you knew it, within half a generation, the Israelites were worshipping the Canaanite gods, Asherah and different gods they had. The Canaanites were more like naturalists. They looked at the soil and the sun and the moon and the rain and the dirt and all that stuff, and that's what they would worship. So the Israelites come into their land knowing that God delivered them and watched the power of God in Egypt and watched the water come from the rock and watched the manna grow on the ground every morning. They watched all those things.

But then they looked at this beautiful land of milk and honey and they said, "Hey, you know, maybe these Canaanite gods had something to them. I mean, this is a pretty nice place. So maybe we should sort of mix the two." Elijah said on Mount Carmel, he looks at Israel before the big battle with the prophets of Baal and said, "How long will you halt between two opinions? How long will you go back and forth? Either worship God or worship Baal, but get off the fence." That's what Elijah's saying.