First, be honest with the Lord about it. Trust that if you confess this idol to the Lord, He will forgive you and open His arms to you. Second, ask Him to show you how this idol is deceiving you and stealing the contentment the Lord offers His children right where you are. Third, ask Him to show you what this desire—for marriage, for achievement, for your family’s well-being, for your country’s well-being, for the advancement of your cause —would look like if it existed in a proper place beneath a supreme desire for Him and for His glory.
“Little children, keep yourselves from idols,” writes the aged Apostle John at the end of his first epistle (1 John 5:21). Years earlier, Paul exhorted the Colossians to “put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Col. 3:5, emphasis added). If the Old Testament prophets warned the people of God against idols of silver and gold forged in the kiln (Isa. 37:19), the New Testament writers alert us to idols of another kind: the idols of ideas and obsessions forged in the heart.
In recent years, the church has come to speak of this second kind of idols as “idols of the heart.” Is God the object of our hearts’ deepest affections and longings, or is something else captivating us? That “something else” need not be evil in itself. When Jesus says we must choose whether we will serve God or money, it is not because money is bad in itself; rather, as Paul says, it is “the love of money” that is the root of all kinds of evil (Matt. 6:21–24; 1 Tim. 6:10, emphasis added). Accordingly, our fallen hearts can take all kinds of good things—money, achievement, romance, patriotism, family, even a noble cause—and turn them into dangerous idols that lead us away from a pure devotion to the Lord and into spiritual adultery (with all the danger and misery that includes).
If you have an idol in your heart, you should not delay in dealing with it. But you must first know if it’s there, and that requires spiritual diagnosis. In this short piece, I want to suggest there are three symptoms that indicate the presence of an idol of the heart. If you find these three symptoms of idolatry present in your life, you need to take urgent action.
The first symptom of an idol is you continually find yourself thinking about it when you have nothing else to think about it. It operates like an obsession in the back of your mind, calling for constant attention. You think obsessively about winning the next game, or getting married, or that pressing issue at work, or the state of your portfolio, or the details of your kids’ lives, or what other people may be thinking or saying about you.
It would be entirely appropriate to give some of your attention to these things, and sometimes even significant attention to them. You would want to be prepared for tomorrow’s presentation at work, attentive to your child’s well-being, involved in the affairs of your nation, or committed to a good cause. But if you find that all of your thoughts have a way of funneling toward this central obsession, and have for some time, it signals the presence of something that has become an idol.
The second symptom of an idol is you find yourself taking unwise measures to attain it. You might date someone you know you shouldn’t date or let a relationship cross boundaries you know it shouldn’t cross.
[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The link (URL) to the original article at Tabletalk Magazine is unavailable and has been removed.]
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