Tim Keller: Gospel Ministry Challenges Idolatry

Tim Keller: We’re here to talk about gospel ministry, and most of the talks and most of the messages, the expositions are going to be a consecutive covering of the book of Second Timothy on how to steward and communicate the gospel. But what I’m going to do here at the front and Don Carson at the end, we’re going to do two bookend expositions to reflect on the nature of gospel ministry. In my case, because I want to talk about something that is assumed in Second Timothy very, very important to gospel ministry. But it’s not explicit there, but it’s explicit in the book of Acts. And I’m going to read to you from Acts chapter 19. I’m just going to read verses 23 to 41 it’s a very entertaining and extremely interesting and vivid incident in the ministry of Paul, and one of the very few places in the book of Acts where you have an incident depicted without actually a sermon from an apostle. There’s no actual example of apostolic preaching, except for a little synopsis, which you’ll hear in the middle acts 19, starting verse 23 about that time, there arose a great disturbance about the way a silversmith named Demetrius, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought in no little business for the craftsmen. He called them together along with the workmen in related trades, and said, Men, you know, we receive a good income from this business. And you see and hear how this fellow, Paul has convinced and led astray large numbers of people here in Ephesus and in practically the whole province of Asia, he says that man made gods are no Gods at all. There is a danger, not only that our trade will lose its good name, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be discredited, and the goddess herself, who is worshiped throughout the province of Asia and the world, will be robbed of her divine majesty. When they heard this, they were furious and began shouting, great is Artemis of the Ephesians. Soon, the whole city was in an uproar. The people seized Gaius and Aristarchus Paul’s traveling companions from Macedonia, and rushed as one man into the theater. Paul wanted to appear before the crowd, but the disciples would not let him. Even some of the officials of the province, friends of Paul sent him a message begging him not to venture into the theater. The assembly was in confusion. Some were shouting one thing, some another, and most of the people did not even know why they were there. The Jews pushed Alexander to the front, and some of the crowd shouted instructions to him. He motioned for silence in order to make a defense before the people. But when they realized he was a Jew, they all shouted in unison for about two hours, great is Artemis of the Ephesians. Finally, the city clerk quieted the crowd and said, Men of Ephesus, doesn’t all the world know that the city of Ephesus is the guardian of the temple of the great Artemis and of her image which fell from heaven. Therefore, since these facts are undeniable, you ought to be quiet and not do anything rash. You have brought these men here, though they have neither robbed temples nor blasphemed our goddess, if then Demetrius and his fellow craftsmen have a grievance against anybody, the courts are open. There are the proconsuls. They can press charges. If there’s anything further you want to bring up, it must be settled, settled in a legal assembly. As it is, we are in danger of being charged with rioting because of today’s events, and in that case, we would not be able to account for this commotion, since there is no reason for it. After he said this, he dismissed the assembly. That’s the reading of God’s Word. The main thing I’d like to show you is that Paul, in his preaching of the Gospel, always took on and challenged the idols of the culture, the idols of the people’s hearts. And therefore you really can’t, you can’t really minister the gospel in a. Changing way, unless you also, like Paul always did, discern and expose and challenge the idols of your place. What I’d like to show you here is something about how to discern idols, how to expose idols, and then finally, how to destroy idols, how to discern them, and then how to expose them, and therefore how to destroy them. First, discerning idols. You see, Paul preached the gospel in such a way that it changed his converts lives because he went after the idols of the region and the idols of the people’s hearts, when people converted, it so changed the way in which they lived in the world that it affected the culture. See, in most cases, I think today, there’s a lot of folks having BORN AGAIN experiences, as they say, deciding for Christ, saying, I’ve received Christ as my Savior, but they don’t live any differently than anyone else in the culture. I mean, that’s actually one of the scandals of our church. I think it’s because their idols weren’t confronted with the gospel. Paul confronted the idols of the culture, so his converts changed in the way in which they lived, to the extent that the very economy was affected, the culture was affected. Now, how did he do that? As I mentioned before, acts 19 doesn’t actually give us a sermon from Paul, which is rather unusual, though. It gives us a little synopsis. I slowed down as we went over it so you could hear it. Demetrius actually gives a synopsis of the kind of preaching Paul was doing. He says, Paul, this man, this fellow. Paul says, Man made gods. Are no Gods at all. See that’s actually discerning and exposing. He was talking about the idols, and he went after the idols. Now we don’t learn more than that in this passage. So if you want to know something about this sermon, this kind of preaching, it’s not that hard. You go back through the rest of Acts. You’ll see Paul confronting the idols in Acts 14, at Lystra. You see him confronting at in Acts 16, Philippi, but probably the most famous places, acts 17, where he preached at Athens. And if you go back there, and we won’t do that very long since we’re trying to expound this passage, you will see three things about how Paul dealt with idols in his preaching. First of all, when he went into act, into Athens. Excuse me. We see in chapter 17, verse 16, he saw that the city was filled with idols. He saw the idols. He discerned the idols. He recognized them. And as I just said, I don’t think you can minister the gospel very well unless you look around your city and see the idols. Figure out what they are, the idols of see, every gender has a set of idols, every culture has a set of idols. Every every class has a set of idols. Every race has a set of idols. Every individual has a set of idols. And Paul knew what they were. And the second thing he did when he got in there was he went to the Agora to preach against the idols. Now, again, not to go too deep into Acts 17, but you and I, when you see the word agora, which has always translated the marketplace, we see Paul went into the marketplace to preach. We, in our culture now only think of the marketplace or the public square as a place where there’s a lot of shops and maybe foot traffic. So when you and I hear that Paul went into the Agora the marketplace to preach against the idols, you and I almost think about individual evangelism. He just wanted to find individuals and preach the gospel to them. And of course, he did, but you have to realize something about the agora, that’s where the culture was formed. Look, this is before print. This is before paper. I mean, essentially, this is before all communication had to happen face to face. And therefore, the agora, the marketplace, was the place, not only where there was commercial culture going on, which, of course, is very important, that’s where the business happened. There’s all the also the place where the the theaters were. This is the place where the public halls were, where everything was debated. This is the place where the law courts were, where the state office, the state houses were. In other words, for Paul to take the gospel and confront the idols in the marketplace would be like us going to Hollywood, to Harvard and in the New York Times, he is not just out on the street. See today, when we go literally out on the street, all we do is get individuals. We don’t get into the culture, because the culture is actually not there anymore, not really,

but in those in that time and place, Paul was taking the gospel into high. Hollywood, into Harvard and into, you know, to the faculty, into the boardroom of The New York Times. That’s what he was doing. And he began preaching against idols. And what are the idols see over every marketplace, certainly, we know, in Athens, also in Ephesus, over the agora, were always the shrines, the temples and the actual images of the gods, the idols. The idols overshadowed the marketplace, because all cultures are based on idols, every individual life and every community and every culture that’s not based on the glory and the grace of God is going to be based on some created thing in God’s place. Everyone and every community and every culture looks to something to save it, something to rescue it some. It puts its hope, it puts its meaning. It’s in something, and that’s the reason why, when you take a look at these gods, beauty is a great thing, but if you mythologize it, if you raise it up to the level of deity in a person’s life or in a culture’s life, where that’s what really matters more than anything else, becomes a kind of ultimate value. Then you have Aphrodite, not just beauty. And human reason is a great thing, but when you lift it up to the place where it’s that’s the thing that’s going to save us science, human reason. That’s how we decide what is right or wrong human reason, then you have Athena or money. It’s a very helpful thing to have. Making money can be a great deal of fun, and if you do very well in it, you can do an awful lot of good. It’s great to make money, but when it becomes the ultimate thing, when it begins becomes the central thing in the life of a culture, the life of an individual, then you have Artemis. Actually, we’ll get back to that in a second. In other words, these gods were over overshadowed the marketplace, not just because of how house that was an architectural motif of some kind it was. I meant every single culture is dominated by idols, unless it’s dominated by the glory and the grace of God. And what Paul did was he went into the agora. Every place he went, he identified what those idols were, and he went after them. Now we have to do the same thing. And at this point I need to under this heading, I need to, I need to deal with an objection. And here comes the objection. It goes like this. Well, yeah, of course, Paul always had to preach against idols. And you’re saying that we have to preach against idols to ever really preach the gospel in a life changing, culture shaping way. But we don’t have idols anymore. We were. We’re in modern, Western culture, and people aren’t bowing down the little statues anywhere. So how in the world should we be coming against idols? And of course, the answer to that is, biblically speaking, please don’t be naive. You know, by the way, if you want a far better, I think, version of the message you’re getting from me right now, you might want to look up an old, worthy Puritan named David Clarkson, whose three volume set of works was put out by Banner truth a long time ago, but it’s out of print now, and in the second volume, David Clarkson has an unbelievably thorough, typically Puritan sermon called Soul idolatry excludes men out of heaven. And his whole point in there, which is pretty obvious from reading the Scripture, I’ll give you a little bit of the scriptural underpinnings, is this. He says, honestly. He says, physical idolatry, bowing down, you know, with your body to a physical image, is not really all that different and a lot less prevalent than the real sin, which is what he calls soul idolatry, bowing down to some thing that probably doesn’t have a physical image in your heart. In other words, you can make anything into an idol. Anything at all doesn’t have to be a statue. It almost never is. Now where do you get this from the Scripture? Recently, I was looking at some of the some of the great passages in the Old Testament about idolatry are Ezekiel 16, Jeremiah two and three, Hosea and there, those prophets use one of the three basic metaphors in the Bible for idolatry. One of the basic metaphors is that of spiritual adultery. We love our false gods, and therefore we commit spiritual adultery with them. Another metaphor is not the marital metaphor, but the political or covenantal metaphor. We serve idols. They become spiritual masters. Yeah, and the third of course, metaphor is the religious metaphor that we we look to our gods to save us. We sacrifice to them. And what they were doing in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, especially Jeremiah and Ezekiel, they talked about idolatry, and at one point they said that you have bowed down to the gods. You committed idolatry when you entered into treaties for political protection, protective treaties with Egypt and Assyria. Now this is like this, obviously, I’ve been reading this thing for years, and never noticed this. When those prophets say that’s idolatry to have entered into those protective treaties with Egypt and Assyria, surely the government officials of Israel must have said, we’re not we’re not bowing down to the gods of Assyria. We’re not bowing down to the gods of Egypt. What are you talking about? But what the prophets were trying to say is, when you hear those protective treaties were basically, they gave up political they gave up money, they allowed high taxes, they gave up a lot of independence, and therefore they they took on political subjugation so that the great Egypt or the greatest Syria would protect them. And what the prophets were saying is, when you look to some creative thing to give you what only God can give you, that’s idolatry. They weren’t bowing down. But when you look to anything to give you the what only God can give you, that’s idolatry. Let’s, let’s, let’s drill down briefly so we can move on here. But what’s an idol? An idol is anything in your life that is so central to your life that you can’t have a meaningful life if you lose it. Idolatry is anything you look at. And in your heart of hearts, you say to it, if I have that, then my life has value, then my life has meaning. And if I would lose that, I don’t know how I would live. You see, an idol can be anything. An idol can be family and children. It can be career or making money. It can be achievement or critical acclaim. It can be social standing a romantic relationship. It can be your competence and skill. It can be physical beauty, either in yourself and or in your partner. It can be some political or social cause. It can be your moral record. It can be, and we’ll get to this in a second, your religiosity and your religious activity and even your ministry success. All of those things can be idols. Here’s why. When you lose one of those things and it’s just a good thing to you, then you’re sad. But if you lose one of those things and it’s become an ultimate thing, it’s not just a good thing, but an ultimate thing, then you want to throw yourself off a bridge. That’s how you can know whether that’s an idol in your life, because you can’t live without it. And there’s all kinds of people out there. In fact, most people in America say, I believe in God, maybe even say I go to church. And yet, they are so invested in their career that if it goes south, or they’re so invested in a particular romantic relationship, if they break up, or they’re so invested in their ministry success, that if it goes south, you want to kill yourself, and that shows that you’re in the thrall of an idol, or you’re in the arms of An idol. When you take a finite, limited thing and make it a relative thing and make it into an absolute. When you take a good thing and make it into an ultimate thing, you’ve created an idol, and you’re enthralled to it. And this is the reason why the pagans weren’t crazy to have sex gods and work gods and play, gods and nature, gods and national Gods was a God for everything. You know why? Because everything could be a God. Everything, anything, any object, relationship, pursuit or material thing, and especially the best ones can take on the role of deity in your life, or deity in a culture. And because Paul, and I hope now you saw idols everywhere, he was a really effective preacher. Which leads us to our second point. Not only does Paul discern the idols everywhere, and I hope we start to

and not please hide behind the idea that we don’t have shrines, and you know, literal shrines and temples. By the way, that’s not true. You know, they say, we do have shrines and temples. In Boston, they ask, what does he know? In New York? They ask, what does he make in Philadelphia? They ask, who’s his family? Those are idols. See, cultures have their idols because you’re, you have academic excellence, and that’s what really matters. Or you make a lot of money, that’s what really matters. And, you know, it’s funny different regions, poo, poo, people in the other city, because they say, Oh, they make such a big thing about money. You know, it’s, here’s an interesting thing. In the business world, the idol is profit. In the artistic world, the idol is sell. Expression and the artist. So in the business world, they say, Sure, express yourself, but not if it’s going to make you lose money. In the artistic world, you express yourself, and if you make money, it’s an insult. You’ve sold out. Why have you sold out? See, because now you like those people over there in the financial world, and you see their idolatry. They sell out for money, but you’ve sold out. You’ve sold out to self expression. What’s so great about self expression? It’s an idol. Do you see the idols in your vocational field? Do you see the idols in your city? Do you see the idols now, once you see them, if you see them, the second thing is, you have to expose them. In fact, that’s actually in this little synopsis, because Paul doesn’t just say there are many men made gods around but then he also says, and there are no Gods at all. Paul knew how to expose them. Now, one of the reasons that this very passage is probably given to us. I mean, commentators, of course, their job is to look at Acts 19 and say why? There’s a lot of things that happen to Paul, lots and lots of true things that really happened to Paul, but only a few of them get into the Bible. So why did Luke decide to give us this one, especially when you don’t get a sermon in it? And most of the commentators saying, I’m sure they’re right about this is, is look at what’s actually happening. This was a way to show readers that the idols, the idol worshipers who said, Our culture is falling, our social order, is in jeopardy, because these Christians are preaching this gospel, and yet, at the end, the city clerk is trying to say, Guess what, our social order is more at risk because of you than from the Christians, because the idols never deliver. When idols are threatened, there’s chaos, see, there’s confusion, there’s violence. You know, idols, when a person’s in the thrall of an idol, they can be looking pretty respectful and respectable on the outside, but you threaten that idol and they’ll kill you. And so what the point here, of course, is that, in a sense, the incident exposes the idols, the weakness of the idols, exposes the fact that it can’t they can’t they can’t deliver the social order they’re supposed to deliver. That was the big charge against the Christians, is they were, they were, they were jeopardizing the social order by saying there’s only one true God, and the idols are no Gods at all. And yet, of course, this incident tries to show no actually, the social order is more in jeopardy from the idols themselves. Now let’s press on this. Let me give you some examples. We’re here for practical ministry. There’s three kinds of idols that you’re going to have to expose if you’re going to communicate the gospel. And by the way, a lot of you are preachers, but plenty of you are not. In fact, I’ll press that in a second. If you’re trying to communicate the gospel to anybody, you need to know what their idols are, because the gospel is You’re saved by grace, and the idol is You’re saved by something else. And it’s one thing to say, oh, you know, you’re saved by grace. You’re not justified by works. But you realize how many different forms of works there are. Do you realize how many different forms of works righteousness there really are out there? And unless you’re unless you know what form you’re talking to, how do you know how to put the how to apply the gospel to it, they give you three kinds of idols that you have to expose, personal idols, religious idols and cultural idols. We could spend a lot of time on this. Maybe we will personal idols. Let me give you just three, every individual, and that means every individual, Christian or not, because we sinners. We don’t want to believe that we’re justified by grace. We don’t want to rely on God and on Christ for our salvation. So we’re going to rely on something else. That any life that’s not built on God’s glory and His grace, is going to be built on the deification of something else. It’s going to be built on turning something else into a pseudo savior, some way in which you save yourself without having to go to God. So you think you’re keeping control of your life, but you’re really not. Romans, one says that’s really the form of how sin works itself out in everybody’s life anyway. It’s always idolatry. Romans, one is pretty remarkable about that, since it’s talking about sin in general, in the whole human race. And basically says idolatry is at the essence of all sin. Let me give you three personal idols. One is the one that’s actually dealt with here money, you know, Colossians, by the way, Artemis ended up becoming, in a sense, the god the goddess of business. It’s because Artemis was the goddess of the moon, of the hunt and also of fertility, and because she was the goddess fertility, that made her associated with fertility of the ground and therefore of good harvest, and therefore of financial prosperity. And on top of that, you saw there was a reference to this by the city clerk. Where a meteorite fell to earth, near Ephesus. Many people thought the meteorite looked like a statue of Artemis, though a lot of other people didn’t, but that didn’t matter. And therefore, hey, we have a statue. I mean, gosh, she sent us her own image. And so this was they set it up, and they created the Temple of Artemis, or the Temple of Diana, which was seven times bigger than the Parthenon and was one of the wonders of the ancient world. Everybody wanted to come see the meteorite. Everybody wanted to come see the size of this thing. And it became a Disney World of the ancient world. It became an enormous tourist attraction. And as a result, because of all the commercialism that went around it, the temple became fabulously rich, and Ephesus became a business center, became a financial center, and Artemis became the goddess of business. And if you wanted to make a lot of money, you sacrificed to her, and you served her and you honored her. You see, what they’re afraid of is, if you don’t have enough people aren’t honoring Artemis. You know, our whole economy might collapse, both literally and literally, because they’re not going to be buying our our statuettes. But not only that, but perhaps it means, you know, we’re not honoring her, then business is going to go down. Isn’t that awful sacrifice to and very often there was child sacrifice. Listen, I live at an Ephesus called New York City. Let me press this home a little bit. You know, this is, I know this is going to be really shocking when I tell you this, but you know, all over New York City, there’s the practice of child sacrifice, because, see the goddess of business in the in the in New York City, if you want to get in the financial world make a lot of money, you have to sacrifice your family. The jobs are set up that way. The work is structured that way. You have to sacrifice your family. You will not be a good father or mother. You can’t be and that’s what you do if you’re going to, if you’re going to get the money, if you’re going to get the power that comes, you have to sacrifice to the Goddess. And you know, for to be a Christian, do we want to say, this is the thing that we we face, you know, in New York City, if you’re if you’re a Christian, do we want to say, oh, okay, as a Christian? No, no. Christians in the financial world. I don’t think we want to say that. I don’t think that’s great. I think we need to say every single part of the world is Jesus, part of the world, and making money is not intrinsically wrong, and finance is not intrinsically wrong, can be a great thing. And yet, for Christians to walk into a place that’s dominated by this God, this idol that the man’s child sacrifice is really tough. How do you get in there and still do your job and not, you know, take the did I do that?

How do you get into your job and not bow down? In other words, how do you make money, just money. How do you demythologize it? So it’s not Artemis The Goddess. How do you mythologize so it’s not your identity, so it’s not your main value, it’s not your salvation, it’s just money. How do you do that? Only with the gospel. We’ll get back to that. Let me give you a second kind of personal idol, and that’s romance, romance. You know, if you love anybody, fall in love with anybody. If you’re in love with anybody, you fall in love with somebody. Oh, my. It’s very, very powerful. And therefore this is really, really hard, a very hard line to draw. But if you actually look to this other person, not just for all the wonderful things that a love, human love, relationship, especially a marriage, can give you, but if you look to that person for it’s only that person’s love that makes you feel worth worthy at all. It’s only that person’s love that makes you feel very valuable at all. You feel like I’m nobody, unless this person loves me to be a great name for a song. If, in your heart of hearts, that’s how you are, then first of all, you’re going to put no boundaries on your relationships, and you’re going to get into lots of relationships in which you shouldn’t have sex, but you know you shouldn’t, but you do you shouldn’t be, you shouldn’t be practically married or married to a non Christian, but you do why? There’s no boundaries. But listen, slave what’s the difference between a slave master and a boss? Bosses can’t do anything to you. Can they? There’s a limit to what they can do. Slave masters could literally do anything. They could beat you, they could rape you, they could kill you. Slave masters had no boundaries. How do you know whether your love relationship is just a love relationship or it’s Aphrodite? It’s mythological. It’s grown in mythological proportions. You have no boundaries. See, your your idol, is doing anything at once with you. You feel bad about that, but you do it because you can’t lose this person. You feel bad about that, but you can’t lose this person. You lie, you cheat, you know to cover up your your affair. Personal idol, let me give you one more personal idol, money, love, romantic love, and then children. Now in the evangelical world, we don’t think of children as idols, but let me tell you, there are all kinds of parents out there who essentially are looking at their children and in their heart of hearts, they’re saying, if my children are happy, if my children are believers, if my children grow up to love me, my children are successful, then I know that I’m worth something. And if that’s how you look at your children, not just as good things, but as ultimate things, and you start to live your lives out through your children. Basically what you’re going to either you’re either going to the child is either going to stay near you and live a crushed life, because that child will always be crushed under the weight of your expectations, the child will just get as far away from you as possible, and because you have turned that child into an idol, it’ll wound you in a way that you’ll never get over, and you’ll be mad at God. How dare God do such a thing as this? And I can’t believe in God, but the depth of the wound is your own making. You know, unless you know, understand, personal idols, your your counseling, your pastoring, your preaching is going to be so superficial. You’re just going to be laying ideas on people. Concepts on people. It’s not going to touch them. The for example, Martin Luther in his larger catechism, his exposition to the 10 Commandments so crucial. You know the first commandment. Have no other gods before me, first commandment, and then you have all the other commandments. And Luther said, I don’t think it’s an accident that the idolatry commandments first. He says, the more I think about it, you never, ever break commandments two through 10 without first breaking one, that the sin underneath all other sins, is the sin of idolatry. Now here’s an example. If you lie, you’re breaking one of the 10 Commandments, right? You lied. But why did you lie in any particular situation? Well, you say, Well, I I lied because I was just so afraid of losing face. In other words, human opinion is more important at that moment to your self worth and your value than Jesus, which means that’s an idol, and you wouldn’t have lied, except you really failed to rest in Christ as your salvation as your righteousness. Human opinion is your salvation and your salvation and your righteousness. You don’t really believe the gospel. At that point, you say, I believe in the gospel of grace, but basically, you’re being saved by works. Functionally, you’re at heart level. You see that you can’t understand moral failings without understanding idolatry. You also can’t understand psychological problems without idolatry. Years ago, when I was a young pastor, had two women at the same time in my church who were just bitter against their husbands and their marriages were falling apart. Now their husbands were not believers, and the wives were but the reason they were so bitter was because each of them had one son, one child, an adolescent child, and because the husbands were being such poor fathers that sons were acting up and beginning to get into a lot of trouble. And I remember thinking, well, as a pastor, the very first thing I need to help these women with is to forgive their husbands. And I said, You better forgive your husbands, because you’re not gonna be able to talk with them when you’re so angry. You’re not gonna be able to see any any communication going when you’re as bitter as you are, and I remember saying to both of them, you’re in the right on what they’re doing wrong, but the way in which you’re expressing yourself, you’re always shooting yourself in the foot. There’s no way a man is going to listen to somebody talking within the tone of voice. You’ve, you’re, you’re talking in and with the with the anger and with the bitterness. What was weird to me at the time as young minister, was was one of the women who was actually a less mature Christian and who actually had the worst husband of the two, forgave her husband. And the other woman, who was actually at least a more experienced Christian and really had a better husband of the two couldn’t no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t. I realized years later, when I look back, here, was the difference. They both loved their sons. Both those women loved their sons, but the woman who couldn’t forgive had turned her son into an idol, basically, partly because she had such a cold relationship with her husband. Over the years, she had turned and said, the main way in which I get love in the world is my son. My son loves me. Everything’s okay. I believe in God, but if my son doesn’t love me, I don’t even want to live. And she couldn’t forgive you know, when people say to me, Oh, I believe God’s forgiven me, but I can’t forgive myself. Have you ever said that? Have you ever talked to anybody who says that? The hell. Happens all the time in pastoral work. I know God’s forgive me. I can’t forgive myself. You can’t say, Well, I don’t know what to say. I’ll give you something to say. I’ll give you something to say. What it means is, there’s a there’s a higher God in their life than God. They failed something else. Just an example is many people are driven by parental expectations, and when they fail to reach those parental expectations, they hate themselves and they beat themselves up. And whenever they fail, I know God forgives me. I can’t forgive myself. What that really means is your real God, which are your parents and your parental expectations? You see, they’re cursing you because that’s your God. Now it’s your spiritual master, and the gods are always violent, and the gods, there’s no mercy in those gods, and unless you repent of your idolatry, until you repent and recognize the fact that you know what you say you believe in Jesus Christ, but functionally speaking, he’s really not your Savior. Your parents are your saviors. But this is all through the Bible that money can be an idol. Greed is idolatry. Colossians, three, five. Ephesians, five, five. Politics can be an idol. You made the Egyptians, you made the Assyrians into an idol. Do you know you have to expose them for what they are? They’re killing you. They can’t deliver. They can’t give you the salvation they say they’re going to give. They can’t give you the social order they say they’re going to give. They can’t give you the joy they say they’re going to give you expose them. Okay? Secondly, you’re not going to be very good communicators of the gospel unless you know how to take on religious idols. Religious idols. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. See, just as money worshipers think they’re just hard working, and child worshipers think they’re just loving their kids. Those who worship religious idols think they’re very devoted to God, but they’re not, because remember what an idol is. Again, an idol is some good thing you’re looking to instead of God for your salvation, a good thing you’re looking to as more crucial to your value and your security and your confidence and your meaning in life than God is. And there’s three things that very busy religious people, and here I’m using the term in the broadest sense, very busy people in the church, very busy people in Evangelical Church, evangelical ministers. There’s three idols that, if you look carefully, we tend to trust that instead of God, truth, gifts and morality.

I’ll be careful, but I’m going to say it. First of all, here’s what I mean by truth. Is it possible to say, I am okay, I am saved because of the rightness of my belief, instead of I’m okay because Jesus Christ died for me. Is it possible to rest your salvation as it were, functionally in the rightness of your doctrine? Yeah, you know, Proverbs talks has several categories of fools. And one of the categories of fools mentioned 17 times is the scoffer. Some translations call him the scoffer, the scorner, or the mocker. There’s two marks of this scoffer. The first mark is he’s dogmatic and closed in his mind. He never admits he’s wrong. Okay, he’s sure he’s right. Well, that could be true of somebody who just believes the truth and is not making out of the truth. But the second is a mocker. And scorner always, always, always is disrespectful to opponents, always belittling, always mocking, always disdainful. That’s why they’re called scorners or mockers. Now keep this in mind, sarcasm and bluntness, clearly, is sometime warranted. You see it in Elijah being sarcastic, you know, and mocking actually talking to the priests of Baal, you know, in First Kings. You can see it in Paul actually dealing with his opponents in chapters 10 to 13 of Second Corinthians. But when the default mode, or when, I should say, when you are always disdainful of people who differ with you, always you’re always down, you’re always making fun of you’re always mocking. You’re always sarcastic, according to the to Proverbs, you’re a fool. And here’s the reason why you’re a fool, by the way of all the fools. It’s the one with the least hope, because you could only be always disdainful making fun of everybody who differs with you, if you’re basically a doctrinal Pharisee, which is to say, here’s how I know that I’m okay, I’m right, and you’re not. And though the sense of superiority, which, of course, the Gospel takes away is is is rank with a scorner and a mocker. Now, what’s scary about this, of course, is besides the fact that Proverbs says, of all the fools, it’s the most far gone, but that the internet breeds scoffers because lots of traffic. I mean, traffic is increased to your blog if you’re a scoffer. Isn’t that? Right? Right, tell me I’m wrong, you see, and what this means is, it’s possible to make an idol out of truth. Secondly, just as possible, to make an idol out of gifts. Jonathan Edwards and his charity and its fruits, sermons in the first or second one has an absolutely amazing, devastating critique of one of the great mistakes that evangelicals make today, and that is the mistaking of spiritual gifts for spiritual fruit. We look at spiritual gifts and we mistake them for spiritual fruit. Spiritual gifts are, you know leadership and you know preaching and teaching and teaching and evangelism and ministry success, spiritual fruit is love, joy, peace, patience, self control. You know, humility. And what Edwards points out there is which is so important, is that when, when you are a great communicator, or you have great musical gifts, or you have great leadership gifts or something, and as a result, your ministry is successful and a lot of people come and it grows. Essentially, even though you say you believe in justification by grace, you actually believe in justification by ministry, the reason you feel like I know God’s with me, I know I’m okay, I know I’m right, is because look at all the things that are happening through me. And of course, you know, if you’re a minister, your people will be very happy to conspire to affirm that. And you know, I mean every every tradition is different. I would say the reformed world. I see this with young guys in the reformed world, we make an eye out of being a great preacher. I know a lot of guys who, more than anything else, they want to be great preachers. They I make an eye out of the gift of preaching. They want people to flock to their banner because they’re such great preachers, and as a result, they’re not working on pastoring, they’re not working on listening to people, they’re not working on evangelism, not working on they working on their messages. They just want that more than anything else, it’s an idol, and I know a lot of guys who don’t want to even be in the ministry if they’re not going to be great preachers, even though that’s, in other words, they’ve got, you’ve got, you’ve got this paradigm of how what the ministry’s got to look like, and it’s all based on the mistaking of spiritual gifts for spiritual fruit. So you can make an eye out of truth. You can make an eye out of gifts. And, of course, and this will literally take 30 seconds. I just wrote my book on the prodigal is about this, of course, and that is, it is typical for Christians to take their it’s got garden variety legalism. It’s very typical for Christians to say, the reason God loves me is because I’m so sold out for the Lord. I come to church, I take notes on the sermon. I’m praying. I’m having my quiet time. I’m just saying no to all this bad stuff. I’m trying to obey the 10 Commandments. Surely. God has to bless me. He has to answer my prayers. That’s garden variety moralism and legalism. And it’s taking a moral record, which is a good thing, moral righteousness, which is a great thing, holiness is a great thing, and turning it into an idol, trusting in that instead of in God, trusting in truth, instead of in God, trusting in your ministry success instead of in God, I’ll tell you something, unless you know how to deal with those idols. When you’re preaching the gospel, you’re actually not going to have you’re not going to produce converts or people that really live any differently, because these are forms of worldliness. When you get out into the world, everybody thinks they’re right and they’re bashing everybody. They make an idol out of there. That’s called ideology. What’s ideology? An idea turned into an idol? You know, my system of thought out there, ministry after success and giftedness and talent. I mean, you go out there and that’s all. That’s how everybody else is. And yet, because we make idols out of truth and not make idols out of gifts that make adults, out of our actual moral record inside the church. That’s the reason why the world looks inside and doesn’t see us living any different. That’s the reason why we’re not changing the culture. There’s an awful lot of people out there that say they’re born again, something like now, 34% of the population says they’ve had a born again experience. You know, that’s enough people. I doubt very much that a third of the population of Ephesus had become Christian, I doubt it. And yet, there was enough people living lives of such distinctiveness that it was changing the economy. If a third of the people that said, Hey, I’ve been born again, I’m an evangelical Christian, we’re living in a very different way, would change the culture. It’s not. Here’s one of the reasons why. Because when we communicate the gospel, we don’t go after idols Lastly, and not the last point yet. I’ll get there, but the last point of my second point, because we’re trying to bring back the Puritan tradition 60 points sermons, I want to say something about cultural idols for a second in some ways, evangelicals like to talk about cultural idols. I mean, it’s fair. For example, the enlightenment. What was the enlightenment? It was taking human reason a good thing and making it an ultimate thing. Was it not? And so when we said human reason, I’m not going to accept anything in the Bible. I can’t my. Reason doesn’t it doesn’t understand. So I’m just going to cut the Bible into pieces and only accept part of it. It’s a disaster. Another way in which human reason becoming an idol was a disaster was because of how, how the cultural elites, for at least 100 years believe that, since they still do to some degree, science, technology, education, we’re going to be able to get rid of poverty, we’re going to be able to get rid of racism. Human reason is going to bring all this, and it hasn’t worked. And of course, the results have been devastating, utterly devastating. I got a lot of illustrations. I wrote down here. I don’t think I can give you one, just one in 1920 HG Wells in his book, The outline of history, praised belief in human progress. Said, once we get over, once we overcome the superstition of religion and start to apply science to everything, we’re going to just go from strength to strength and get rid of poverty and war and racism. 1920 1933 in his book, The Shape of Things to Come, he was appalled by the selfishness and the violence of nations. He was appalled by the lack of progress on the program he had wanted. And he actually said the only hope was for rational, reasonable, educated intellectuals to seize control of all the governments and to run a compulsory educational program stressing peace, justice and equity. And in 1945 he wrote a book at the end of the second of his two world wars, a mind at the end of its tether. And this is a quote Homo sapiens, as he likes to call himself. You notice that Homo sapiens means the rational, you know, the wise. Homo sapiens, as he likes to call himself, is spent. This is the end. And what one commentator said was, what happened? He had put all of his hope he had made an idol, and it was an ideology, put all of his hope in the ability of humanity to solve its problems with reason and science. And what happened? Quote, the fact of Original Sin forced itself into a mind who had no grasp of God’s grace or power, and it came to the end of its tether. So your gods will always let you down. That’s the point. The gods will never bring you what you think. They won’t bring you the social order. Actually, if you give in to these gods, any God, but God is going to bring down the social order. There’s also broad cultural idols. Here’s what I mean by that, traditional cultures. And a lot of people here are from them, or their parents are traditional cultures. The idol is the family.

Individualism is gone. The idol is the family. And by the way, so many of us say, Oh yes, we hate the Western individualism. It’s just terrible. And it is. I’ll get there in a second. But you know what? There’s an opposite to that, and that is the family is an idol. And in cultures in which the family is an idol, it matters more than anything else. Is your family, everything for the family, then you have things like honor killings. You kill the women that have disgraced the family. You know, even if it’s your daughter, honor killings, women are treated as chattel. Gay people are bashed and literally killed. That’s traditional culture. Then, on the other hand, we have Western culture, and Western culture says the individual and my feelings are an absolute and what you have today in individualistic culture, no one must tell anybody else that they’re wrong. No one must tell anybody that their beliefs are wrong. No one must ever even offend anybody. So if you say something that offends and upsets this person, that’s wrong. But of course, what’s going on is the idea that you should not tell anybody that their beliefs about God are wrong. Is itself a belief about God which is being imposed. To say you can’t tell people that their beliefs about God is wrong, is a belief about the nature of God that is being imposed. And therefore, post modern relativism, like all idolatry, is violent at its core, and yet it’s failing. You know, high critical theory, which is really where all the post modern deconstruction stuff came from. Is Dead in academia because of what I just told you. You know that inconsistency. They see it. The gods always fail. Let me give you another quick example. The political swings we have are idolatry. When I’m so old that I remember something. Let me tell you what I remember. I remember in the 70s, the people that were killing genocide. They were communists, they were atheists, they were the terrorists. They were killing people by the millions. They were the communists, right? And the corruption, the high corruption, the moral corruption, was in government, Watergate. And so what did we decide? Free Enterprise, the free market. Reagan Thatcher, you see secular humanists, they’re the bad guys, because, see that it’s the atheists that are killing people, and it’s the it’s the government that’s corrupt. So we have to do is free enterprise and and there’s competition, and let’s, let’s lower the tax. Taxes, and let’s stress traditional values. And so you had the conservative movement come in with Reagan, you know, in the early 80s, and Thatcher. Now, what’s going on? Who’s killing the people? It’s the religious fundamentalists. Oh, it’s the religious people that are bad, yeah. And where’s the corruption? Oh, it’s in business, yeah. So let’s raise the taxes, and let’s go to state, you know, you know, you know. I remember, in in the New York Times, there was an article recently about Bernie Madoff, and one of the speakers said it was, it was, it was covering a forum, you know, it’s pretty big deal in New York City, since everybody knew him. And somebody said, of course, human beings are selfish and they’re greedy and they’re going to do stuff like that. Of course, that’s what we have government to regulate it. What’s a government? Isn’t government people? And so what we have is, no, really, honestly, there was an idol. Listen, conservative ideology says state is bad, private enterprise is good. It will give us all we need. And there’s a liberal ideology that says private enterprise, capitalism is oppressive and centralized government, the state is will give you all we need. And we’re going to go back and forth. And why? Ideology? Idolatry? Absolutely, do you understand? Do you know the idols? Can you expose them? And what’s going to happen, by the way, it’s going to be a crash every time we say, Oh, the whole problem is over here. So let’s get away from those people. We demonize those people, and we idolize these people over here. And then there’ll be a breakdown. Why? Because people are people, and it’ll be, there’ll be corruption in government, and then we’ll have a swing back. I hope I’m dead by then. These swings take 30 or 40 years, and so, you know, I probably won’t be around. Now, my question last, last point, it’s the briefest, and probably in some ways, the best. How do you actually, actually do something, not just expose the idols, but how do you actually destroy them? Well, look, notice this part of the text. It’s right here, Paul. Paul wanted to appear before the crowd, but the disciples would not let him. Even some of the officials of the province, friends of Paul, sent him a message begging him not to venture into the theater. Now the point is that when the idols are opposed, it’s dangerous. As I’ve said all along, idols are violent. Now the Bible is very ambivalent, and that’s a weird thing to say about the Bible, but the biblical writers are ambivalent about whether idols are something or nothing. On the one hand, idols are empty. They’re worthless things. You know, you’ve taken a created thing which doesn’t have the power to give you what you want. See, it’s something you’ve made yourself. On the other hand, they seem to wield enormous power over you. You know the woman, the woman who was in the grip of the idolatry of her son, who never could forgive her husband. Let me tell you what devastation happened. She was angry. She was violent. Basically, you know that marriage fell apart, that family fell apart. Everybody’s miserable, the kid’s a mess. And here’s why idols are nothing, but through them, the powers and principalities, the forces of darkness, control us. That’s the reason why, on the one hand, the idols are nothing, and on the other hand, they’re unbelievably powerful. And if you oppose them. You take your life in your hands. You take your life in your hands. But here’s the key. Paul risked his life in order to defeat the powers and principalities, but was saved Jesus. It cost him his life. You know, Jesus was picked up by a crowd. Jesus. They cried, crucify him. Crucify Him, and they did. Why did he die? Do you always take your life into your hands? Paul risked his life in order to defeat the powers, but Jesus had cost him his life to defeat the powers, and that’s what he did, because it says so. Colossians, 215 Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them triumphing over them on the cross, which means that when Jesus Christ bow, when the world, the flesh and the devil, when the powers and principalities unleashed all their fury against the Son of God, he bowed his head into it and died, that storm engulfed him, as it were, and he sunk. And yet we’re told, in doing that he defeated them. He utterly defeated the idols. He utterly defeated the powers and principalities behind them. How? So he did it objectively and subjectively. Hear me, first of all, he did it objectively and. If you’re really serious about understanding idolatry, really serious, you’ve got to read a book by two Jewish philosophers written in 1992 put out by Harvard University Press, just called idolatry. And the two writers, the two, the last names are hallbert Hall. Pardon me, hallbert Hall and Margaret. And when they it’s fascinating to watch two Jewish philosophers deal with a very important issue in Hosea, Ezekiel and Jeremiah. He says, in the biblical metaphor of idolatry as spiritual adultery, there is a conundrum, because in these texts, Ezekiel, 16, Jeremiah, two, Hosea, because adultery was a capital offense, because adultery deserved death. In the metaphor, God the husband tells the wife she must die. And by the way, according to biblical law, she had to die. And yet, because God is still the husband, he wants reconciliation. And Jewish philosophers, it’s fascinating to see them wrestle with this, but they said, you know, it was a profound contradiction at the heart of this spiritual adultery metaphor. Because, on the one hand, what’s so awful about sin of idolatry is it deserves death, but on the other hand, because it’s, it’s the betraying someone who loves you, the lover who’s betrayed. God wants you back. And how can he and you know what they say is, how can God both punish the adulteress as she must be punished if God is just, and reconcile with the adulteress and bring her back into a happy marriage, which he also wants? And you know what they actually say? They said, there’s really no way through this contradiction. I guess it’s just the limitation of the metaphor. But they’re wrong because Jesus Christ, our true bridegroom, came and took the punishment that we spiritual adulteresses deserve, so that he can be both the just and the justifier of those who believe. And therefore, so that he can, on the one hand, punish our adultery and still make us again his true brides. And therefore, objectively, he’s overcome the powers and principalities. But subjectively, subjectively got to end here, subjectively,

what is going to actually take help me? You know, I know Jesus died for my sins, but what’s actually going to help me pull my heart off of these things that my heart really loves more than Jesus? I’ve got to see what he’s done for me. I’ve got to know what he’s done for me. That’s why I’m singing about it. That’s why I’m preaching about it. That’s why I’m listening to people preach about it, because when that reality breaks through on me, that changes me on the spot, that frees me from my idols, that defeats the powers and principalities that he objectively defeated on the cross now subjectively that that triumph is coming into my life. Because you know, if you really put you know, you’ve just got to remember this that if you, if you live for your career, your career can’t die for your sins. In fact, if you fail your career, it’ll punish you forever. You know person I love most in the world is my wife, Kathy, and my wife and I know that our biggest temptation for idolatry is the other person. Very, very hard not to slip into idolatry with your wife or your husband If your marriage is good. But here’s what I got to keep telling myself, Jesus has got I got to love Jesus more than my wife. The only way that’s going to happen is if I worship and pray and think the gospel deep into my heart, so that as much as I love my wife, Jesus Christ is is my lover. Now number one is my king, is my Savior, and I see what he’s done for me, and it pulls my heart up to him. I don’t want to let my wife less. I want to love Him more. But I know this one or the other of us is going to look at the other person in a coffin, and if our Savior’s in that coffin, how will our Savior help us when our heart is breaking? There’s only one savior that can only that can always help you when your heart is breaking, who will be able to help you face anything even that? Do you know how to take the gospel to the idols? If you learn how to do that then and only then will we turn the world upside down. Let’s pray, Father, thank you for giving us this tour of the importance of this remarkable theme of the Bible. And we pray that You would help us understand it better, apply it better. But we have to start with ourselves. We all we have idols, and we need to see that objectively, you have saved us from them, and subjectively, this Triumph needs to be pushed deeper and deeper into our lives, so that we can live the kind of lives free from the power of these false gods, and so that we can communicate your gospel in life. Change. In World, changing ways, and we pray this in Jesus, name Amen.