Our hearts have room for only one all embracing devotion and we can only cleve to one Lord. Every copetitor to that devotion must be hated. As Jesus says, there is no alternative--either we love God or we hate him. We are confronted by an "either--or": either we love God, or we love earthly goods. If we love God, we hate the world, and if we love the world, we hate God. It makes no difference whether that love be conscious and deliberate or not; in fact it is morally certain that it will be neither, and that our conscious and deliberate desire will be to serve two masters, to love God and the good things of life. We shall indignantly repudiate the suggestion that we hate God, and will be firmly convinced that we love him, whereas by tryng to combine love for him with love for the world, we are turning our love for him into hatred. And then we have lost the single eye, and our heart is no longer in fellowship with Jesus. Our deliberate intentions make no difference to the inevitable result; Ye cannot serve two masters, if ye be followers of Jesus Christ.

-Bonhoeffer "Cost of Discipleship"

** Seriously if you call yourself a Christian you MUST read this awesome book for yourself! You cannot but profit from the wisdom of this suffering saint who really knew what the fire was like! And what the COST really meant! For him it meant everything! As it also should for us!

Idols Are Usually Nice Things....Bummer, Eh?

Think it not hard if you get not your will, nor your delights in this life; God will have you to rejoice in nothing but himself.
                                           --Samuel Rutherford

Maybe personal happiness, ease or even delightful things aren't really as important as we would like to make them?

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American Idolatry

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Idolatry Defined By Spurgeon

Spurgeon, "A Summary of Experience and a Body of Divinity"

If you love anything better than God you are idolaters.

If there is anything you would not give up for God it is your idol.

If there is anything that you seek with greater fervor-
that is your idol.

Conversion means a turning from every idol.

What do I fawn over? What do I covet? What do I need(or think I need)? Where is my treasure founded?

All good questions that I fail to ask myself often, mostly because I already know the answer isn't what I would like it to be. I know now very often that my heart is covetous because I value something above God. My heart is prideful because I have given myself more deference, usually that which is due only to God. I need something so badly because that something has gained a characteristic that should only be attributed to God.

I was telling my husband and a friend just last week that so often I have the expectation that my husband must understand and have compassion on my life and situation. Why? Does my husband have peace that surpasses understanding and He can give it to me? Does my husband offer eternal joy to me? Does my husband understand my human condition because he was experienced the essence of Humanity in a perfectly sinless and universal way? I had attributed characteristics of God to my husband that He has no right, ability or desire to hold. I looked to him to fulfil my needs as I saw them.

WRONG!

Only God can be the real Lord and master of our lives. Only God can understand the human condition purely and satisfactorily for even us. Only Christ came to die on a cross for my transgressions, there by suffering for my sins and showing His great mercy on me and you. Therefore, in light of His eternal and infinite character I should, as a finite creation, look to Him for these things that I have a desire for! My desires are not wrong, but my placement of them are.

Sometimes though my desires are wrong, like the lady I saw in the grocery parking lot. I want to be worldly at times. I want to create jealousy in the hearts and minds of others. Then My desire is the idol because my desire is what is wrong.

Idols are so insidious. Sneaky. Blatant. Tempting. Do you find any of these things on the throne of your heart?

The wretched idol, SELF!

(Octavius Winslow, "Christ and the Christian
in Temptation" 1877)

Of all the sins common to our fallen nature, God
has the most signally marked that of Idolatry, or
False Worship.

Man is by nature an idolater. His sinful mind,
being alienated from God, seeks some object
of worship other than the true and living God.

The 'renewed' man is not entirely exempt from this sin.
Hence the exhortation of the Apostle addressed to the
early Christians, and in these last days addressed to us:
"Little children, keep yourselves from idols." "My dearly
beloved, flee from idolatry."

Surely, it was not the gross and senseless idolatry of
the heathens to which the Apostles thus refer; from
this many of those saints to whom they wrote had
already been delivered; but to other idols and other
worship, less palpable and degrading, but not less
superstitious or offensive to God.

The worship of SELF is a natural and fearful form of
idolatry. It is an innate and never entirely eradicated
principle of our nature, but clings to us to the very last
of life. Alas! the holiest and the best of us want to be
something, and to do something, when in reality we
are nothing, and can do nothing.

We walk in our religious life, for the most part, upon
stilts; always appearing in the eyes of others taller
than we really are!

But real greatness and true humility have ever been
in alliance with entire abnegation of SELF.

Who can stand before the cross and gaze upon the
Creator of all worlds impaled between two criminals,
Himself dying as the chief, and not shrink into his
own nothingness, bewailing that he should ever have
been betrayed into the folly and the sin of burning
the incense of idolatry before the wretched idol,
SELF!

Beware of SELF idolatry!

It is the most insidious, hateful, and degrading
form of idolism to which the soul can be subjected.

www.gracegems.org

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John Piper On Idolatry

Introduction to Idolatry

Since posting on my parking lot escapades (see here) I have been considering a posting series on a topic that has become of significant concern to me. The sin of Idolatry. This sin has always been prevalent in my life; it was the conviction of this sin that brought me to the arms of grace; and this sin continues to be a battle with my own flesh and especially, my mind. Often I discover that I have exhaulted something above where it rightly belongs. I have exchanged the glories of the invisible God for something visible, something like myself or my desires, another person (spouse, children, family, friends) or something to which we have attributed some characteristic of God (I do not mean an unspecific God--I mean Specifically Yahweh, God of the Old and New Testaments-the Trinity).

Idolatry is such an insidious sin, since it creeps up and out of us in such seeming unaccountable way. Our nature fosters it naturally, our eyes are blinded to it easily because it is rooted in self. I find it most clearly set in my mind, coming to the surface in thoughts and then words and actions. My thoughts often reveal so much more of my idolatrous heart then anything else. And so often I am at the center of those self congragulatory murmurings, or the complaints of lack that flood my thoughts, the discontent, the comparissons, the wicked critisicms, and the endless one ups. Focus and worship offered to anything or anyone apart from God is idolatry.

In what ways are you harboring an idol? What do you go to first whenever You make any decision?

Your idol may be so hidden, or so peculiar, that all our attempts to touch it, have left you and it unscathed. Will you therefore conclude that you have none? Search deeper, look closer; it is not too deep for the eye of God, nor too hidden for the eyes of a tender conscience anointed with divine eye-salve. Hidden love is the deepest of all love; hidden diseases the most incurable of all diseases. Search every fold of your heart until you find it. It may not be so big nor so ugly as your neighbor's; but an idol is still an idol, and an image still an image, whether so small as to be carried in the coat pocket, or as large as a gigantic statue.

Every man has his idol; but it is not every man who sees it. Few groan under it.

"Dear children, keep yourselves from idols." 1 John 5:21

"The dearest idol I have known,
Whatever that idol be,
Help me to tear it from my heart,
And worship only Thee."

-The History of an Idol, its Rise, Reign and Progress
J. C. Philpot, October, 1855

Over the next several weeks I hope to define and broaden my own understanding of Idolatry and hope to post some of my finds here along the way. I hope it is as pertinent to you as it is to me at this time in my life.

Blessings,
Larissa

I am Still Such A Sinner

Yesterday morning I was wrestling my boys back into the car after a tumultuous grocery trip (although most of them are tumultuous). I happened to look across the parking lot as I was half pushing half throwing my youngest son into his seat, it is hard to get little people straped in. I glanced at this lady coming across the parking lot with her two very quiet and well behaved children, perfectly coifed and at ease. In the time it took me to convince gresham that yes, he really has to buckle the chest strap, the lady had easily loaded her two children, her groceries and was driving away. At that same moment I noticed that the car next to me was attempting to back out over my cart, with my baby still aboard and a walmart associate was flying to my rescue! Jeese, Could I be more glaringly "NOT IN CONTROL??"

As I buckled into my seat, wishing more then anything that I could be as calm, cool and collected as that woman all the time and that my children would be easy to strap into the vehicle. I suddenly realized how covetous I was. Not only did I desire to have what another person did "an appearance of unconcern" but I wanted to have perfectly coifed hair and neat, tidy clothes. In place of my crazy flat hair and my rumpled attire. I was suddenly that silly little girl begging to play with my friends toy, covetous down to my core. And not only that I wanted to be what that woman seemed to me--simply because I wanted others to look at me and be covetous at the same time!

My children have been chided of late because of their hearts of discontent and jealousy, especially with the Christmas holidays, and yet I am no better. Still I am clinging to the very first vestages of Grace that saved me from the wrath of God. I am still confessing my base core. I am still struggling to be contented in the place the Lord has me, a mom to three active boys and a new baby. I am still so humbled, I haven't been allowed to get puffed up with my own importance and I am so BLESSED not to be what I desire to be. I know now that if God gave me the desire of my heart at that moment it would not be a good thing for me. My heart would be turned away from the cross and toward myself.

We are all like this in some way, are we not? We have a perception, wheather it is true or not remains to be seen, and we desire what it is we see. We want it not just because we think it is good, but because we want others to think we are good. We are those dirty little children who always fight over the last bit of candy. We want what we percieve to be the "Best". And yet God has not withheld any good thing from me! He gave me His son, why should I doubt He would give anything up for me or He wouldn't go to any length to protect me......even from myself?

I have the best of things and yet I am still such a beggar for mercy!