Mike Harrelson - From Idols to Awe

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Almighty God, you welcome you. [00:00:06] Speaker B: Hey there. If you're new to Restored Church, we want to welcome you and thank you for tuning in. You're listening to a portion of our Sunday worship gathering. We believe the church is not an event, but a family you belong to, so we would love the opportunity to connect with you. If you want to learn more about our church or if we can help you in any way, please Visit our website, www.restoredtemecula.church, and click on Contact. With all that said, we, we hope you enjoy the message. [00:00:35] Speaker A: How was everyone's fourth of July? Yeah, you got fun, apparently. I was told this morning that I looked like I was dressed for the occasion for 4th of July. I didn't even realize it. I had some blue and some red here, but I guess the white came from my beard. But, yeah, no, it was a fun day, being able to spend time with family and friends and all that stuff. So, like Eric said, my name is Mike. I'm one of the elders here at Restored Temecula. I have the privilege of being able to share the word with you this morning. We're actually gonna. We've been in a series for years now called the King in His Kingdom, and we're gonna take a break from it today. We're gonna. You know, a lot of us follow a reading plan each day, each week, each year. And I went through Second Kings about a month ago, and there was something in there that just stuck out to me, and I just kept on. I kept on coming back to it, and so I felt like, ah, I feel like this is something that the Lord wants me to share with you guys. So this morning, we're gonna be in Second Kings. I know it's a place that not everyone always hangs out, but at the same time, I feel like God has something for us. So. Yeah, would you guys pray with me and we'll get started? Yeah. Father, I thank you, thank you for this morning, this time, to be able to bring you praise as a community, to worship you, the God that has created everything, that is sustaining all things and has made a way that we can be with you through Jesus. And I pray that your name, Lord, would be lifted high this morning. I thank you for the privilege of being able to share your word. And I pray that you just touch each person here this morning, that you would have something for each person they could walk away with, that they could apply their lives, that they could move forward in faith and trusting you, maybe even for the first time, Lord. And so we praise you. There's no one like you, Lord. Pray this in your name, Jesus. Amen. All right, so like I said, we're gonna be in 2nd Kings 17, verses 24 through 41. But before we get into that, as a way of introduction, as I was reading through this, it made me think back to a couple decades ago. When I got out of college. I got gifted from my parents with a trip to go back to where I was born in Singapore. And they bought me a plane ticket. And Marla, my wife, she came with me, along with her cousin and one of our friends. And on that trip, we went to Singapore, and then we took a bus ride up into Malaysia, up to Kuala Lumpur. And when we went up there, I got off the bus. And immediately when I got off the bus, I'm like, I'm in a different place. Like, Singapore is. It's Asia, don't get me wrong, but Malaysia's a little bit more Asia. I guess. Without saying it, I don't know how else to say it. It was a little bit more wild. And when I got off, I realized, like, I was walking around the streets, and there were shrines on the sidewalks. There were shrines, and there was temples everywhere, and there was incense on these shrines, and there was fruit out in front of these shrines. And I was like, wow. Like, I'd been a Christian for probably about three years at the time, but I'd never seen anything like this where, like, worship was so out in the open. It was so out in the open for everyone to see. It was a part of everyday life, the public. It was like, worship wasn't a private thing. So often it gets to be a private thing here. It was a public thing there, and people were doing it everywhere. And it really. It shaped the culture that I had walked into. I got off a bus into, and all that goes with that. And so as we're looking at two kings this morning, that's the kind of world that we're actually stepping into. It's a reality that on every hill there's shrines that gods are being worshipped and not always the God of Israel. And so. And it's a very public thing. It's things that people are doing on a regular, everyday basis in front of everyone else. And it's not a private situation. And so let's just hop into the text here. Second kings, 17, 24, 29. It says, Then the king of Assyria brought the people from Babylon, Cutha Ava, Hamath, and Sephar Vaim, and settled them in a place in the place of the Israelites in the Cities of Samaria. The settlers took possession of Samaria and lived in its cities. When they had first lived there, they did not fear the Lord. So the Lord sent lions among them which. Which killed some of them. The settlers said to the king of Assyria, the nations that you have deported and placed in the cities of Samaria do not know the requirements of the God of the land. Therefore, he has sent lions among them that are killing them because the people don't know the requirements of the God of the land. Then the king of Assyria issued a command. Send back one of the priests you deported. Have him go and live there so he can teach them the requirements of the God of the land. So one of the priests they had deported came and lived in Bethel, and he began to teach them how they should fear the Lord. But the people of each nation were still making their own gods in the cities where they lived and put them in shrines of the high places that the people of Samaria had made. So we enter into two kings in a moment where the ten northern tribes of Israel had just been exiled from the land. This is something that God did. And it was accomplished through the hand of the empire of Assyria. They came and they conquered and they moved them out. And it says in 2 Kings 17 in the verses before this that the reason he did that, it's summed up in a couple verses, verses 13 through 15. It said, still the Lord warned Israel and Judah through every prophet and every seer, saying, turn from your evil ways and keep my commandments and statutes according to the whole law. I command your ancestors to set you through that. I sent you through my servants, the prophets. But they would not listen. Instead, they became obstinate like their ancestors who did not believe the Lord their God. They rejected his statutes and his covenant he made with their ancestors and the warnings he had given them. They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves, following the surrounding nations the Lord had commanded them not to imitate. So God moved them out of that place. And then as a way of what the Assyrian empire did is they actually did a population swap. They took Israel, moved them out to these other lands, and they took these other people from these other nations and moved them in. And so often this is the reason, the reason why Assyria would do something like this was because they wanted to weaken the potential of there to be some kind of rebellion that would come up against them. They wanted to weaken the people around them, take away their identity and cause them so that they wouldn't resist their imperial authority. And so we have all these different people that have entered the land. And then we hear this crisis. There's lions. You're like, what is going on here? The God of the land and lions. And he's sending these lions, the same, sort of wild and different. But if we were to look back to Leviticus 25, verse 23, God makes. He says something to Israel. He says, the land is not to be permanently sold because it is mine, and you're only aliens and temporary residents in this land. And he goes on to say in verse 55, for the Israelites are my servants. They are my servants that I brought out of the land of Egypt. I am their Lord. Israel was God's chosen people. He rescued them from their slavery, and he brought them into a land, a promised land, a land of milk and honey that would be a blessing to them. And they conquered all the other people around there. But he said, the land is his. It was never theirs, it was his. And he's the one that gets to call the shots in that land. I have four kids. My wife and I have four kids. Our oldest is 15, our youngest is nine. As you can imagine, we've had many kids that have come in and out of our house over the years. And if you're a parent, you have rules in your household, right? There's ways that you sort of operate. There's a culture to your home. There's ways that you don't operate. There's things that you don't do. And all that's because you want to be able to protect and protect your family. You want to keep it a place that's loving and respectful to one another, and you want to uphold the values that you have as a family. Every once in a while, though, there might be a neighbor or someone or someone that comes into our house, and they don't always abide by the rules of the house. And if I'm standing there, it's interesting, I can see in my mind's eye right now, my kids, they might give me sort of a side eye, like, what's dad going to do? They know that someone's breaking the rules at that point, what's dad going to do? And, you know, try to be gentle, go over and say, hey, this isn't the way that we operate in our home because of this reason or that reason. And to try and correct it, I'm assuming that all of us have been in that place at one time or another. Yeah, you've either been, like, the parent that's had to correct you've been the child that's like, oh, my gosh, my friend's doing this thing right now. Or maybe you're the kid, which I've been that person, too, that's disobeying the rules of that household. And then you have to be corrected. And just like I step in to protect the culture of my home, the Lord stepped in to protect the culture and his values of his land in the same way. And so the king of Assyria had a solution, though. He's like, let's bring back one of these priests so he can teach them the ways of the land, the God of the land, to fear this Lord. And so we don't know much about this priest. We can assume he was exiled. He was a priest at the time. It says that the land had shrines on all the high hills. It was probably some kind of mixture of religion that was going on there, of following Yahweh, the God of Israel, and following the other gods of the land. And we don't know what was taught, but it was enough to where these lions would stop attacking and they could sort of check the box of following God. In some ways, this idea of mixing religions and cultural beliefs and ideas and practices, this is what scholars call syncretism. It's choosing the things that you like and leaving behind the things you don't like of different things, and you sort of mix it together to make your own sort of religion. You can think of it like a fruit smoothie. You know, like you have bananas and strawberries and blueberries, maybe a little kale for those people that like vegetables in their smoothies. And all of them are distinct on their own. They have the different shape and color and flavor and all that stuff. But when you mix them together, they no longer are distinguishable. They're all something else at that point. There's something else. Maybe one's more dominant than the other. Like, you had the blueberries in there, and it becomes really like sort of a purpley color in this fruit smoothie. But something's going to be more dominant. And so we see this actually all over the world. We see this all over the world. In the east, there's a lot of mixing of different things. It might be like Buddhism and animism, where they're looking at rocks or water or trees having some kind of life force to them. You see that in Africa, you see it, and also you see it in South America. But the reality is, we see it here in America, too. The New Age is pretty popular these days. It's pretty popular. People mix like spiritualism and spirits and crystals with other religions and even Christianity at times, or have Eastern philosophies of reincarnation. That's mixed with things. It's really sort of scary, to be honest. But it doesn't just go with religious practices. That's a thing. It's actually. It can be culture as well, like pop culture, media, actually politics. We can mix that into who we are as Christians and it becomes part of our worldview at that point. Barna, their organization that does a lot of different surveys and stuff, they did a survey on this right before COVID and they actually did one a year or two ago as well. And they looked at this idea of syncretism within Christianity and what they came up with. This is actually sort of shocking. The study goes as far as to say that 88 to 92% of American Christians hold a synchronistic worldview. That means that they have a biblical view that's mixed with some other kind of view. They're making their own thing that's going on there instead of an actual biblical view at that point. And so like Israel, they compromised and they were confronted with this reality of they had a loss of identity and purpose and then God sent him off. At that point. They served God enough to keep him at bay, but they didn't love him with their whole hearts. That's the reality. And eventually he sent them on their own way. I was just praying through this the other day. Judges 17:6 came to mind. And this is Judges is before the time of the kings. So Kings is recording a whole bunch of the kings that are there. But this actually came before there is even King Saul that was on a throne or anything like that. And it says in Judges 17:6, it says in those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did whatever seemed right to him. Does that sound familiar at all? I mean, we live in a day where most people do what seems right to them. Their preference on things, what they want to do. So reality is, in the west, we don't build physical shrines. Really. That's not something we do. You don't see them on every high hill. We have internal shrines, we have idols that we have on the inside. But before we look at these modern day idols that we build, I want to look at what's driving them. Because what we worship is directly tied to what we fear. And I think this text actually exposes some of this here with a couple different ways that we fear. So 2 Kings 17, 30, 33, the men of Babylon made Succoth, Benoth. The men of Cush made Nergal. The men of Hamath made Achium. The Avites made Nibhaz and Tartach. The Sephirothites burned their children in the fire of a Dromelech and Anomalek, the gods of the Sephirothim. They feared the Lord, but they also made from their ranks priests for the high places who were working for them at the shrines of the high places. They feared the Lord, but they also. Just remember that. But they also worshiped their own gods according to the practices of the nations from which they had been deported. Okay, so my point here is that there are idols in our midst. That's my point here. There's idols in our midst. So. Talk about fearing the Lord. I was helping some friends move about 10 years ago, maybe a little bit more. And I was driving through Utah at the time. And I was in their minivan, like Honda Odyssey, packed full of stuff. I mean, it's. There's only room in the front two seats. Everything else is packed out. I hadn't seen another soul on the road for like, probably 15, 20 minutes. I'm like, you know what? There's no one out here. And I just hit the gas and I'm going like, I was going over 100 miles an hour in a minivan. Like, sort of wild and actually sort of dumb, honestly. But I was doing it and I was like, no one's going to catch me. And then in my rear view mirror, I see some headlights way back there. And I was like, oh, my gosh. Just imagine the thoughts like, I'm gonna get pulled over and go to jail. Cause I'm exceeding the speed limit by a significant amount in my friend's minivan that's gonna probably get impounded with all their stuff that we're moving to another state for them. I'm just like, going through all this stuff. I'm like, oh, my goodness. So I started slowing down, of course, but I didn't slow down out of respect for the law. I slowed down because I didn't want to get caught. I mean, there was no respect for the law in that moment. It was all about me. I had a terror of getting in trouble. And so this is a fear that. It's derived from Latin. It's called servile fear. It's like a worldly fear. It's a fear of getting caught. The things that will affect you in that place. Lo and behold, I did not get pulled over. It happened that it was One of the other cars in the Caravan that was coming even faster behind me. And so I got free on that one, but I didn't speed anymore after that, to say the least, on that trip at least. But the fear that we're talking about here and fearing God, we hear this. The fear of the Lord. It's all throughout Scripture. And this is a totally different kind of fear, A totally different kind of fear. This fear is, like, you could say a holy fear. An awe and a wonder, a reverence. And it's a deeper fear. And it comes from this idea of. It's another Latin word called filial. It's like a relational fear. It's a loving fear. It's a love that comes that a child has for a loving parent. A fear that yields a heart and mind to the superiority of God. It's a love and respect and obedience of walking with God in his ways. Michael Reeves, in his book Rejoice and Tremble, which, if you're looking for a book on the fear of the Lord, it's an amazing book. I'd highly suggest it. He says it's an adoration of God that dreads sin itself, not just its consequences, because the person has. Has come to treasure God. So it's a dread of sin itself because of the treasure that you have in God at that point. It's a fear severing or damaging a cherished relationship through our own actions. So we don't wanna hurt that person. We fear hurting that person. Like, I don't wanna hurt my wife. I desire to love her really, really well. But even more so, I desire to follow God and what he's doing. So real fear of God comes, means loving him more. So much so that we don't want to hurt or disappoint him, not just obey him, because we are scared of getting caught. And how often are we just more concerned with getting caught in our own way, really. So the settlers that settled this area, Samaria, they waited for the danger to pass of the lions. They waited for it to pass, and they went back to their idols. They had external compliance without internal transformation is what was going on there. They lacked love for the Lord, but they had a greater love in their idols. And so you're like, idols. Okay, great. Mike, we're gonna talk about idols. Love it. Tom mentioned it last week, a quote from John Calvin. It was. Man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols. You might have heard other people say, like, our hearts are idol factories, and there's a reality, like we were made to worship. We worship regardless of what we do. It's like every single day. If we're not worshiping God, we're worshiping something else. You name it. Like, we'll find something. Our hearts will find something to cling onto, to seek after to. To love, to show adoration to. And we were made really for him. We were made to seek him, to worship Him. And I wanna note, like, not because he needs it. That's the thing. God doesn't need us. He's chosen to make us. But he knows what's best for us. And so that's why he says to worship him and not to worship other things. Cause if we worship other things, it's actually gonna cause us to drift and to ways that are not going to love those people around us. That is not going to allow us to be the fullest version of who he's created us to be. And so with that, just as I read through the scripture, I was haunted by the reality that we can fear the Lord, but we can also worship other things. And it says they feared the Lord, but they also, they also made priests for those high places. And it's so easy to worship idols while seeking God. So easy to do that. We don't mean to. It just happens. It's almost like we have this predisposition in our fallen state to, like, go after idols. We're gonna seek after them, but God made us for something so much more than that. I mean, yeah, it dilutes the reality. Like he gave us the Ten Commandments, human flourishing. Right. What's the first and second commandment? There you go, one and two. There they are. Don't take any other gods beside him. And don't make idols for yourselves, you know, yet we do it every single day because our hearts or carried away by other things. So, you know, ancient idolatry can be sort of easy to write off for us as Western people because, you know, we're intellectual in the west and, you know, that's fine. But at the same time, the reality is that this isn't actually an intellectual problem as much as it's a deeply personal problem. It's an identity problem that happens. There's a group missionary organization called surge. This is a quote from them. Rather than explicit false gods. Modern idolatry operates through affections captured by approval, reputation, possessions, power, pleasure, control, relationship, sex or money. I'll add comfort to that as well. Yeah, it's pretty easy for us to be able to walk in these doors on a Sunday, say, hey, I love you, Jesus, you are God. And tend to walk out these doors and cross this border, imaginary border, and behave like, you know, we're in a different territory where our careers, our finances, our private lives take over and they become the things that we're seeking instead of Him. Or there's some weird mix of the two that happens in that way, instead of putting him first and putting these other things second. Yeah, all these things, all these things are formed by the world around us. Media, politics, all the culture, all vying for our attention, our loyalty to be worshipped. And as we look at our YouTube feeds, we look at our, I guess Instagram, TikTok, whatever, it's all just feeding us those things, constantly saying, hey, I want you. I want you. I want you to worship me. I want you to worship this ideology. I want you to worship this modern idol that somehow has captured your heart. See, these modern idols are like actually identical to these ancient shrines. They demand our devotion, they shape our decisions. And honestly, they fragment our relationship with the Lord at the end of the day. And it isn't like the subtle compartmentalization where we serve Christ publicly while our hearts remain divided by competing loyalties. It's like so deep in this way. And so I thought, I was thinking back, like, what's a moment? Because I don't want to make this all about everyone else, because I deal with this too. And I was in a career for 17 years with a company. I started a position maybe halfway through that time. I was still pretty young at the time and I was on the road like all the time. I mean, I was gone nonstop. And Marla stayed home with, I guess we had three kids at the time. Probably we didn't have Levi at that point. I was home. I wasn't home much. She was home all the time. And for me, I've always been really a hard worker. I have a drive to do an amazing job at what I do. And that's not a bad thing at all. I'd say that's actually a God given thing. That's beautiful. Really depends on where you're directing it at the end of the day. So for me, the problem was I never felt like I was good enough to be in that position. I was always looking to work hard because I wanted to prove to other people that I deserve that position. There was guys that were older than me that probably could have taken my position, but they gave the position to me. And so I was constantly working harder, going, staying away from home longer because I was seeking to get the Approval of those around me. And the sad part was it didn't matter how hard I tried, I'd never have everyone's approval. That's a reality. It wasn't going to come. It wasn't going to come. And the even sadder part is I already had the approval of the Lord, but I wasn't willing to receive it. And this was like. This was actually, like. On the surface, it looked like I was driving towards success, like, making more money, doing different stuff, getting these opportunities, making my company better, all that. But deep underneath it, it was a deep idol of approval that I was trying to serve. And it was taking me away from the things that mattered most in my life. I didn't realize this until Covid. I was home. I was forced to be home for over 40 days at one time. And then I saw how my family responded, and it was absolutely beautiful. Like, I was. I saw our family flourishing in the midst of a pandemic. Just take that in for a second. Our family was flourishing interpersonally at a time that the pandemic was ripping apart the world. And I went, oh, my goodness, there's something wrong here. There's gotta be a change. By God's grace, a couple years later, there was able to be a change at that point, and I moved to a different company. But the sad part is that sort of. That idol sort of followed me along, and I had to, like, constantly fight that thing that was there. See, the hard part about idols in our lives is so often we're not the ones that actually, like, recognize them. They're seen by other people. I think other people probably saw my idol before I saw it. It took me being home to actually see something along those lines. And so, yeah, so identifying idols, like, what does that look like? Could you guys. Ahmad, could you put those four questions up on the screen for me? Thank you. So I put down some questions here for you guys to consider. They'll be up here for a second. I'll read through them. We'll bring them up at the end again. So the first one, what has become or is becoming more important to you than God? I think that's pretty self explanatory. Second one, what are the things that are taking you away from your time with God and his people? Sometimes it's the absence that we're gonna notice. The things that pull us away that we're gonna start noticing. Oh, this might actually be something that has. I need to look into. What are the demanding. What is demanding? Your time, finances or energies? Idols are Gonna demand that. They're gonna demand your time, your finances, your energy, your relationships. And then the last one. Are there areas of your life where you're making painful or unhealthy sacrifices? That's the one that got me right there. Painful, unhealthy sacrifices. I think the people that were suffering the most were the people I care about the most because I was away from them. They didn't have me. And when I did show up and I was there, a lot of times I was thinking about other things. So this might be. That could be a work situation, mine. But for a student, it could be an academic success as an idol. You want a greatness within academic success and then you sacrifice integrity by cheating. That could be a way that shows up. It could be a control idol where you're a manager and you have employees that work for you and all of a sudden you're taking away their freedoms, you're squashing them with your power. At that point, I think we have to take an honest look at these things where there might be these things happening in our lives to identify them. Because really, at the end of the day, they're taking us away from God and they're actually poison to our souls. And the danger here is I think many of us probably know that we have these idols in our lives. We acknowledge them, we can minimize them. Oh, that's just human. Yeah. You know what? It is human. It is human in a fallen state. But if you're in Christ, guess what? You've been saved. You're becoming a new creation. So it's not an excuse at that point. Sometimes you laugh at them just cause it's like uncomfortable. You're like, oh yeah, I'm dealing with this control thing, but actually it's hurting other people around you and it's keeping you from the Lord. We don't want to make a joke about something that would actually be killing us. Here's the reality is when we worship other things before God, it's sin, plain and simple. It's sin and it's keeping us from him, the one that actually loves us and made us to be able to be with him. It's killing our devotion to him. Jeremy Prier says idolatry dulls the human heart, making it spiritually inanimate and empty. And the idols that promise to sharpen and enliven the soul actually blunt and kill it. See, compromise in this area isn't a temporary phase of life. It's actually a permanent trap. It can trap you, it can hold onto you. Unless you renounce that thing, you repent of it. It's going to. Actually, it could be carried on for generations and families as well. So let's look at 2 Kings here, verses 34 through 41. It says they are still observing the former practices to this day. None of them fear the Lord or observe the statues, the statutes and ordinances, the law and commandments that the Lord had commanded the descendants of Jacob, whom he had given the name Israel. The Lord made a covenant with Jacob's descendants and commanded them, do not fear other gods. Do not bow down and worship to them. Do not serve them, do not sacrifice to them. Instead, fear the Lord who brought you up from the land of Egypt with great power and an outstretched arm. Like, when they came up, it was like, there's no other way it could have happened besides God being in it. And he cared for them the whole way, provided for them. You are to bow down to him, you are to sacrifice to him. You are to be careful always to observe the statutes and the ordinances, the law, the commandments he wrote for you. Do not fear other gods. Do not forget the covenant that I have made for you. Do not fear other gods, but fear the Lord your God, and he will rescue you from your enemies. You see that promise right there. However, these nations would not listen, but continued observing their former practices. They feared the Lord, but also served their idols. Still today, their children and grandchildren are continue doing as their ancestors did. So my last point for you this morning is his love sets us free. As I've read through some of you probably read through it recently, it can be like you get some of these narratives and then it's just like one king after another, his son and then his son, and they did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. Every once in a while you get one that he actually there's reform that happens in the nation at that point, and people start following God. They start tearing down the shrines in the high places, start tearing down the idols. But for the most part, we see this lineage of just not following the Lord and following after other things and doing despicable, disgusting things that you just. They're appalling. I mean, burning babies, come on. Like, it's horrible, absolutely horrible. But they're serving their gods. They're entrapped, they're imprisoned to these gods. These kings had an opportunity to change the direction of a nation in the same way as families, parents, we have an opportunity to change the trajectory of a family. I look around this room, I see some faces and Some that aren't here as well, that are, in my mind, that their parents that had kids and their kids are in this room, and they have grandkids that are in this room. There's generational things that have happened in their family. They made a decision to follow the Lord, to fear him, to bring up their kids in the fear and the admonition of the Lord. And in turn, the kids, they're doing it, and now the grandkids are doing it. Who knows what that family was like before? And there's some people in this room right now that you may be the first generation that has said, hey, I want to follow Jesus. And that's beautiful. We wanna celebrate that all day long. I wanna say, keep on doing that. Because who knows what's gonna happen with your kids and their kids and what the trajectory will look like for your family going forward. We all have this opportunity to step into this moment and say, no more of these household idols. We're not gonna follow these things anymore. These ways of thinking, these things that we put our money and our time and our resources and our whole hearts into. And even these hidden idols of power and control. I'm done with these things. I don't want to pass those things that were passed to me onto the next generation. I want to see them have freedom in Christ, to be transformed by the gospel, to be renewed in everything, and so that our family would be renewed. This is the kind of thing that the Lord has called us to, and these idols are the things that keep us from it. Yeah. So there's power in the lives of those that fear the Lord and reject idols. I think the old adage of, like, there's more that's caught than taught, I think is really true, honestly. Cause our words can come out, and I'm pretty sure most of the time, my kids hear wa wa. But I pray that they see that my words, what they do here, match up to the way I live my life. Cause that's what they're actually gonna follow. They're actually gonna follow that. So what does your life look like? How are you walking? Does your walk equal your talk? Is it the same or is it different? This is the kind of stuff the idols will say one thing all day long, they feared the Lord, but they also. Our also is the way that we walk, guys. It's the things that come out when we're pressed. It's when I get really mad. Am I gonna try and control and use power over my family, or am I gonna come under them and Come power under. Like the Son of Man did. Jesus didn't come to be served, but to give his life as a ransom for many. He came under to empower people to be able to walk in the power of the Holy Spirit. See, the Gospel interrupts this trajectory. This is another quote from Jeremy Pierre. He says Jesus, who perfectly embodied the dynamic human heart, exchanged his perfection for human sin, thus interrupting the deadening cycle of idolatry. See, the Gospel is the cure for this idol problem that we have here. Thomas Chalmers, he's a Scottish preacher from a couple hundred years ago. He had this sermon that's powerful. It's called the Expulsive Power of New Affection. He argues that we cannot dispossess the heart of old affections, but by the expulsive power of a new one. He's saying that we can't will ourselves to love God more and to love this other thing less. We can't do that. It's not going to happen. Yeah. The love of sin only can be expelled by the love of God. So the gospel's good news, guys. Jesus, he came and lived. He came out of perfection and came down, became the person Jesus that we talk about, that we praise. He lived the perfect life in our place, died the death that we deserve. Opened up. His veins were opened so we could have freedom. It says John 3:16. Most everyone in this room has probably heard this at one time or another. For God so loved the world in this way that he gave his one and only Son so that everyone who believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life. Like, that's how much God loves us. We're not gonna. We're not going to muster up enough love for God to overcome these things. It won't happen. But the beautiful thing is it says in Romans 5:5, this hope will not disappoint us. Because God's love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has given, who was given to us. God knew that these idols were going to take over, that we were going to follow them. So he sent his Son to die in our place. That we can have the promise we have the Holy Spirit in us so that God could pour out that same love that they have in the Godhead, so that we could overcome these things by his power and not by our own. We don't have to white knuckle this thing. We can actually give ourselves over to this good news of the gospel. We can give ourselves over to it, repent of our sins, acknowledge this, bring things into the light, choose to move, repent. Means I'm just gonna turn from the way I'm going. I'm gonna go the other way. I'm turning 180. I'm gonna walk towards Jesus in this. To repent from our sins and to trust him. Trust the Gospel, to actually believe it, that it has power, that it can transform lives, that it can renew families. This is what has happened. Like, there's amazing. I mean, it's amazing. God has given us new life in Christ. I just love this. 2nd Corinthians 5:17. Therefore, if anyone is Christ, he's a new creation. The old has passed away. See, the new has come. If you're in Christ this morning, you're a new creation. You don't have to be held by idols any longer. You don't have to. It doesn't have to be the destination in your life. I'm gonna serve this thing. No, you can serve him. You have a choice. And if you're not in Christ this morning, you can be. I'd love to talk to you afterwards. Let's have a conversation. Let's start a conversation. It'd be amazing if you know other people in your life that don't know Jesus and you see them captive to these idols. We're gonna have Alpha starting up in September. Bring them to Alpha. We'd love to talk to them about Jesus and explore ideas and all that kind of stuff. We'd love to just give him an introduction. Come and see. This is who he is. He's amazing. Mary of Bethany, she got it. She got this. She sat at the feet of Jesus. She broke her alabaster jar of perfume. This is like. Like her retirement, essentially. She broke that thing at his feet because she was captivated by a greater affection. Guys, where's your affection today? See, God wants us to be free. All right, I'm gonna call up the band. In closing, Israel and the settlers both made choices to follow after idols and to not fear the Lord. Their hearts were attached to these other gods that led them to places that were. I mean, we'd say that they're. It's horrible. Yeah. I can't even imagine some of the places that they got led to. And the really sad part is they missed out on the beauty of what God wanted for them. Like, they were created to worship him, to be transformed by him, to know him, to love him. And even the outsiders, the foreigners, they were invited into that, too. That's the reality. Just like us. Most of us in this room are probably not Of Jewish descent. We're foreigners, no access. But he invited us in. But us too. We don't have to live in a life of divided hearts. We can choose to follow him and also to see our families follow him. So, yeah, what I want to do for the rest of the time this morning for us is, is we're gonna put these, the four questions back up on the screen. The band's gonna play over us for the next couple minutes. I'm gonna allow. Oh, we got plenty of time here. Okay. Yeah, we're gonna probably use like 5, 10 minutes or so at least. What I want you guys to do is we're gonna keep these up on the screen. I want you just to read through them, consider, pray, ask the Holy Spirit to reveal to you if there's anything that comes up from these. Prayer team's gonna stay back for now. We'll invite them up in a little bit. But this is an opportunity. We don't get opportunities like this often. Like, slowing down is hard, but we can slow down right down right now for a few minutes and just ask the question, Holy Spirit, is there any place that I put anything before you, before God, in my life that's maybe become an idol that I need to repent of, that I need to bring into the light? See, we don't have to white knuckle this thing any longer, guys. Isn't the way God made it to be. He wants us to be able to walk in freedom with him, to become the people that he actually created us to be, to look more like Jesus each day and for. Honestly, for our affections to be towards him, that we'd be able to move from idols, to awe in wonder of him, to fear the Lord, to understand what that means more fully, to fall more deeply in love with him and in that love the things that he loves and to see his kingdom come. So I am going to. I'm going to pray and I'll leave you guys to looking over that, praying through it. Jesus, there really is no one like you. I say it all the time, but it becomes more and more real to me each day. Thank you that you came to set the captives free, to give us new identity, to see your kingdom come, to see a world transformed by your love. I thank you, Lord, that you are more than the God of a strip of land in the Middle East. You are the God of the universe. You're the one that has come and set up your land, your geography, and each believer around the world. And I pray for each person in here that you would reveal to them areas that you want to transform their life, that you want to free them, that you want to bring them more into your image. Not cause you need it. Because you want the best for them. Because you love them and care for them. And you showed that on the cross. You showed that in the way you lived. And you gave us that hope when you rose to life on that third day. We love you, Lord. We praise you. We bless you. Name, we pray. Amen. All right, guys, next 10 minutes. Just go ahead and read through. Pray. Eric will be up here in a little bit. Love you.