New Morning Mercies #22

You and I don’t need to be rescued only from the idols around us. No, we need to be rescued from our idolatrous hearts.

I was in Northern India, in one of the high, holy cities of Hinduism. It was my first time ministering there, so I was on a four-day introduction tour of Hinduism. We had entered a temple that held the most horrific idol I had ever seen. I had no idea that things like this existed. It was a huge, maybe 20-foot-high, image of a male sexual organ. The Hindu pilgrims around me seemed emotional as they entered the temple. They seemed joyous, grateful that they were there. Many of them laid down flat on their stomachs before it. They kissed its base. It was one of the darkest spiritual scenes I had ever seen. Through our translator, we interviewed the members of a dirt-poor Indian family who had walked for months to get to this holy city, to this temple of darkness. The scene was so spiritually oppressive that all I wanted to do was get out of the building.

I found myself trying to get through the busy streets to our vehicle, and as I did I kept saying to myself, “I thank God I’m not like these people, I thank God I’m not like these people.” Then it hit me—I am! No, my idols aren’t the dark idols of formal religion; they’re the subtle idols of my everyday world. They’re things that claim the place in my heart that only God should have. And they are just as vomitous to my Lord as that idol was to me. At that moment, I confessed to the worship war that takes place in my heart every day. I cried out for the rescue that only the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ could provide and I longed for the day when that war would finally be over.

Worship is not something we do only in formal religious settings once a week. God designed us to be worshipers. Everything we do is the product of worship. We are always giving our hearts to something, and if it’s not God, it’s something God created. All of this takes place in the little moments of our lives, and for that we need moment-by-moment grace. That’s why John counsels us in 1 John 5:21 to keep ourselves from idols. There is no greater argument for our need for grace than the ease with which our hearts fall under the rule of things other than God. But that grace is yours for the taking. Won’t you live in that rescuing grace today by resisting and running from the idols that challenge God’s place in your heart?

For further study and encouragement: Ezekiel 20