Idol-Making Factories

The following is an excerpt from Douglas Bond's book, Hold Fast in a Broken World:

Men are "idol-making factories," John Calvin termed us, and one of the greatest idols that men create for themselves in the modern world is money. "Money! Nothing worse in our lives, so current, so rampant, so corrupting." Come to think of it, maybe it's not just modern man's problem. Sophocles, the paragon of Greek tragedy, penned these words twenty-five hundred years ago: " Money - you demolish cities, root men from their homes; you train and twist good minds and set them on to the most atrocious schemes. No limit, you make them adept at every kind of outrage, every godless crime - money!"

Christian [men] must beware of the love of money, of worshipping at the shrine of wealth, of pitching their hopes on material prosperity - and so forfeiting their souls. Sell your soul for thirty pieces of silver or thirty million pieces, it makes no difference in hell.

There are other kinds of idols, ones of the heart and imagination. Lustful thoughts after the body of an attractive young woman become a form - a highly destructive form - of idolatry. You live in a pornographic world, a world that wears itself out making sin look appealing. The devil "will paint, and mask, and dress up sin," wrote J. C. Ryle, "in order to make you fall in love with it. He will exalt the pleasure of wickedness, but he will keep out of sight the sting." Men slain by sexual sin are a vast and miserable host.

But you may be operating under the delusion that you can keep sexual sins secret, just between you and your imagination. It's a lie....Others may never know your secret sins, but before God's eye every thought, every desire is laid bare.

To identify an idol in your life, consider this: Who or what do you desire so much that you are willing to sin to get it?

Who Do You Trust?

In what or whom do you trust? Who or what is at the center of your life and existence? Do you put your ultimate trust in money, your career, another person, yourself? God places many things in our lives that are good: job, wife, finances, friends, family. But when we love any of these things more than the God who created us and sustains us, then, at minimum, we will be gravely disappointed, and, at worse, they will separate us from Him and lead to ruin. Love the blessings God gave you, but always love Him more.

Put not your trust in princes,
in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.
When his breath departs, he returns to the earth;
on that very day his plans perish.

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the Lord his God,
who made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them,
who keeps faith forever. - Psalm 146:3-6