The Deadly Exchange | Romans 1:18–23

In 2012 I had a lifechanging experience. I with about 20 other Mississippi Baptists went to Thailand on a mission trip to share the gospel and encourage missionary families. It was a great time and I saw so much. I fell in love with the nation of Thailand and it’s food and people. It was a nation of extremes with mansions surrounded by open air shelters on the side of the road serving as the homes for Thai families.

One part of that trip that I will never forget was when we traveled up the mountain to the Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, a beautiful gold plated Buddhist temple carved into the mountain. This temple, dedicated to the location where a white elephant, carrying the Buddha’s shoulder bone found by a monk named Sumanathera rested. The elephant is said to have climbed up Doi Suthep stopped, trumpeted three times, then dropped dead. This was interpreted as an omen and so King Nu Naone immediately ordered the construction of a temple at the site.

While there, I saw something that broke my heart. Hundreds of Thai’s had made a pilgrimage to the top of that mountain, climbing 309 steps to the pagodas where idols of the elephant and a giant Buddha statue are worshipped and incense is offered to the Buddha.

I had never seen this type, nor level of idolatry in America. At the most, I had seen Buddha statues and the Maneki-neko Cats in Chinese and Japanese restaurants that are supposed to bring luck. But here, I saw millions in darkness, bowing down to idols praying to their ancestors.

It’s easy for us to see this type of idolatry and to shake our heads.

But idolatry is alive and well in America and in our American churches today.

Idol Factories

John Calvin once famously said:

“The human heart is a factory of idols. Every one of us is, from his mother’s womb, expert in inventing idols.” –John Calvin

In our text, that is exactly what Paul is saying: Men, because of the pride of their own thinking and hearts have created idols. This is the condition of the heart: We are idolaters.

Jeremiah 10:14–15 ESV

Every man is stupid and without knowledge; every goldsmith is put to shame by his idols, for his images are false, and there is no breath in them. They are worthless, a work of delusion; at the time of their punishment they shall perish.

Why? Because we venerate our wisdom and our ability to think above God’s . We place our wisdom against God’s. The problem is our wisdom is damaged, our ability to think is effected by the fall.

The mad man who thinks he’s a duck in his mind is the only sane man in the room. While everyone else is attempting to tell him he’s not a duck, he is wondering why everyone else is deluded so greatly that we cannot see what he is.

This is the predicament of man. Claiming to be wise, we show ourselves to be fools.

1 Corinthians 1:20–25 ESV

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

Notice, they became wise because they gloried in their own wisdom. We are good at glorying in ourselves and thus creating idols to our selves, deluding ourselves of our own greatness, our own intelligence, our own authority.

In this way we create idols. In the womb, our first idol, our first god is the voice sining to us, patting us, telling us words we do not understand. That immaterial voice becomes our mother feeding us, playing with us.

This is the beginning of human idolatry.

Tim Keller defines idols as bring “good thing(s) that become ultimate things.” Idolatry at it’s core is wrong thoughts about God that leads to wrong worship of God. It’s when we take God in all his glory and shape him, mold him, make him into something else.

For the pagan it could be making our jobs or our pleasures, or our desires into ultimate sources of meaning. When we take good things like food, or sex or the feeling of satisfaction that work gives and we make that the ultimate thing.

For the Christian it is when we change God positionally to be all about me, or when I change what God reveals his will, and I morph it to fit my political, social, or economic desires. It’s when my view of the world becomes God’s view and God become subservient to me instead of me to him.

There are so many different things that become gods to us, and if we’re not careful we cna fall into idol making.

So what are the idols that we make?

James Durham (1622-1658) was minister in Glasgow for only eleven years but left a considerable number of writings. He notes several things that we can worship:

1. THE WORLD

The world is the great clay idol that both covetous and hedonistic people hunt after, calling, “Who will show us any good?” (Psalm 4:6). This idol keeps thousands in bondage. An excessive desire to have the world’s goods, and so to have a prestigious reputation in the world, is the idol of many.

2. THE BELLY

The belly is a shameful god (Philippians 3:19), yet one worshipped by the majority of people, who labour for nothing more than for enough in this life to fill the belly (Psalm 17:14). They only want to earn their living and provide for their families. The fear of want captivates and enslaves many.

3. THE SELF

In some ways, the self includes every kind of idol. Your self, your reputation, your good name, people’s approval–your own will, opinions, beliefs, and conclusions. People are said to “live to themselves” (2 Corinthians 5:15), in contrast to living to God, when respect to self influences them to be “lovers of themselves” (2 Timothy 3:2, 4), and “lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God” (Titus 1:7) and “self-willed” (2 Peter 2:10).

4. INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE

Gifted or influential people, who have the power to do us considerable good or evil, are often made into idols when people put too much fear, love, or trust in them.

5. THE COMFORTS OF LIFE

Things which can lawfully be used as comforts and contentments–such as houses, spouses, and children–we can be too much addicted to. We can become absorbed in these things–even though they are in themselves very little–and so they turn out to be our idols.

6. SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS

Our prayers, repentances, blameless living, and so on, are often invested with more of our confidence than they should be. We rely too much on them for our salvation and eternal peace (Romans 10:3).

7. CHURCH

The purity of our worship, the forms of our worship, our church membership, can become idols. When we rest on these forms of godliness, and do not press on towards the power of godliness, they become our idols. This was the problem with the Jews, who appealed to the temple of the Lord and the covenant between him and them, and their external relationship to him (Jeremiah 7:4).

8. GIFTS FROM GOD

When we lay too much weight on God’s gifts (such as beauty, strength, intelligence, learning), or think too much of them, we make them into idols. In fact, we may put grace itself, and the sense of God’s love, and inward peace, into Christ’s place. We may sometimes seek for these things more than for Christ himself. When things like these are rested on, and delighted in, and Christ is slighted, or when we miss them and do not delight in him, then they are idols.

9. AN EASY LIFE

Ease, quietness, and our own contentment, can often be a great idol. This is how it was with the rich man, who told his soul to take ease (Luke 12:19). His ease was his idol, seeing how he rested on it, and made it the chief end of all his buildings and the goods he had to store. But his riches were his idol, seeing how he grounded his expectation of rest on what he possessed. Similarly, many idle people, who frame their life so that they will have no trouble, even though they are not being or doing anything profitable, make this the drift of all they do–to have an easy life. If this was not their chief end, it would be profitable, but when they neglect many necessary duties, only to avoid hassle, it is their idol.

10. ESCAPISM

Sometimes our minds please themselves with things which never exist except in their own imagination. Solomon calls this “the wandering of the desire”, as opposed to “the sight of the eyes” which others delight in (Ecclesiastes 6:9). Some people spend their gifts and skills on writing novels, romances, stage plays, and comedies. Even more subtly, yet perhaps even more commonly, people concoct imaginary and fictious scenarios where they get the revenge, delights, or prominence they desire.

11. PROFESSIONALS AND EXPERTS

The means which God normally works by, are often trusted in and relied on to such an extent that they become idols. These could be doctors, armies, or ministers–or inanimate natural causes. Worse than that, astrology and palm-reading are much prized but the Scriptures treated as antiquated and largely discarded.So what are the signs of idolatry in our lives?

Idolatry Happens when anything becomes:

Our Source of WORTH

One of the first evidences that an item or activity has become an idol in your life is that you find your sense of worth in that thing. If we’re honest, this is a tough one. Our culture tends to value us by a set of preconceived and preset standards. Standards like work productivity, beauty, friendliness, the behavior of our kids, social mobility, etc. all of these things can be things we find our value in.

We are valued by our society by our value to society. If we’re successful in business, we’re valued. A doctor - valued. If our kids do well in school then we’re valued. If we’re popular we’re valued.

But what happens to us when we lose that job, or when our kid gets into trouble, or when our position is lost, then are we valued?

If you want to know what you place your self-worth in, ask yourself what is that one thing that if taken away from me my world would crumble then there’s a good chance that’s what I find my worth in.

We all know people who are like this when we see them.

Many of us will remember the story of Wanda Webb Holloway. Holloway from Channelview, Texas, was desperate for her daughter Shanna to become a Texas High School Cheerleader. The mother who lived obsessively through her daughter, often dressing in matching outfits attempted to ensure her daughter’s place on the Junior High Team, by attempting to hire a hitman to kill the mother of her daughter's junior high school cheerleading rival, hoping that the stress would cause the girl to drop out of the team. The plan ultimately failed when the man she asked to perform the hit turned her in to the authorities.

Now most of us are not that dramatic, but I have seen people lose their minds when life throws them a curveball.

Our Source of SATISFACTION

A second way something becomes an idol is when they become a source of ultimate satisfaction. Satisfaction is a great word. It means completeness, wholeness. There are a lot of things that can satisfy. A cold glass of water after mowing the yard, a scratch on an itch, a dunk in the pool on a summer day, these can all satisfy.

So can hard work, success in a project, the love of another. There are many things that can and should give us momentary satisfaction.

What do you love? That’s one way to identify idolatry in our hearts.

We commit idolatry when we give our hearts away to created things – we’re addicted to them, we pursue them with excessive energy, we dote on them, or we sorrow immoderately when we lack them.

There are three ways to tell if your love to created things is excessive.

1) If your contentment depends on them to the extent that you fret when you cannot enjoy them, as Ahab did with Naboth’s vineyard, and Rachel when she had no children (Genesis 30:1).

2) If your love for created things competes with God, so that respect and love to the world shuffles out your duty to God, as it did with Demas.

3) If love to the world undermines your zeal in doing your duty towards God. This was the case with Eli (1 Samuel 2:24). Eli honoured and loved his children above God (1 Samuel 2:29). Not that he tolerated their wicked wrongdoing entirely, but because he did not intervene as sharply as he should have (and likely would have, if they had not been his own sons). By contrast, Abraham is commended for showing his love for God, because he did not hold back his only son when God called for him.

Our Source of SECURITY

When life gets tough, when life gets hard, what do you turn to? What thing to you seek for comfort?

Idolatry occurs when I seek something, anything above and beyond God for my sense of security.

Psalm 146:3 ESV

Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.

For some in our culture, their security is in a political system, or a political party. We think a president, or a world leader will save us from the problems of life. We look to the government, or to a job, or to a spouse for our sense of security.

For this reason, when bad things happen, they will do anything to save that thing which gives them security. People will do anything to save their god.

You can see this in the wife who will get pregnant to save a marriage, a business man who will cheat or commit fraud to keep his financial status intact or a politician who will lie for his reelection. You can see it when people are resting in their wealth, their position, or their power, and not in God’s providence.

But all of these will fail us. So how do we avoid idolatry?

Find Your WORTH in Christ (John 15:5)

Notice what Jesus says: It’s not in what we have, nor in what we make, but in Christ that we receive our ultimate worth.

My worth is based on who God says I am:

I am a Child of God:

John 1:12 ESV

But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God,

I am a Branch of the True Vine

John 15:5 ESV

I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.

I have been justified and redeemed

Romans 3:24 ESV

and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,

I am a fellow-heir with Christ

Romans 8:17 ESV

and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

I have become the righteousness of God

2 Corinthians 5:21 ESV

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

And on and on and on. I am who God says that I am!

Take Lasting PLEASURE in Christ (Psalm 16, esp. 11; Psalm 107:9)

Psalm 16:11 ESV

You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

Psalm 107:9 ESV

For he satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.

God is to be the ultimate source of our pleasure. God’s word tells us

Psalm 37:4 ESV

Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.

Then end of desire is making God our lasting hope and delight. Do you delight in God and in the things of God?

TRUST in God and His Good Purposes for You (Psalm 16:8)

Psalm 16:8 ESV

I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.

If we are going to put an end to our idolatry, then I must find my source of security in Christ alone.

Psalm 20:7 ESV

Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.

Will you join me today in laying aside your idols and trusting in the Lord.