God's Heart is: Devotion to Him, Not a Man-made Substitute

Those are exciting words, the kind of words that are designed to make us want the latest and best, and to move away from what we have and be re-directed to what we don’t have.

If we don’t have what is the latest thing, the latest fashion, the latest shoes, the latest car, the latest kitchen gadget, the latest accessories, the latest camera or phone or computer or flat-screen TV, or the latest game in our Play Station or Xbox, you get the idea, then we are supposed to want that. Not what we have, but what we don’t have.

That’s a salesman’s tactic, it’s why you never want to give an unsolicited caller any extra time to wear you down about something he is selling that he wants you to think you need, even though 15 minutes ago you didn’t think you needed it. Or, if you are ever bored in the middle of the night and have the TV on, all of those infomercials selling a new kitchen knife or better pressure cooker, or set of pots, or whatever.

Walk through Kohls or Target or Macy’s or just the aisles inside the mall and you will be bombarded with so much new that you don’t have.

OK, so

What’s New About What’s New?

Often, we can’t make any real use of the newest features in the latest gadgets anyway.

I mean, if we are driving a car that is maintained well, it gets us from one point to the next point safely and usually on time. Now, if we decide that what we really need is a fastest, prettiest, cutest, quietest, loudest car that is being sold, for only a few hundred dollars more in payments, it gets us from one point to the next point safely and usually on time. Just the same as what we had.

I do a lot of cooking, and I am taken by the imagination of people what design the gadgets and tools and all that go into a kitchen. I have a lot of those things. Only I have one rule: It has to be something I will use regularly, and must be useful right away. But, I have to admit, I’m not always successful. Mostly, but not always.

I know this from long experience and overloaded storage shelves.

Newer is Not Always Better.

Let me show you an example.

This is a wire whisk. It is super useful for stirring things up without dragging out an electrical appliance. If you are feeling fit, you can use it to whip of egg whites into a meringue, or cream into a nice desert topping.

I uses whisks a lot. I have a few shapes of them. I have the standard balloon whisk. I have that in a few different sizes, from one that is fit for a teacup to others that are large enough for my big bowls. I even have one that is silicon coated to use with hot and messy stuff. I also have an egg whisk, a very round shape at the business end. I have a spring whisk, the one most homes always had to stir puddings while they cook, scraping the bottom of the pan while continuing to stir the pudding. And I have a gravy whisk, one that some of you also may have, it looks like a spring that is made into a circle, with wire inside the spring to hold it that way, and the handle comes up at a 90* angle. It works so well when you are stirring up the dark bits from the roasting pan and getting the flour mixed in and pulverizing and lumps of flour so you end up with a smooth gravy.

But then I have this one. I saw it in the online catalog when I was ordering some glassware for our cupboard. Isn’t it just the coolest thing?

It is a regular balloon whisk, but more than that it is a whisk with a whisk inside of it. And there is another whisk inside of that!

Now, I’m not a complete idiot. I bought it at a really good sale price. But then I couldn’t wait to put it to use. So, I had s cake I wanted to stir up. I put my stuff in the bowl, and started to stir it up with my cool new whisk. Well, the bottom of the whisk inside the whisk barely touched the top of my batter, and when I was really stirring, it didn’t touch at all. And the whisk inside the whisk inside this whisk didn’t have anything to do.

I tried it later on pumpkin pie, stirring up a full mixing bowl of pumpkin custard with pumpkin and eggs and milk and spices and all, and it worked as far as all the pieces getting wet in the whisk. But it soon bogged down, and when I took it out of the bowl, all the pumpkin fibers had clogged up the inside whisks. Absent mindedly, I did what made sense at the time. I took the whisk and tapped it firmly on the edge of the bowl to knock off the stuff that was tangled in it.

Some of the more astute among you are already picturing what happened next. I rapped this whisk on the side of the bowl, and some of the tangled pumpkin went into the bowl, but it seems like most of it just took a ride on the down stroke, and like a kid jumping off a swing set in the park, it bounced back up and splattered all over my face. It’s a really cool whisk, alright, but not one I can use in my kitchen.

So since I brought it to church, I’m going to donate it to the church kitchen!

Not out of spite. I think it will work really well for stirring two-pound packages of cocoa powder into 42 cups of water. I don’t do that in my kitchen at home, but we do it here for the Christmas parade. And there won’t be pumpkin guts on it when you try to shake it clean. Just watch out for the rebound.

So, if newer isn’t better, then maybe. . .

Older Must Be Best

Our problem of wanting what is new goes against the other principle of life, the side of things that makes us strangely conservative with short memories.

Those of us with quite a few winters in our lives have this flip-side of the problem. We have a yearning for what we used to have.

For most of us, even if we really aren’t into cars, we are captured by the shapes and sounds and shine of Classic Cars that have been restored.

We usually are fascinated by the museums of the automobile, or the aviation museums with restored warplanes, the military museums of guns and artillery and tanks and rockets. We might go to an airshow, and be more attracted to the older planes still flying than the modern marvels that are really holding our borders secure.

It is really something for us to walk around on the Queen Mary in Long Beach harbor or the Battleship Iowa at the Port of Los Angeles, looking at the sheer massiveness of what tons and tons of steel welded together can be like. This was when they really knew how to build stuff. These were ordered, designed, built and used in a time frame of months, not years. And if they haven’t been scrapped and recycled into shelving or highway barriers, they are still proudly standing with us today.

The flip side of wanting what is new is the even more expensive side of wanting what is old, but we want it . . .

Restored

Reconstructed

Returned to Greatness

Returned to Glory

Or Reformed by adding the right upgrades.

We forget that there are things we have forgotten about the golden olden days.

We forget that on the car, brakes used to be barely adequate, and wore out quickly. Those big old engines used a lot of gasoline, that used to be cheap but now is out of our budgets. Most new sets of tires these days last longer than engines or transmissions lasted on those older cars. Plus, there are all those safety features that have been added over the years.

At first the car companies didn’t want to put in seat belts because they didn’t want people to think of their cars as unsafe. Then, they started to see the value of making them a selling point. But by that time, people thought they weren’t really needed, and didn’t want to wear them. Everyone had a story about someone’s uncle or cousin that died in a car fire because of being stuck in a seat belt. Still, the statistics were letting us know that fewer people were dying on our highways.

The laws were changed so you have to wear your seat belt. Only now that means the shoulder belt too, that digs into your neck if you are a certain size. But even more people survived serious car crashes.

So seat belts and shoulder belts are new and better, but a pain to always wear. It’s true, if you don’t crash you don’t need it. But if you do, you’ll be glad you have it.

We forget the problems that our parents and grand parents and great-grandparents endured in the golden olden days.

You only have to be in your 20s to start to get nostalgic about certain things. By the time you are in your 30s and 40s you are thinking about the golden olden years as so much better. When you are in your 50s and 60s, you might get a little wiser, but the truth is, most all of us have a conservative bent that makes us want to have the best of what was old, even if we forget the problems that we had back then.

So what does that have to do with the theme for today?

Because when we have troubles with what seems new to us, no matter how much we liked the idea of it, we will revert to the idealized views we have of our own past.

In our troubled world, we think of returning to the days of “Leave it to Beaver” or “My Three Sons”. That is sometimes, in modern American rhetoric, referred to as “Make America Great Again”

But that America of the 1950s was an America that in the 1940s set up concentration camps for Japanese Americans, while a man named Eisenhower waged war with another man with a German name, called Hitler.

That America of the 1950s came back from winning the WWII and immediately returned black fighting men back to their slums and sharecropping.

That America of the 1950s and 1960s still excluded people of color from most restaurants, hotels, and colleges, and in many states would not be granted the same access to voting as the whites around them.

And the White Christian nationalists in the America of the 2020s is worried that blacks are trying to replace them—when Hispanics outnumber blacks 2-1 in our country. Those same Americans of the 2020s that want a return to the good old days believe that means that voting laws must be tightened to eliminate more black votes. Those are the same white European-bred Americans that go with a “We were here first—the rest of you can leave tribalism that completely eliminates consideration for the Native Americans they displaced, and have forgotten that most black Americans are here because their ancestors where brought here are slave ships by white European settlers who displaced the natives.

I was thinking about how God’s Heart is that we glorify Him, but chose this direction for the message when I read an article sent to me by a friend and former member of the church, Richard Wilson.

A lot of you will remember him. We are regularly in touch, and he is at least weekly calling me to get some Biblical interpretation on a passage he was reading or to discuss other challenging matters of society.

The article he sent me is a political and religious analysis by John Blake, of CNN. The title is,

An 'imposter Christianity' is threatening American democracy.

That is a pretty provocative title. But it points to a problem in our nation and even in our churches, one that is growing in the hearts of Christians that has blinded many to the issues in the background.

You know I don’t like to be political in the pulpit. But I am a Bible-oriented teacher and sometimes prophetic preacher that is extremely interested in the state of the church, the beliefs of Christians, and in the challenges that the commonly held forms of American Religion presents because that flavor of faith has some serious blinders on.

I like to read widely and think deeply. I like to affirm those things that are good and challenge those things that are not. If not always in my preaching, then at least in my way of living with others in our great nation, which is only a small piece of this world which so desperately needs an authentic Christianity.

What does this article mean by speaking of an “Imposter Christianity?”

Here are the opening paragraphs of that article that showed up last week:

“Three men, eyes closed and heads bowed, pray before a rough-hewn wooden cross. Another man wraps his arms around a massive Bible pressed against his chest like a shield. All throughout the crowd, people wave "Jesus Saves" banners and pump their fists toward the sky.

“At first glance, these snapshots look like scenes from an outdoor church rally. But this event wasn't a revival; it was what some call a Christian revolt. These were photos of people who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, during an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“The insurrection marked the first time many Americans realized the US is facing a burgeoning White Christian nationalist movement. This movement uses Christian language to cloak sexism and hostility to Black people and non-White immigrants in its quest to create a White Christian America.”

That is an important reflection on some of the beginnings of the events of January 6, 2020.

It speaks of a group of white supremacists, which, by the way, is also a basic definition of NAZI, who in American have commandeered conservative Christian religion in America to serve their own purposes.

The analysis by John Blake also tells us that a report from a team of clergy, scholars and advocates —[not just John Blake]— “concluded that this ideology was used to "bolster, justify and intensify" the attack on the US Capitol.”

But I am even more concerned at the implications that these ideas have had for so many conservative Christians in our country, who aren’t thinking deeply, who are not even reading their Bible, and who are picking the bones of those who are feasting on lies.

It is well worth a warning for all of us.

The writer quotes Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of the New York Times bestseller,

"Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation"

wrote that White Christian nationalist beliefs have infiltrated the religious mainstream so thoroughly that virtually any conservative Christian pastor who tries to challenge its ideology risks their career.

Well, I don’t have that much more of a career to risk, so here I am. But here is the problem for the church: If you only listen to the loudest voice among those you mostly agree with, you will be swayed by those who misuse the name of Christ for their own ends because you have not taken a deep enough dive into the Bible to know what is right.

I look at the pictures, and listen to the rhetoric, and cringe at the implications, and I think God is justified to use the words of Psalm 50, which we read at the start of this message, against our political and cultural sociopaths who have been so noisy and so willing to live in a cesspool of lies that tickle their ears and address their fears.

An Impostor Christianity Is Not Based On the Word of God

Think about those images of January 6, starting with the apparent prayers to some god whom I don’t recognize from scripture, and

Listen again to these words from Psalm 50

Psalm 50:16–17 HCSB

16 But God says to the wicked: “What right do you have to recite My statutes and to take My covenant on your lips? 17 You hate instruction and turn your back on My words.

In other words, misquoting and misusing the Word of God.

Psalm 50:18 HCSB

18 When you see a thief, you make friends with him, and you associate with adulterers.

That’s a Psalm 1 problem of hanging out with the wrong crowd. Then,

Psalm 50:19–20 HCSB

19 You unleash your mouth for evil and harness your tongue for deceit. 20 You sit, maligning your brother, slandering your mother’s son.

Now we are talking about lies, slander, and dishonor of others.

Psalm 50:21 HCSB

21 You have done these things, and I kept silent; you thought I was just like you. But I will rebuke you and lay out the case before you.

God is saying, “Just because I let you get away with this kind of behavior for a time doesn’t mean I don’t care, it doesn’t mean I’m not keeping track. Your judgement day is coming!

Psalm 50:22 HCSB

22 “Understand this, you who forget God, or I will tear you apart, and there will be no one to rescue you.

A Man-Made Substitute for what is true cannot stand in the presence of the True God.

My God is deeply concerned about the oppressed, about the dispossessed, about the fatherless and the widow.

The Christ I follow is not a tool for a political agenda, or one to be misused in order to subvert justice and righteousness and godliness.

Adolf Hitler used Christ’s death as an excuse to commit genocide on Jews.

White nationalists in our country have hijacked conservative Christianity into believing lies about the election that are akin to saying black Americans have been active in corrupting the electoral process by doing nothing more than voting.

If you don’t believe the Church has been hijacked by these ideas, just look at the primary results in Arizona where 3 important races were won by those who believe there was corruption in the electoral system in their state. The same system that just elected them to run for their party in November.

We suffer from a terrible case of just plain poor scholarship.

The notion that the US was founded as a Christian nation is bad history and bad theology, says Philip Gorski, a sociologist at Yale University and co-author of "The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy."

These beliefs are growing among Christians, according to a survey last year by the Barna Group, a company that conducts surveys about faith and culture for communities of faith and nonprofits. The group found that an "increasing number of American Christians believe strongly" that the US is a Christian nation, has not oppressed minorities, and has been chosen by God to lead the world.

"It's a half truth, a mythological version of American history," Gorski says.

Some Founding Fathers did view the founding of the nation through a Biblical lens, Gorski says. (Every state constitution contains a reference to God or the divine.)

But many did not. And virtually none of them could be classified as evangelical Christians. They were a collection of atheists, Unitarians, Deists, and liberal Protestants and other denominations.

The Constitution also says nothing about God, the Bible or the Ten Commandments, Gorski says. And saying the US was founded as a Christian nation ignores the fact that much of its initial wealth was derived from slave labor and land stolen from Native Americans, he says.

The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, that the US negotiated with a country in present-day Libya to deal with pirates attacking American ships, just 20 years after America was founded. Ratified by a Senate still half-filled with signers of the Constitution it declared, "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on Christian religion."

Don’t shoot the messenger on that one. The fact that this is still the greatest country in the world has to do with its democracy, not its Christianity. So we must not, as a nation, fall prey to those who would subvert democracy with a subverted Christianity that knows no God other than itself. To hijack Christianity for racist or political purposes is heresy. It is false religion. And it has the possibility of stripping us of the democracy our fathers fought foreign threats to protect.

Remember this:

God’s Heart is: Devotion to Him, Not a Man-Made Substitute.

We are so prone to give up what is true for a lie that it amazes me continually.

And in American Politics of the last decade, it has gotten worse instead of better.

There was a time when I aligned with the Republican party. For years that was true. But during the terms of President Obama I gave up on them, because they quit taking part in government so that they could block anything the President proposed.

I have been utterly sickened and saddened by the Republican party that completely lost its backbone to stand up for its own ideals because a new guy in Washington intimidated everyone with threats carried out on Twitter, whose son-in-law kept appeased by skewing the news to always bring at least two positive things before the boss as negatives, no matter what was happening.

I don’t have to wonder what God was thinking, because its right here in Isaiah 57:

In Isaiah 57:11

Isaiah 57:11 HCSB

11 Who was it you dreaded and feared, so that you lied and didn’t remember Me or take it to heart? Have I not kept silent for such a long time and you do not fear Me?

There’s a consequence to this kowtowing to a blowhard instead of bowing before the Almighty God:

Isaiah 57:12 HCSB

12 I will expose your righteousness, and your works—they will not profit you.

In the end, if we continue to reject God, if continue to put our hope in anything less than God, we will be lost.

Isaiah 57:13 HCSB

13 When you cry out, let your collection of idols deliver you! The wind will carry all of them off, a breath will take them away. But whoever takes refuge in Me will inherit the land and possess My holy mountain.

You see that the final hope is still there for those who will truly put the True God back in the highest place in their hearts.

Take refuge in Yahwek God. In him and him alone is your home for eternity.

Here is Jesus’ simple and clear take on this:

John 4:23 HCSB

23 But an hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. Yes, the Father wants such people to worship Him.

John 4:24 CSB

24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth.”

We have to check ourselves continually. Where is your heart? Where is your hope?

Where is your devotion?

Do not, under any circumstances, allow yourself to settle on a man-made substitute for the Holy God.

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