What God is your god?

Intro

I recently have been reading a book series for fun called “The Saxon Tales” by Bernard Cornwell. In the book the main character is a pagan living in Christian 9th and 10th century England. He was raised from a young age by pagan Danes, whom he loves. But he has sworn an oath the the Christian Saxon rulers. So he fights for the Saxons against the Danes who are trying to conquer all of England.

In the books there is a lot of talk of religion, some good, some not so good. But the thing that always sticks out to me is the gray area between the different religions. The main character believes in Jesus, though he is a pagan and worships the norse pantheon of gods. Though whenever the Christians win he wonders why his gods allow the Christian God to win.

In the books the blending of the different faith traditions isn’t exclusive to the pagans. There are the times when Christians will go to pagan mystics to ask for advice and there are definitely instances when the Christians fear the pagan God’s and their magic. When I first read this I was a little turned off. For the author to think early Christians looked to anything but God, or feared anything that the false pagan gods could do to them was ridiculous. But the more I thought about this the more it made sense.

We do this all the time in our culture today. We don’t fear or rely on pagan gods, but, more often than we would like to admit, we make other things in our world gods. We worship them, we devote our resources to them, we look to these things for our needs, and we seek them out in times of trouble. The problem is we are falling into the same trap that we read about today in our passage from Jeremiah. “We are forsaking the living God and we are digging our own cisterns.” So how exactly are we doing this?

Our God is where we give our worship

Worship is showing admiration and devotion

Worship is not just what we do on Sunday mornings

Worship is giving our all to someone or something

We worship what we love

Is God the object of your worship?

Our God is where we devote our resources

Jesus said “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt 6:21).

treasure is our time, our talent, our resources

We give our all to what we love

Our God is who we rely on for our needs

Give us our daily bread (Matt 6.11).

God wants his people to rely on him for our needs

We live in a society where we generally don’t need God to supply our needs

We have jobs

We have the government

God is an after thought

Who we rely on for our needs shows where we place our trust

Our God is who we look to when we are in trouble

Psalm 46:1 NIV

God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.

When we are hurting or in trouble where do we look?

Many of us look to friends and family

Some look to the government

We pray to God as a backup.

Conclusion

We read in Exodus 20:3

Exodus 20:3 NIV

“You shall have no other gods before me.

but in our lives we often put lots of other gods before the one true God. We give our worship to all sorts of things in the world, we worship celebrities, politicians, athletes, pastors, even our own possessions. When the truth is God should be the object of our worship. We devote our resources too lots of other gods. We give resources to our houses, to vehicles, to our entertainment, and a host of other things. When we should be devoting our resources to God first and everything else should get the leftovers. We rely on a host of other gods to fulfill our needs, our skills, our time, our government. When the truth is we should only rely on God to fulfill our needs. And when we are in trouble what gods do we look too to rescue us? The truth is we should focus on God first, He will always come to our aid.

So the question today is who is your god? Do we focus on the god’s of the world or do we place everything in the one true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, because only He can give us what we truly need. Let us pray.