So I decided it's time to start writing again. It's how I best express my thoughts and I think it gives God more of a chance to work through me.
Today at church, the minister preached about idols and the idols we have in our culture, such as image, money, power, and success. He also pointed out we may have other people in our lives who become our idols. He defined idols as anything anything we devote our heart, mind, and strength to other than God. These things are true. And there are many more. One of the ones I struggle with is comfort. I like to be comfortable, but that's not always what God is calling me to. But I think in the church culture, we have idols that we are completely unaware of.
I think that church itself can become an idol. We get so wrapped up in belonging to one church and making it "perfect". We view it as better than any other church, and if something goes wrong where we feel like we can no longer attend this church, we will fall away from meeting together regularly as we were told to do. I think emotions that worship bring can become an idol. I think that people love the feeling of amazement and awe they get while worshiping or even the good feeling they get when they hear good worship music. They base whether a sermon was good or not on how it made them feel. God never promised we'd be happy or feel good. That's not the point. The point is to worship Him and bring Him glory, and sometimes, to do that, we have to go through bad stuff and feel bad (I strongly feel my depression has brought more glory to God than most of my efforts). Yes, I've heard a lot of great worship music, but to worship, we don't have to have music at all. We can have instruments or not. We can have the words on a big screen or in a hymnal. We can have fancy lighting and special effects or not. But sometimes, we focus on that and bow down to those things instead of God. I think the Bible is sometimes an idol. The Bible is not God, it simply helps us to know God. I see the way people act toward the Bible, and it seems to me they are worshiping it. Some people spend all their time with "The Bible says this, the Bible says that" and which version is the best that they forget the importance of just stopping and spending time with God or that the point of the Bible is to get to know God, who is a being, not a book. What others in the church think of us becomes an idol. We won't confess our sins in order to draw closer to God and allow others to see Him working in us because we don't want others to know we are sinful. That's ridiculous. We're all sinners and mess up. That's the whole point of Jesus becoming man. People might see us struggle with our relationship with God or make a mistake. Well, to me, that's the whole point of church. To help us in our relationship with God, so they need to know when we're struggling. I think these are some of the things we ignore because they are "good, Godly things" and are indeed wonderful things, in their rightful place -- as a way of worshiping and glorifying God, as a way of getting to know Him better and draw closer to Him, not as a god in and of themselves. Nothing should ever be more important than God. Not even something at church.
