Realizing and Revealing…
The Lord is With Us

Removing our Idols

† IHS †

As you experience and know the grace, mercy and peace of living in God’s presence, may the idols you cling to, that weigh you down, simply fall aside..

Can you imagine the Sanctus, sang by people of every tribe, every language, every ethnicity, as they pour into the space around the throne of God?  As we seem Him in all of His glory?

As we hear the people of God, all in awe of our Father’s appearance and of His glory. Can we our voices added to theirs as we all sing Holy! Holy! Holy! with such awe that almost sucks the breath out of us, combined with a joy that goes beyond anything that we could ever imagine?

Our attention will be so focused on the Lord God Almighty, that I doubt we will notice the other parts of the scene, the 4 seraphim, the 24 elders, and though we will move and sing as one being – I think all of our attention will focus on the love of our lives, our Father…. The Son, the Holy Spirit….

Everything else, all the things of the world… will have ceased to exist, they won’t matter.

Including our idols,

including our idolatry.

The Idols fall away…

That is the lesson tonight! As we look at Gideon’s walk with God, we consider this Lenten journey – what it means. We realize how it changes our lives to accompany Christ on His walk to His cross.  As He bears the punishment we deserve, if only because of the number of times we have shattered the 1^st “commandment”,

Because I am the Lord your God, who rescued you, you shall have no other gods… you will not make or worship idols.

Far too often, our lives resemble that of Israel.  Imagine – as people walk up to the front door of your house, there is a monument to your favorite idol, to the thing that you most often put in God’s place, the things or people or achievements that we spend most of our time either working for, or enjoying, or chasing after.

Rarely are we as simplistic as Gideon’s dad was, just placing our idol, or an altar to that idol in our front yard.  We may be more sophisticated in how we chase them, of how we pursue them, but they are idols none the less.  We may even be as blunt and transparent in how we chase after these things – at least in the view of others, or if we look at how we spend our money, our time, our thoughts, and who or what we turn to, as we deal with a crisis.
What is it that binds us, that ties us up, that stops us from being with God?

The thing about idols that I don’t think we understand – is that if you have an idol, you don’t own it – it owns you.  That’s the thing about gods, if they are a god, not only do we depend on them, we are entrusted to them – we become their property.  We find ourselves to connected to them to break the connection, to dependent on them for our success, our ability to deal with, usually by ignoring it, the aspects of life that cause us anxiety.  We become addicted to them, and knowing its wrong struggle to find a way to break free.

That is why we are like Gideon’s father, who finds himself, a child of God, one who could well remember God’s reign over Israel; the proud owner of a home with the community altar to Ba’al.   An altar to worship the god of fertility.  Are we, like Gideon’s father, willing to make a stand, only after they are removed?

How can we overcome our attraction – even our addiction to those idols we have?  That is the part of our quest for lent, to rid ourselves of the things which stop us from realizing and revealing that the Lord is with us!

The Secret to Ridding ourselves of Idols.

I began this devotional message talking about our being in the presence of God, as we dwell in His presence before His throne, for a reason.

The only way to break the power of something over us, is to have something more powerful grab ahold of our attention, of our focus, of our very lives.

Remember – those idols wouldn’t stand a chance of attracting your attention, when you dwell in the presence of Almighty God, as are gathered in His presence around the throne of God.  We joke about you can’t take it all with you, but the real truth is that you wouldn’t want to!

You would look pretty silly, in the presence of God, illuminated by and dwelling in his glory, to be lugging a bag full of false gods, or to be bowing before things you have made yourself, or that others made. It wouldn’t be just silly, it could be even considered pathetic, sad, something that would bring us to tears.  Even as we talked about on Sunday, as Paul would cry and wail as he had to share that some people chose to be enemies of Christ, and the cross where our lives were linked with His.

The cure for idolatry is simple – it’s to realize we live, we dwell in the presence of God.  TO remember that doesn’t just happen when we go home to be in the Father’s presence, but we now dwell, fully, in the presence of God – the Holy Spirit.

It is found as we gather together, in Christ’s presence, as we worship Him, as we hear that we are freed from our sins, and from all of the world’s unrighteousness and injustice.  As we pray, as we spend time in scripture – both devotional reading and studying it together, as we come to the altar, and celebrate the foretaste of our homecoming feast – the feast of the lamb. It is found, as we realize and reveal to others, the Lord is With Us!

There is no idol that stands in the presence of God!
Gideon, dwelling in the presence of God, hearing God’s desire, did what we are called to do, and did away the idols that bound the people of Israel.….

Free not just of idolatry, but of every sin… for we dwell in the presence of God…

For we dwell in His peace. AMEN?