Commandment 1: No Other Gods

Hey, hey, if you don't know me, my name's Chris.

Alice and I are some of the pastors here and great to be

worshipping Jesus together with you this morning.

It's moving, isn't it, that I found it moving in that time of

worship. Just love worshipping Jesus and

such a good place to be. So Alice is going to be speaking

to us. She's done this series.

She's going through the 10 Commandments this year and this

is week, the second one of those, if you want to catch up

with other ones, they're all on our website, Spotify, Apple

Podcasts or wherever. And those things are there.

Let's let's pray, shall we, as we go into the Bible together?

No, thank you that we get this opportunity to sit and and learn

from your scriptures, learn from you.

And we just say that we we're hungry, hungry to be fed this

morning. Feed our souls, feed our

spirits, train us. We pray, Holy Spirit, that you

train us and you recruit us to live life in all its fullness

with Jesus as our Lord, bringing hope and good news to the world

around us. So I do that through what Alice

teaches us this morning. Amen.

OK. We are looking at the 10

commandments and we're on Commandment 1 today.

Can anyone remember what that is?

We did a little round the table group work and we all kind of

wrote down and collectively I think we got them just giving

being super positive feedback here.

Can anyone remember what the first one is really interesting

and a lot of people say love the Lord your gold with all your

heart, soul, mind and strength because Jesus that is in the

first five books of the Bible and Jesus sums up all the 613

laws with love the Lord your gold and love your neighbours

yourself. So there's there's nothing wrong

with that. It's not technically the first

commandment. Anyone remember the first

commandment? Yeah, that's it.

You shall have no other gods beside me.

You shall have no other gods beside me.

Anyone being up a mountain in their life that's been

memorable? Want to share with the room,

Jane or anyone? Anyone can say a memorable.

Just shout it out because we haven't got long.

Snowden. Yes, that's memorable.

Oh, OK, that's yeah, that's always a bit

00. Oh, that's brilliant.

I, I thought it was going to end in the poor visibility.

So I'm really pleased it ended on the mountaintop experience.

That is the right answer. The mountain.

Anyone else had a mountaintop experience where it wasn't poor

visibility? Any mountains you want to shout

out? A mountain you've been up?

Sorry. Oh, that sounds, is that New

Zealand? Oh, sounds unpronounceable and

beautiful, so I won't butcher it.

Anyone else? Oh, nice.

Oh, yeah. Anyone else?

Yeah. Sorry.

Oh, that, that that's yeah, that's good.

Yeah, yeah, that's so good. It's beautiful.

That is more biblical, by the way.

Mountains in the Bible are more like our hills because they how

could they have got up the mountains?

We get up now they couldn't. So when you see mountain in the

Bible and city few 100 people, not not millions of people.

Mountain, a nice hill in Malvern maybe, but in the desert more

than England's green and pleasant land.

Yes. Sorry.

Oh, Oh yeah. Oh, God.

Oh, yeah. OK that is really significant as

well, that one because what's at the top of Machu Picchu There's

yeah, yeah. So shout out a few more and

we'll come back to that one. Carmel.

Oh, yes, yeah. That's, yeah, 00.

I mean, that that's we could just stop there, couldn't we?

Yeah, That was good. Yeah.

But so for the very reason that Machu Picchu has temple, a

temple on the top of it, and all that we've shared is

particularly in the ancient world, people felt mountains

were where the gods were and heaven and earth overlapped.

So pay attention when you read the scripture for any mountains.

Jesus delivered his sermon on the mountain.

So it's a way to live where heaven and earth are one.

You'll see it as soon as you see it.

You see it everywhere. It's a brilliant way of

understanding spaces that are closer to God.

And Moses delivers, God delivers the 10 commandments to Moses on

a mountain, which means he's saying I'm going to deliver

something that is of heaven and earth space.

This is this is going to be your true humanity.

I actually went out my Mount Sinai.

I actually went, we were climbing up the wrong mountain

and we saw tourist camels on the other one and we were like, oh,

climb down. Went up the other one really

hot, had no kit because you don't when you're 19, don't

think like that. Went to the top.

Some Germans told us off. They said you're going to die of

hypothermia. Luckily they had blankets and

hot chocolate so we didn't die of hypothermia.

Woke up the next day to the most incredible sunrise as we've all

talked about I've ever seen. It was a mystical, heavenly

experience, despite being slightly comic, getting there.

And that those are those are those moments externally that

God wants us to live in perpetually.

Internally, He wants us to live in a perpetual mountaintop

experience in terms of a sense of wonder and awe and beauty at

the world. And I say that within the

context that we live in an evil age and terrible, terrible,

terrible things happen. But I think Jesus is inner life

with the Father was like that, although he was also familiar

with sufferings. So there's a place for us to

inhabit both a perpetual ongoing mountaintop experience as well

as being familiar with sufferings.

And I think we numb both. We can't bear either, but God

brings this revelation, these 10 commandments, hundreds of

commandments actually, which are summed up in the 10 from a

mountain, because he's saying part of how you're going to

experience this mountaintop experience within yourself is by

living this way. So he's just delivered them out

of slavery in Egypt. But what's interesting is it

isn't just a political deliverance.

You're oppressed. I'm going to put you in a land

where you rule yourself. You're not going to be oppressed

by a dominant empire, Egypt anymore.

You're going to be in a land where you rule yourself.

That wasn't enough. They needed an ethical way to

live. They needed a way of life, which

suggests the oppression wasn't just external, it was also

internal. There was an internal oppression

as well as an external oppression that he wanted to

liberate them from both the inside and the outside so they

could live in this perpetual sense of a mountaintop

experience. So in the ancient world, you

often get like we learned in Machu Picchu temples or

worshipping sites in high places, because that was the

place where where you could sacrifice to the gods and

ancient peoples. Often there's that is the range

that people think Mount Sinai is, is in Mount Sinai.

These are some some of the gods that would have been worshipped

in Canaan. But this is this is pretty

common practise. They basically worshipped for

provision, protection and a sense of identity.

So you had your local tribal God and you sacrificed to them to

get what you wanted from them. The relationship was extremely

variable. The gods were very fickle and

you were very vulnerable to the natural elements of the world.

Literally you could live or die on the harvest.

So you needed to sacrifice to the gods of weather and

fertility and farming and so on to make sure you could live

another year. So this is a kind of survival

mode. A lot of the, the ancient

worships were really literally about getting through the day or

the week or the month of the year, not being subject to

sickness, death, disease, famine.

And the gods were fickle. You never knew if you'd done the

right things for them. You'd pleased them in the right

kind of way. And, and so you were always kind

of on tender hooks and you, they developed practises and ways to

try and appease the gods, which kind of made sense to to the

people at the time in order to get them to kind of basically

keep you alive. And these are the Canaanite

gods. They were no different.

So there were actual physical statues that represented the

God. And in a temple, you would have

a statue. That statue wasn't the God, but

it represented the gods he sacrificed to that statue.

Sex with male and female temple prostitutes.

I use the word I prefer the word sex worker normally, but to to

clarify this is different from the sex industry, temple

prostitution. That's why I'm using that word.

I wouldn't ever recommend anyone uses the word prostitute

normally. It's completely inappropriate.

But for to understand what I'm trying to say in terms of the

ancient world, the sacrificial system was facilitated by male

and female temple prostitutes and child sacrifice were among

the worshipping practises in Canaanite religion.

In order to ensure that the wet season represented by the God

bar who you will come across in your in the Bible won in the

yearly battle against the dry season, April to October, who

was represented by this God mocked Mote who you won't come

across in the Bible, but you will come across in in ancient

Near Eastern like religious sources.

So there's an Old Testament scholar Laurence Boat here.

He says their religion pictured the gods as little more than the

personified power of the storm, the drought, the growing crops,

sexual facility and the like. It is the task of human religion

to win the favour of the gods and bring a favourable blessing

and order on our creative presence.

For civilisation to survive, it is absolutely essential that

Baal triumphs in the end. So when Yahweh says to ancient

Israel, they've come out of Egypt, which had a pantheon of

gods, they were about to go into Canaan that had another pantheon

of gods. You shall have no other gods

before me. This would have been thoroughly

disruptive at every level of human experience, how families

were built, how societies were built, how, how you, you

understood your own life, how you stood your, your communal

life, everything would have been thoroughly disrupted.

This was a political statement, a religious statement, a

cultural statement. It was in every, it, it, it was

a holistic statement of a thoroughly different way to

live. So this commandment was about

the difference between who God is, who's represented himself.

Sorry, who's who's given us this name, personal name Yahweh and

the other gods? It was about who we trust to

deliver us, to heal us, to save us, to protect us, to provide

for us. And the very first thing that

Yahweh says is I am the Lord your God, I'm Yahweh, Elohim.

So Elohim's just the word for gods, but he calls himself this

name Yahweh, and he's essentially saying I'm

fundamentally different from these other gods.

I'm not fickle, but I'm faithful.

I'm not cruel. I make covenants.

Relationship with me is not transactional, it's personal.

So for this reason, he's saying you can trust me.

I've delivered you out of Egypt. I've set you free from this

dominant empire where you were being thoroughly and cruelly

oppressed. I will provide for you.

I care for you. I intervene for you.

I did it even when you can do it for yourself.

You can't offer me anything. But I came in and broke through

and delivered you. I'm not the personified power of

the storm. I'm the creator of heaven and

earth. I can ensure crops and fertility

are blessed, but the root to the blessing and prosperity is

living in agreement with Yahweh in His ways, not in the ways of

Egypt where they'd come from, or Canaan where they were going.

So it was a challenge to come out from the nations, to come

out from the lies people believed about what the gods or

God was like, which is our original sin.

We believe lies about the nature of God.

He is very good, very kind, very generous, very abundant.

But human condition seems to be crippled and he's against us.

We've got to do what we can. We've got to be transactional.

We've got to do horrific things to get him to love us.

You know, you can feel this kind of angst in the human condition

because we believe the lie that God isn't good.

He isn't faithful, He doesn't provide, he doesn't protect, He

doesn't initiate. He isn't actually really in

charge. And so this was the practises of

the ancient world and this was the mindset change God was

bringing them to a repentance, A kindness, to a literally a

change of mind about what God's actually like.

And he does this through saying he's not only their tribal God,

but he's the God of all the nations.

And if they live his way, then everyone will understand this is

what God's like. He is provision.

He is protection. He is identity.

And he does that freely and lovingly and abundantly out of

his overflow. He doesn't need these kind of

strange and odd sacrifices to kind of appease and placate him

like he's a petulant toddler. He's not like that.

He's completely different to what we think he is.

And so when we get to Jesus, though in the 1st century, by

then devout Jews would have understood there is one God.

Although this God was complex, Elohim, the very first word

Elohim in the in Genesis chapter, one that got in the

beginning, God created is the singular, but God is the

plurals. They knew God was complex.

They just didn't understand his complexity, but they believed in

this one complex Elohim God who was who was creator of heaven

and earth. And they were rejected

wholeheartedly and renounced the paganism of their Greek or Roman

context. So you have two kinds of people

in the New Testament. You have devout Jews who worship

this one complex God and live by his way, seek to live by his

ways. And then you have Romans who

have their pantheon of gods, which were not dissimilar in in

what they required to the Canaanites.

And then and, and, and also the history of the Greeks as well,

who they loved and basically imitated.

So Jesus speaks into it and it, this is what I'm trying to do

with each commandment, how Jesus interprets them, how Paul does

and therefore how we can apply them.

So Jesus is taken up onto a mountain by the devil, and the

devil says to him in one of his temptations, or the adversary,

this the liar, the accuser, he took him up onto an exceedingly

high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and

their glory. And he said to them, all these I

will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.

Then Jesus said to him, Away with you Satan, for it is

written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only you

shall serve. He quotes Deuteronomy, which is

a reflection on this text, what Jesus is doing.

He's taking this idea of external idols that you bow down

to. And even the Greeks and the

Romans were still doing that. And he's saying there's an

internal idolatry of dominion. We want dominion on our own

terms. We want to rule.

We could call it worldliness, we could call it selfish ambition.

We could call it the desires. People call it disordered

desires, but he took something that looked external and said

actually it's an internal human condition.

Idolatry is worshipping something that gives you a sense

of power and control and dominion.

And Paul says something really interesting in Romans one.

Sorry I didn't get those. In Romans 1, he kind of sums up

the human condition by saying they exchanged the truth about

God for a lie and worshipped and served created things rather

than the Creator who is forever praised.

So there's the reality, which is God, and we worship Him because

that is reality. We don't worship Him because he

needs our worship and he's a narcissist.

We worship Him because he's the creator of heaven and earth.

He's worthy, but what we do is we exchange that for created

things. And Jesus is saying some of

those created things are out there, physical things.

And Paul is saying that, and he's also saying some of it is

lies. We believe the created thing is

a lie. We believe about what will make

us happy. I'm going to quote Tim Keller

now. I find Tim Keller quite complex

because I don't think he understood women the way God

does. I think he had a happy and good

marriage, but I don't think he understood the agency and

authority of women. However, I think he was really,

really good on the idols of the heart, on understanding how an

individual's and in systems we have individual and systemic

idolatry. So he's brilliant at that.

So I'm going to honour my my spiritual father by quoting him.

The first command asserts that we will either worship God or

something else. Notice it does not envision

envision 1/3 option. There is no possibility of our

worshipping nothing. I really want us to get this

because I think this is extremely perceptive.

The first command, which is the one we're looking at today,

asserts that we will either worship God or something else.

Notice it does not envision 1/3 option.

There is no possibility of our worshipping nothing.

So we think, no, I don't worship anything.

I don't believe in anything. I, I live, you know, just free

from all of that. The point Tim Keller's trying to

draw out from that first command is we will be worshipping

something if we're not worshipping God, since we need

to worship something because of how we are created, we cannot

eliminate God without creating God's substitutes.

Something will capture our hearts and imaginations,

becoming the most important concern, value or allegiance in

our lives. And this is, I think, really

helpful phrase. An idol then for us now today in

the 21st century is making a good thing into an ultimate

thing. So it could be something

external or it could be something in our heart

condition. But it's something that God's

created because the only thing that exists in the whole world,

God's created. And he says, Paul says, if he's

created it, it's we, we give thanks for everything God's

created. They are good.

But if that thing becomes like that little idol statue on the

throne of our lives that we bow down and we pay a price and we

worship and we sacrifice and we violate all our relationships

for that was the thing that will oppress us and destroy us.

That will be our idolatry and our way of life and and God is

wanting to call us out of that oppression into the freedom of

when he's there, life works because we we are governed by

whatever we worship and only under him, his governance is

perfect freedom. So what's the main to do?

How, how do we identify idols in our lives and how can we be free

of them? That's what I really want to

drill down on today. I've actually got some questions

that people can go away and use in their force or accountability

or life groups because this is a deep long work.

This isn't something that is a quick fix, right?

Chapter #1 Let's go on to the second commandment.

I love over the next two years for us Christ to be forged in US

through these teachings on the 10 commandments.

So the best thing to do is just embarrass oneself, isn't it?

And tell a personal story. Some idols are pretty cool to

talk about, some are just embarrassing.

Mine's embarrassing. There you go.

And hopefully, as you hear me tell my story, you can start to

see how it works, how we can tell what a pattern of idolatry

in our life is, where where we're oppressed and not free as

we're designed to be. When I was young, I went to

boarding school. Whilst I'm acutely aware that

access to a good education is a real privilege, I also felt a

deep sense of low self worth, of longing for love, approval,

validation. And I sought to heal myself

through success. In my context, and this is no

joke, every week the teachers would post the order of results

for every class in the school, in every subject.

This meant that every child in the school would know where they

were academically in comparison to every other child in their

school year, in every subject, every week.

That's why times there are changing, isn't it?

That worked. I remember.

I remember looking forward to those results coming because I

felt I didn't know I was getting a dopamine hit, but I didn't

know that at the time. I felt better about myself

because I usually see myself in like the top, some of the top

positions in some of those subjects.

So it just, it soothed me. I could feel it at the time

viscerally. I didn't know it consciously,

but I knew there was a, there was a pattern in me going that

is making me feel better about myself.

So success became, without me realising it, the source of my

validation, approval and ultimately salvation rather than

God. I'd made the good thing success,

the ultimate thing. In the 1st chapter of the Bible

we see God wants humanity to be blessed and multiply.

We see in Joshua 1 He even says the word success.

If you meditate on the law day and night, you will be

successful wherever you go. And we see Jesus when he

multiplies to thousands of people bred he, he successfully

feeds lots of people. So success itself isn't wrong.

It's created by God. It's a, it's a multiplication

principle. It, it's become, when it becomes

the ultimate thing, it makes me and people I, it makes me toxic

and therefore a very poor conduit for love for other

people. So that kind of grew in me

without me realising it. And it looks different in every

industry success. It looks like finance in money

in the finance sector or maybe sales.

It looks like votes for politicians.

It looks like likes for influencers and in the Christian

world when I was growing up in the in the West, it looks like

having a testimony of such powerful overcoming that the

person is worthy of a best selling book written about them.

They don't write it. Someone else writes about them

so that when I was coming closer to God and encountering the Holy

Spirit and being filled with the Holy Spirit and was giving my

life holy to God, that idol just translated from worldly success

to Kingdom success in my heart. Think Jackie Pullinger

overcoming addiction and seeing people delivered from heroin

without any withdrawal symptoms. And I've been there and

experienced it. It's unbelievable is worthy of a

book. Or Brother Andrew experiencing

angelic protection on multiple occasions when smuggling Bibles

into communist countries. Unbelievable.

The testimonies of provision, protection and deliverance or

even someone like Lauren Cunningham, whose vision to see

waves of young people serving as charismatic missionaries across

the world birthed a movement, a new kind of missionary movement

at the time called Youth with a mission, where every single

person lived by faith financially.

And so you see, test me after test me after test me a

financial provision, along with all those will will have seen

healings and other miracles. So that in my head, I didn't

realise this, but in that in my head was what a successful

Christian was. And if you weren't have, if you

didn't have that kind of story, you weren't really successful.

And success was the thing that was going to heal me and save

me. It gets worse.

You don't realise this because I didn't.

But when you become a church leader, that then translates

into another really toxic thing called numbers.

Oh so cringy. I didn't even I literally had no

idea. Even when we were associate like

pastor level, I had no idea of the the thing in the West about

how you quantify successful churches because why would you?

It's the most narcissistic, inward looking, odd way to look

at the world. Anyway, it so happens that when

you do become a church leader, numbers matter.

So the numbers of people who attend your church, the numbers

of people who are baptised, the numbers of church plants and

although this isn't particularly connected to my ideal of

success, the number of pounds people give financially.

Because we live in a Theta driven capitalist economy, we

don't know how else to measure success in the spiritual realm

apart from numbers unless we have that massive testimony, of

course, of overcoming. So I knew I'd been desperate for

a powerful testimony, but I had no idea this was an idol or

stronghold in my heart until I started paying attention to

patterns of emotional responses. And this is what I, I want us to

kind of hear how we can learn how we can be self aware with

the things that our disordered desires or the the good thing is

the ultimate thing. So for many years I battled

deeply with a sense of shame, humiliation and failure on how

my spiritual life is doing in terms of a lack of a powerful

overcoming testimony, and more recently even how Hope is doing,

particularly in comparison with other churches who seem to be

doing better in terms of numbers.

I'd be taken out by envy over the smallest comment about

another church or I sometimes or during our sabbatical.

I couldn't actually go into any white church that entire time

because I felt such a sense of shame and humiliation, and I've

even dreaded coming to Hope on a Sunday because I've just felt so

broken and full of shame and humiliation.

However, I also had a lot of head knowledge and convictions

and values which were Hope is. We are here to serve every

member, to be the person God's created us all to be.

And so many of us at Hope contribute in many ways which

can't be measured quantifiably. Also, we serve people that are

very long, slow burn, like it takes 20 years to see a child

grow into maturity and that's one of our dreams.

Or we do things like partner with God's house, which changes

the dynamic and potential for God to move in a because he

moves when leaders are in agreement in a city, breaks that

division and opens up a move of God in the city.

But that can't be quantified. So I know my head, we're doing

what God's asking us to do and we're and we're following the

Spirit and fundamentally we're non negotiably, non coercive

here. People are free to come and go

as they like. We will go after the lost sheep,

but we will not. We will let that rich young

ruler walk away because everyone's free to follow Jesus

or not. And of course, most importantly,

I know in my head that fruit looks like Christ like character

which will be exposed by fire on the last day.

And therefore numbers alone can be misleading as a metric for

success. I know this in my head and I

fought as anyone who knows me for a second knows.

I fought regularly to practise gratitude, confession and

blessing other ministries. I do that wholeheartedly because

it's the right thing to do. But in my heart, this wounds,

this, this need, this idolatry was still powerful and had

dominion over me. Because of these, I could see

these emotional responses were not in alignment with reality.

So I've got this image of a balloon and we can call this our

happiness balloon. We're designed to have that

sense of well-being, contentment, peace, even in

suffering in our inner lives. Remember I talked about that at

the beginning, a sort of mountaintop experience of the

wonder of the goodness of God and and well-being in the world.

And occasionally we encounter things in our life that might

cause this balloon to pop. We might get carved up by car,

we might just get really fed up with that obsequious AI that

tells us our we're so amazing, but never actually tells us the

solution to the problem that we wanted them to do.

And we actually just want a human or we've like burnt the

food and we get annoyed. I'm not talking about that.

Those are one offs. That's just the irritations of

life. I'm talking about the fact that

every single time something happens that's in the same

pattern, and we can see the pattern, our balloon pops.

Every single time we get into relationships, we leave a trail

of destruction behind us. Every single time we get angry

and impatient when we're carved up.

Every single time we feel envious when we hear about how

much money someone else is making, it's the always, it's

the every. It's the patterns that show us

that this this has an eye. This has a a stronghold, a place

in our life that's exercising dominion and is oppressing us.

It could be the approval of others.

So for me, every time someone else's powerful ministry was

mentioned, or more recently, their growing church, I would

lose my Lovejoy and peace. I would that happiness balloon

would burst and I didn't mind at all when someone was successful

outside my lane. So it's really precise.

I'm really genuinely happy for people when they succeed in

their lane because they're fulfilling the calling on their

lives and I'm really happy for them.

But within a narrow scope of my lane, being a successful

Christian, having that overcoming testimony or the the

kind of sense of a successful church leader, I always lost my

Lovejoy and peace to feelings of envy, shame and humiliation.

These reactions were so out of keeping with the actual reality

of my life that I realised I was worshipping the idol of success

and this idol was oppressing me. So how do we identify an idol?

We can, in our living free language, also call it a

stronghold, a place where the enemy has a high point.

That's that's that's very deeply defended in our heart.

We pay attention to where the balloon of Lovejoy and peace

repeatedly pops in the same circumstance.

We are paying attention to patterns and underlying this

pattern of emotional response is a lie.

We are believing and holding higher than the truth like God.

Let's sorry like Paul, we've exchanged the worship of the

creator for the worship of the created thing.

So how do we turn away from idols and worship God?

Well, we have to ask Him what it looks like for us to worship

Him. We can't work it out on our own

strength or wisdom because we are not free to see clearly.

We're oppressed. We're darkened in our mindset.

So for me, turning from this idol of success was actually

really unexpected. It was.

It makes total sense now. But basically, God had become a

utilitarian means by which I could heal myself through

success. I was no better than the

Canaanites. They used the gods for a

utilitarian means to make their harvest work, to save and

deliver them. And I was doing exactly the

same. It just happened to be God

rather than money or books or something else.

God had become the thing by which I could heal myself and

what God wanted me to do is he invited me into an actual

personal relationship with him where I actually tell him how I

feel and I hear his voice. So it's not transactional, it's

personal. Now I had not done this for a

very long time because I felt felt ridiculous and self

indulgent. I I'm only a bit aware of the

level of suffering in the world that I've never experienced.

And so there was no way I was going to tell God.

Oh, I'm finding this really difficult.

So cringey. So entitled and cringey.

So I was grateful for my life. I confessed my sin.

I blessed other ministries, as I said, but actually God was

inviting me into a personal relationship with Him where

actually I came to the end of myself and the only thing I

could talk to Him about was how I felt because I felt utterly,

utterly desperate. People say you shouldn't pray

because of duty, you should pay because of desire, and only

immature people pay because they're desperate.

I was like, great, I'm in to show you.

I'm just desperate. That's why I'm praying.

And I found that people say, oh, I found God in the Psalms.

I'm like, oh, for goodness sake, so first world.

But I found God in the Psalms because I came to the end of

myself. And in the book of Psalms, you

find a really honest relationship with God.

You find him people telling God how they feel.

And they really were suffering horrific humiliation and in

slavery and horrors that I can't even imagine.

But there was permission within the Psalms to tell God how I

felt. So I had permission to break

before him and ask him to heal me and realised that this was

this was toxic. It was a thing that was wrong in

my life that had come in a wound that I hadn't dealt with in my

childhood. And the enemy had taken up

territory says in your anger, don't sin.

Don't let the enemy have some topple some legal territory in

your life. When we don't deal with stuff,

we don't realise we give the enemy legal territory and

especially as children, because we don't even know that that's a

thing. And the enemy loves the

vulnerable. He's always going after the

vulnerable because the vulnerable aren't is armed so

much to to to fight that spiritual warfare, to protect

our hearts, to keep worshipping God.

That's the duty of parents and guardians and carers to kind of

guard children so they can worship God and not not receive

those wounds. So he took me to the place of

reality of what what I was actually wanting wasn't him, is

what he could do for me to a place of wanting him, for him,

just for his own sake. And I recognised that like those

those people, those primitive people who were building the

Tower of Babylon who wanted to make a name for themselves, I

was just the same, just wanted to make a name for myself.

So many names out there aren't there.

At the name of Jesus. Every knee will bow and every

tongue confess that he is Lord. And there's a recent teaching by

John Mark Comer on the two halves of life.

And he talks about one of the strengths of the second-half of

life as we come to a place of acceptance.

If if we do, we can fight against it and become bitter, or

we can come to a place of acceptance.

And it was just such a beautiful moment.

So yeah, I think I'm coming to that place of acceptance.

And he quotes Teresa of Avila, who says when one reaches the

highest degree of human maturity, one has only one

question left. How can I be helpful?

And that's just this really beautiful content space to be.

And that's, I think the space I'm moving into, hopefully.

Apparently we're never healed. We're healing.

But I feel a lot closer to that space of how can I be helpful

when God commands us, You shall have no other gods before me.

He is inviting us on a journey to know the depths of his love

for us, his deliverance of us, his freedom for us, but also the

depths to which we can love each other.

Because now I feel able to love people, be present to them,

listen to God when I'm with someone, pay attention to what

the Spirit's doing. In a way it's very, very hard to

do when we're we've, we're still worshipping other gods in our

heart. We can do it.

He protects us, He gives us grace.

There's always more where sin abounds.

Grace abounds the more, but I think the, the more sensitive we

become to the nature of God, the more we realise our inability to

love when we're also worshipping idols.

But I also want to say as a side note regarding hope and probably

the conviction of this sin came through being in this community.

This is the most beautiful community of people I could

imagine. And I absolutely mean this

sincerely. I've written these words down

and I mean it. I've words are really important

to me. I wouldn't lie.

I've never wanted to be anywhere else.

And I cannot imagine ever wanting to be anywhere else.

This community is loving, open, humble, kind, generous,

thoughtful, compassionate. Exactly what I imagined and

hoped a beautiful church community could be.

And whilst as elders we always work on continuous improvement,

I couldn't be more proud of this church in terms of our culture.

So please don't conflate my process of my idolatry of

success, which has distorted the reality of how I viewed hope as

this idea with the what I've always believed.

Hope actually is a really special place.

I'm simply trying to explain to you what an idol of the heart is

by using this personal example. So what we're going to do now is

we're going to come to an end in our kind of group circles on the

tables now. But also I really want us to

work this through in our lives so that we are genuinely

liberated because it's such a peaceful place to be.

To have that happiness balloon not pop as much.

To have that sense of well-being and contentment and God is good

and anticipation for the day even in the midst of suffering.

And that we live in an evil age. To have that space is so

healthy. And we have a practise here,

which is a bit like when you learn to drive it, it's a bit

clunky and you kind of go mirror signal manoeuvre.

I don't even know if you do that anymore because like you don't

even need to drive a car. You have driverless cars, don't

you? It probably doesn't even count

like anything we used to do. But anyway, in the old days you

had mirror signal manoeuvre. And of course I never go mirror

signal manoeuvre when I'm driving now.

But I needed to learn something. I needed to learn how to drive

and, and this is learning how to repent, how to change.

We're breaking it down into very concrete steps.

Firstly, we recognise and the way we recognise is by paying

attention to a pattern of emotions that are either under

reactive or overreactive. Our emotions are very, very good

data for how we're really doing. They're given to us as a gift,

like a petrol light that does petrol even exist anymore?

Might have to change my analogies to some other kind of

moving car object thing. We can pay attention to that,

that to our emotions. So we recognise and that's

actually the biggest battle of all because everyone here is

humble and we want to change. We wouldn't be here for any

other reason. We could be like in the mall or

gaming or something. We're here.

So we kind of want to be transformed by the renewing of

our mind. So the first thing we need is

the recognition. The second is then the repent

bit is telling God honestly how we feel.

Just come to Him in that sense of sadness or maybe shame and

the ways we've believed lies and how we've made the created thing

the ultimate thing and how tragic that is.

Just feel the emotion of that and then receive God's

forgiveness for the lies we've believed, but also the effect

this has had on other people. We have not been able to love

the way we're designed to love because of this rebuke the

Spirit which has energised the power of the lie in our lives.

Whilst we don't have many physical idols now that we bow

down and worship, I talked about that last time.

They they, there is a real demonic energy behind our loves.

These spirits are intelligent, they're seductive, they're

clever, they're wise, they're shrewd.

They brought down humanity. We need to have like due respect

and we need to take authority and rebuke these spirits that

energise these lies that we're not loved and we're not able to

love others, which is humanity's design.

And then we replace, we ask God by the power of the Holy Spirit

to show us what replacing, serving this idol looks like

practically. And for me, it actually looks

really different to what you'd think it would look like.

It just looks like being really honest and open with God and

having an open relationship with him.

And that's dismantling this and replacing this with an actual

love relationship with God where I, I love him for him.

So I'm going to pray now and then I, we can get in our

groups, but also make a heart choice to kind of pursue this

over the next period of time. It will keep cropping up because

it's the, it's one of the, it's the root behind all the, the

other commandments. Lord, I thank you so much that

we can be free from the, the disordered desires that oppress

us. And thank you that you've come

to set us free. We will know reality, you say,

and reality will liberate us. You shall know the truth and the

truth shall set you free. And you are reality, Lord.

So you liberate us from the things that oppress us and

prevent us from loving God and loving our neighbour, which is

our true humanity. And so we call into the light.

Now we just call into the light, the patterns of responses and

and emotions that you don't want us to live with anymore that

show that we're believing a lie that you don't want us to live

with anymore. We respect those emotions.

We respect what they're telling us and we allow allow them to

guide us into being honest about where we are worshipping idols.

And we we just say yes to being a people because this is a

communal command to all of us that we shall have no other gods

before you. Amen.

Thank you, Alice. So you've got one minute before

we need to collect children if you've got little gems or kids.

So take a moment to if it's just to, just to as Alice said, this

won't be done and dusted in in 30 seconds.

It's a thing to continue to unravel and unravel over time.

If you want a moment to pray and ask God to continue to do that,

maybe there's something to pray personally.

Now do go ahead. If you'd like some prayer, come

to the front. If anyone else, I'll be having a

prayer with you. And, and then at 12:10, if you

can go and collect children, kids and little gems.

If you've got those. And then with tonight, we've got

our AGM, which is, if you've not been to one of those, it's, it's

more exciting than it sounds. It's a, it's a, a vision, time

sharing vision for the next year with the church.

We'll be commissioning our new elder team.

And we always have. We've got a Trinity of Jelly

babies, chocolate buttons and pretzels as well, which it's

always a nice feature I think. So that's 7:30 in the prayer

centre tonight.