Episode 259: Freed from Our Idols

- Welcome to Harbor West.

Great to see you guys and worship with you this morning.

My name is Justin.

I'm one of the pastors here of our church.

And if you have a Bible, you can grab it now.

We are gonna continue worshiping God by opening his word

and we're gonna read it together, study it together,

seek to believe it together, and then live it out together.

And so if you have a Bible, you can turn it to Exodus 20.

If you're looking to use a Bible,

the one under the chairs in front of you,

Exodus 20 is on page 64 in those Bibles.

And we're gonna continue our study

through the 10 commandments.

And so let me just lead us in a quick prayer

as we dig into God's word.

So Father, we pray the words of Psalm 119

that you would open our eyes,

that we may behold wondrous things out of your law.

We pray it in Jesus' name, amen.

Today we're gonna be studying the second commandment

and we're gonna read our whole text up front.

We're gonna read our whole text right away

and then we'll go back and talk about it a little bit.

So look down, Exodus 20, look at verse four.

Do not make an idol for yourself,

whether in the shape of anything in the heavens above

or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth.

Do not bow in worship to them and do not serve them.

For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God,

bringing the consequences of the father's iniquity

on the children to the third and fourth generations

of those who hate me.

But showing faithful love to a thousand generations

of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Do not make an idol.

Do not bow and worship idols.

Do not serve idols.

The second commandment is this, get rid of our idols.

And remember the context from last week, right?

God saw his people in slavery, he heard their cries,

and he miraculously rescued them.

He brought them out into freedom.

He brought them freedom, he freed them, rescued them,

and then, then he speaks these commands to them.

The commands are given to make sure his people

keep living in the freedom that he's provided for them.

He doesn't want them to end up back in slavery.

He wants them to live in freedom.

God really wants you to live in freedom.

That's God's desire for you, you right now.

God wants you and your life, he wants you to live

in a freedom that you can only experience

through his provision.

He wants your life to be one of freedom.

That's his desire.

And so one of the ways that we remain in the freedom

that God has for us is to not serve idols,

which means this, this command, get rid of your idols.

If we don't do it, if we do make, bow down and worship to,

and serve idols, it's a way to head back to slavery.

So here's what I'd like to do.

I'd like to ask us four questions about this text,

and then we'll answer them.

First, what is an idol?

Second, why would we want one?

Third, what do idols do to us?

And then fourth, how do we destroy them?

So first, what is an idol?

Well, the first command in verse three,

the first commandment, have no other gods before me,

that's telling us who we should worship.

Who should we worship?

Well, God says there's no other gods.

There's no other gods that you should worship,

we should worship me alone.

There's no other gods who exist and have any power,

worship me.

The first commandment tells us who to enthrone and worship,

God, Yahweh, the creator, the maker of heavens and earth,

the God of the Bible, that's who.

The God we worship is the God who gives us freedom.

The second commandment tells us how to worship him,

not through idols.

Our God does not wanna be worshipped through idols.

And so what is an idol?

Well, in the times that this was written,

an idol was typically represented as a physical thing,

like a statue or something you can make.

And maybe hearing that, you're like,

oh, whew, okay, good.

I don't have any of those in my house,

I don't have any little statues, little idols

that I bow down to and worship to,

so I'm good on this one.

Maybe that's what you're thinking.

But the thing is, it's not simply the image,

the thing that's dangerous.

I mean, a statue by itself has no power,

but it's what that thing represents.

Like, look what happens after God rescues his people,

he brings them into freedom, rescues them from slavery.

Look what happens just a few chapters from here

in Exodus 32, we've got it on the screen.

It says, "When the people saw that Moses delayed

"in coming down from the mountain,

"they gathered around Aaron and said to him,

"Come, make gods for us who will go before us

"because this Moses, this man who brought us up

"from the land of Egypt,

"we don't know what's happened to him."

Do you hear their motivation?

It's fear, right?

We don't know what happened to our leader.

It felt like life was in chaos and they were afraid.

And so Aaron tells them, "Well, give me all your gold."

And so they do, and then in verse four,

he took the gold from them,

fashioned it with an engraving tool,

and made it into the image of a calf.

Then they said, "Israel, these are your gods

"who brought you up from the land of Egypt."

In these days, a bull was a symbol of strength.

And so these people, they were scared,

they wanted to experience God's strength again,

and so they make something

where they can focus on God's strength,

on his power, and on his stability.

And so the next day, they wake up, they get up,

and they offer burnt offerings to this bull, this calf,

and they worship it the same way they worship God.

They're still worshiping, even worshiping correctly,

but they're only worshiping the characteristic of God

that they want to worship.

They've remade God in their own image.

All they care about is God's power.

And so this shows us what an idol really is.

An idol is anything less than the fullness of God

that we give our hearts to.

Anything less than the fullness of God himself

that we give our hearts to.

Here are some things talked about as idols

in the New Testament.

Money, nature, ourselves, sex, possessions.

All good, beautiful things that God has blessed us with

and wants us to enjoy in the freedom

that he's brought us into,

but we end up turning to them and giving our hearts to them

in ways that we never should.

Now, does this mean that we always make little images

that represent them and worship those little statues?

No, not at all.

We remake God simply when we focus on just the things

we like about God and we want God to be

and ignore the rest of him.

So this might happen when you hear things like,

maybe you would say or someone would say,

maybe you hear something like,

"Well, man, I don't want a God

"who would allow people to go to hell.

"I don't want that kind of God.

"I like a lot of things about this God,

"but I don't want a God like that,

"so I'm just gonna get rid of that."

Or, "I think God is a God who's okay

"with everyone's lifestyle choices.

"I think if there's a God out there,

"that he would just be okay with everything."

Or, "I could never worship a God

"who would offer forgiveness to that person

"and ask me to love them as family."

You see, what we're saying when we say things like that is,

I'm only gonna worship a God that does everything

the way I want him to do it.

I'm only gonna worship a God

if he does things the way I think he should.

And by doing that, we are remaking God into our own image.

The Israelites wanted God's strength.

That was the only thing they were focused on,

and so it meant that they were no longer worshiping

the fullness of who God is.

They were giving to their hearts

to something infinitely less beautiful

than the fullness of how God has revealed himself to be.

Sometimes this happens in our marriages.

We want our spouse to act the way we want them to act, right?

And so we may even say to them,

"Man, this is who I need you to be to me,"

even though that's not who they are.

We love a person we've made in our own image,

not a person who really exists.

And when we do that to God, that's idolatry.

When we give our hearts to the love of God

but ignore the wrath of God, his anger at sin,

we aren't worshiping God in his fullness anymore.

When we only love the grace of God for sinners

but never focus on his holiness and his purity,

we aren't worshiping God anymore.

When we only see God as the judge of mankind

but ignore his compassion and kindness and nearness,

that is a totally different God.

Idolatry is anything less than the fullness of God

that we give our hearts to.

And so the question is, why would we wanna do that?

Why would we wanna do that?

Well, back in Exodus 32, it says Israel was scared, right?

Israel was scared because they had a need.

They wanted their need to be met.

They wanted God's power because they wanted protection.

That was their need.

And we all have needs, right?

We all have needs that we'd love to have met by God.

We want protection as well.

We want protection in life.

But instead, sometimes of going to the fullness

of who God is and trusting that he will protect us,

sometimes we're like, ah, yeah,

but I think money will do a better job.

And so I'm gonna discredit God and say

that he's not a God of full protection.

And I'm gonna say, yeah, God, you're there,

but I think money will give me more protection than you.

And so we don't worship God in his fullness anymore.

We give that worship to something else.

We want love and we think that we'll get it best

through other people.

We want pleasure and so we give our hearts to sex.

We want beauty and we think we'll find enough of it

in nature.

Our idols spring up as a result of our hearts

not being satisfied in God.

Not believing that God himself,

as he has fully revealed himself,

can and will meet all of our needs.

And what's crazy in this, man, is that the Israelites,

they experienced God's power in ways we can barely fathom.

Like they experienced the plagues, right?

The parting of the sea, the pillar of cloud and fire,

the raining of bread from heaven.

They had these crazy miracles showing God's power,

but now they're in the doldrums of everyday life.

They were satisfied with God and praising him

on the mountaintop when the miracles were happening,

but now they aren't satisfied anymore.

This typically happens in our lives

when we want something that we don't think God will give us.

When we want something that we don't think God will give us.

Maybe you want sex your own way,

and so you have to reimagine God as a God

who's okay with you having sex before marriage.

He's a God of grace, right?

Let's just focus on his grace.

Maybe you wanna cheat on your spouse,

and so you have to reimagine God in order to do that.

Well, he's a God who would want me to be happy, right?

And I'm not happy where I'm at,

and he wants me to be happy, so he'd be okay with this.

He wouldn't mind if I'm not faithful.

Maybe you wanna hoard your money,

and so you have to reimagine God.

Well, God's a God who wants me to be wise and save.

He wants me to be a good steward, right?

He won't mind if I'm not generous.

Maybe you wanna feel supreme in your views,

your tightly held views that you've come to in life,

the views that you're willing to die on that hill

or at least go down to that corner and hold a sign for.

You wanna feel like those views are validated and right,

and so you've gotta reimagine God to be a God

who elevates your culture, your nation, your politics,

and he looks down on those

who view things differently than you do.

You see that bull?

It focused on one good thing about God.

He is all-powerful, but it didn't fully show who God is.

And when our hearts aren't satisfied with God's fullness,

we will reduce God to only the things we like about him.

We remake him so that we can live how we want,

and that gets to the heart of why we want idols right there.

We want idols so that we can live how we want.

That's our default starting spot.

I wanna live how I want in this world,

and so when my views conflict with who God is

and how he's revealed himself,

you know who it's easier to change?

God.

It's easier to change God than it is myself.

And so we reimagine God, we remake God in our own image

to be a God who's completely okay with me and fits me,

rather than saying he is God, I am not,

and I'm ready to change any way I need to.

We wanna live our own way in this world.

Proverbs 14 says it this way on the screen.

There's a way that seems right to a person,

but its end is the way of death.

There's a way that seems right

for us to live in this world.

There's a way that it seems right for us

that God should be like this,

but the end of that path, man, it's slavery, it's death.

But God has spoken, he's revealed who he truly is

so that we can have life and freedom.

We've gotta stop refereeing God and let God be God.

Let him be who he's told us he is.

Because, number three, man, what will idols do to us?

Well, look at the progression in the command.

First, God says don't make an idol.

That's just the decision to make it,

to give the opportunity to give our hearts to it.

But then he says don't bow down and worship it,

which is a terrible sin to worship anything other than God.

But you might still be worshiping God alongside your idol.

A lot of us try to do that all the time.

We say we love God, we worship him,

but we've got our idol on the side, you know?

I love God, yeah, yeah, yeah, but money, ooh.

I'll dip into this sometimes.

Worship it and love it.

But then look at the last one in the progression.

Don't serve them.

When you serve an idol, you've given it your entire life.

Make, worship, serve.

There's a progression there.

It's almost never the story that someone wakes up one day

and just serves a new God out of nowhere.

It's almost always the case that it's a slow path

filled with many decisions,

giving your heart and your life to an idol.

But once you do, it will completely enslave you.

In Exodus 32, the Israelites worshiped that bull

for not even a full day.

Not even a full day.

And they were already involved in what our Bible translates,

our translation translates as they got up the next day

and they worshiped and it says then they partied.

Some other translations say they engaged in pagan revelry.

The Hebrew there kind of makes it clear they had an orgy.

Less than a day of serving an idol

and they're back in slavery.

They are slaves to their appetites.

Idols enslave us.

And they enslave others around us.

In verse five, it says that a father's sins of idolatry,

the consequences may be felt in his kids,

his kids' kids down the line.

Generations of a family may be enslaved

to money or power or sex or politics

because one person gives those things their heart.

And at the end of it all, it produces a hatred of God.

That's the end of verse five, right?

God equates serving idols with hating him.

God says to change him and not embrace the fullness

of who he is, but only worship parts of him

is like hating him.

And so that tells us what idols will do to us, man.

Idols will enslave us, they'll enslave those around us,

and they'll lead to us hating God.

But God wants us to live in freedom.

God wants us to live in freedom from the idols

that would consume us and enslave us.

And so the key question here is this,

how in the world do we destroy them?

How do we destroy them and stay and remain in freedom?

Well, we tend to think, as I thought for many,

many years of my life, we tend to think

that the way to destroy idols is to hate them.

I've just gotta hate my idols.

I've gotta hate my sin enough.

And so if I could just like hate my hoarding enough,

then it'll lead to me being generous.

Maybe I go to war on hoarding in my life.

I set up plans, I set up accountability system,

and so I break the habit of hoarding,

and I become generous, and maybe my heart

even comes along eventually, and I start to love

being a generous person.

Here's the problem with that.

Even if I could figure out how to hate

one of my idols enough,

I've got like 12 or 13 more right in here,

baking, ready to go, ready to be worshipped.

John Calvin wrote, "Our hearts are idol factories."

They're idol factories.

There's something about our hearts.

It's like it's a factory that's just producing idol

after idol, things that we would love to worship

instead of God, and so even if we could figure out one

and kill it, man, there's another one right there,

ready to go.

Anybody ever worked in a factory?

Anybody ever worked in a factory?

Few of you, yeah, okay.

I spent some good time in a factory.

My dad, his whole career, he worked in a factory

that makes the cans for Coke and Pepsi,

and so there's two lines in this factory

that I used to work at.

There's the end line, the ends, like the top that you pop

and the bottom it sits on, those are the ends,

and then there's the cylinder that is the can you hold onto.

I don't know anything about that cylinder

'cause I didn't work on that side,

but I worked on the end line is what it was called.

I worked with those ends, all right,

so I was in this factory doing 12-hour shifts,

12 on, 12 off, four days in a row,

and it was about 102, 104 degrees in this factory,

just blazing hot, and there was this machine

about the size of our room right here

that was making those ends, and every 22 seconds,

it would send them down to me.

They would come out of this machine,

they would come down these little troughs,

these three troughs right in front of me,

and it would push them down, and there would be 450

in front of me in three troughs,

and so I'd have to squeeze them together,

and I'd have to look to see if there's any grease

like gunked up on those so that you don't get grease

in your Coke Zero 'cause, I mean, Coke Zero's

basically that anyway, but you don't want

any added grease in there, and so I'm squeezing it,

looking for the grease, throwing out if anything's bad,

and then I shove them into these bags.

So I do it three times, put them into these bags,

take the bag off, fold it, and I put it on this pallet.

A pallet held 986 of those bags, okay?

And so it would take, once they came down

and they released in front of me,

I would have 24, I think 24 seconds

before some more would come, and so I'd do it real quick,

I'd put 'em on, and then there was this one little AC vent

that if I got in front of it, I could feel some cold air,

and I learned, I got to the point where I could do it

quick enough that I could stay here for about two,

two and a half seconds, something like that,

and just feel it, and then I'd have to be back,

and man, it just, like, these motions just got into me

so much that I would wake up in the middle of the night,

and my arms would be doing this, and I'd be like,

oh my gosh, what's happening to me?

But what was even more wild was the sound of the machine.

You had to wear earplugs because this machine was so loud,

but it had a certain cadence and beat.

It would go, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da

for 12 hours, all right?

And it, like, got into my soul.

You could feel it in your bones, and it was miserable.

But there were some days where I'd be working

and doing this same sequence for every 24 seconds

for 12 hours and I'd hear (vocalizing)

and the machine would break.

And it was the greatest thing in the world.

(audience laughs)

Terrible for the company, because now they're not producing.

Now the mechanics descend and it's craziness,

but I was trained to do nothing else.

There wasn't even a broom for me to hold when that happened.

All I could do was sit in front of that A/C right here

and just feel it for as long as it took to fix the machine.

There was one day I came in, 12 hour shift,

it was down the whole time.

And so I stood here in front of an A/C for 12 hours

making $32 an hour.

It was great.

My prayer to the Lord of Angel Armies every day

was break the machine.

Please God, break this machine today.

The way that the idle factory in our hearts breaks down

is not through a hatred of idols.

It's through a full on, all out love for God.

That's what breaks the machine.

Through a love for the God who rescued you

and brought you into freedom,

through a wholehearted love for and worship of that God,

the idle factory in our hearts will be destroyed.

Look what Romans 12 says.

It says, "Therefore, brothers and sisters,

"in view of the mercies of God,

"I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice,

"holy and pleasing to God.

"That is your true worship."

Now look at this, our true worship.

What that's saying is how do we truly worship God?

In other words, how do we worship

the fullness of who God really is?

How do we give God our true worship?

How do we become a people who the idle factories

of our hearts have broken down?

We're not worshiping idols in any way anymore.

We're truly worshiping God.

Giving him our entire lives as a living sacrifice.

How do we get there?

Look at the beginning of the verse.

In view of the mercies of God.

With them, with God's mercies in mind,

as you are captivated by God's mercies,

when you love who he is and what he's done for you,

you will worship God with your whole life.

You will worship God for truly who he is.

See guys, we can worship God all day, every way, every day,

and with the rest of our lives,

if we have his mercies in view.

If we know that even though we were dead

in our trespasses and sins,

enslaved captives to sin, death, and Satan,

but God being rich in this mercy,

came and rescued us and brought us into freedom

and made us alive, and he did it at great cost to himself.

How do we destroy our idols?

We destroy them by being captivated by the gospel of Jesus.

That brings us freedom.

Jesus came to break the machine,

to destroy the idol factory in our hearts,

and to overwhelm it by his life for you,

his death for you, and his love for you.

It's only through wholehearted worship of that God,

the God who invites you into the freedom

he purchased for you,

that we can have hope to destroy the idols that enslave us.

Maybe you've been like Israel lately.

You had the mountaintop experience with Jesus, right?

You put your faith in Jesus at one point,

you experienced his freedom,

but life has felt kind of like the doldrums lately,

like it did for Israel.

They had that with Moses.

Moses was their rescuer.

He came in, he rescued them, he brought them into freedom,

and then he went up the mountain,

and it felt like he got distant in their lives.

And instead of in that distance, leading into trust,

they ran away.

Maybe Jesus has felt distant to you.

And maybe instead of leaning in, you've actually run away,

and your life feels a lot more like slavery

than it does freedom lately.

When we experience the freedom of leaning into Jesus

and being captivated by what he's done for us,

that freedom that we live in

will change everything about our lives.

That's what happened to Wesley Barr.

Wesley Barr is a member of Harbor Church Honolulu,

and he, for most of his life, just pursued idols,

just pursued dead things that he thought

would give him life, and then he met Jesus,

and Jesus broke the machine,

and it changed everything about Wesley's life.

Specifically, it changed his view

on his work and his gifting.

Check out a little bit of Wesley's story.

- My name's Wesley Barr.

Growing up, didn't really know God,

didn't read the Bible, even didn't go to Bible study,

didn't really know anyone that went to church regularly.

I finished law school in 2008 when I was 23.

After a few years of work, I did really well.

I worked my way up in my firm.

I was able to be professionally successful

and make enough money where I felt like

this is what I wanted to attain,

this was the goal that I was going for.

And then I looked around, and I still felt empty.

I still felt like I wasn't fulfilled, I wasn't happy.

It wasn't bringing me the joy or the purpose

that I thought that level of success,

that next job, that next trial,

that next paycheck was gonna bring.

And I think that my walk with God has been one

where he has revealed himself to me over a number of years.

My faith started in 2020 when my dad passed away.

I felt lost.

When I started coming to church, it was a total shift

in mindset, and it was like a weight

had been lifted off my shoulders of the pressure

to have all the answers, to have it all figured out,

to have a plan.

I think that those years that I spent pursuing those idols

of external validation, money,

what I thought career success looked like,

I think sometimes getting there shows you

that that's not the thing that's gonna bring you

what you're missing.

When I look to God for guidance in all areas of my life,

that meant also my career path and how I can serve others

with the gifts that he's given me as an attorney,

as an advocate, as somebody that can help those

maybe that are in difficult situations.

It's a total 180 from where I started my practice,

focused on the bottom line, the jury verdict,

the settlement amount.

It felt incredibly freeing.

It felt like this thing I was chasing,

this finish line that I kept seeing in the distance,

that I was already there.

And I think that that freedom opened up

so much room inside of me for God to then work

and serve him instead of serving myself

or serving these false idols.

- When Jesus comes in and breaks the machine,

he brings us into freedom.

He brings us to that finish line in life that we long for.

And so church, man, let's fix our eyes on Jesus.

Let's with his mercies in view, move forward

and watch how he destroys the things

that we'd love to run to and worship

that'll lead us to freedom.

Let's pray together.