One of One with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

All right, MetaCurch, how you guys doing?

Yeah.

Well, I want to welcome you in.

If you're joining us for the first time, my name's Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta.

And whether you're joining us here at our Petrenko venue or here in our Holodus venue, you are in great hands with our venue pastors, Pastor Andre, Pastor Tony.

I'm so glad that you joined us.

Today I am continuing a conversation we've had over the last two weeks about the Ten Commandments.

If you missed either of those weeks, it's really easy to get caught up, to get the full context.

You can go to YouTube.com slash metachurch.

And on our YouTube channel, all of our previous sermons and series are on there.

There are so many options of what you can spend your time listening to.

There are so many podcasts, there's so much news, and most of it just makes you frustrated and anxious.

So you can go to youtube.com slash metachurch and get things that will fill you up and fill you with hope.

Now last week we honed in on just one of the commandments.

We looked at the tenth commandment and found out that if we can learn to not covet, to not have improper desires, that it will help us to obey the other nine commands.

Today I want to focus on the two commands that are almost implicitly linked.

It's really hard to talk about one without talking about the other, that God saw as so important He made them, commands number one and number two.

First, let's look at all ten.

Let's review.

The Ten Commandments go like this: put God first, don't make or worship idols, respect God's name, keep the Sabbath holy, honor your parents, do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not lie, and do not covet.

Putting God first and avoiding idolatry are deeply connected, and we're gonna explore that connection today.

However, putting God first kind of makes sense.

It's like, yeah, I mean, God should, you know, come first in my life.

And if you're a believer and you're here at one of our Sunday services, you're probably like, I think I do that, you know, for the most part.

We're gonna explore the truth of that today, if God really does sit at the top of our lives.

However, the second one about idolatry, it kind of feels like it doesn't apply as much today.

Odds are that this week you did not like carve an animal out of wood and then bow down and pray to it, right?

Now, if you did, today's message is going to be so applicable to you, right?

But odds are you did not do that.

For most modern Westerners, we think of idolatry as an ancient pre-Enlightenment problem.

With you know, modern science and technology and running water and electricity, we feel like we left those strange pagan ways behind.

Now, sure, we know some parts of the undeveloped world still have remnants of idol worship in their cultures.

But here's what we think as Westerners.

We're like, I'm sure as soon as we can help those countries develop, like, as soon as everyone has their own iPhone, they definitely won't struggle with idolatry anymore.

What I want to suggest is that idolatry did not disappear.

In fact, modern idolatry is even more insidious and perhaps more dangerous because we are mostly unaware of it.

My message today is one of one.

Would you pray with me?

Jesus, we love you.

I thank you for your great love for us, demonstrate it for us by coming to this earth, by giving your life on the cross for us, by rising again, offering us eternal life.

I thank you for MetaCurch, for every person who is here across our venues, anyone who is with us online today.

God, I thank you for truly a safe culture where you can come in and wrestle with the biggest questions, and I pray that we will wrestle with them.

Holy Spirit, I believe that you are here and that you are desperate to speak to us.

I ask whoever we are, whatever our background, we'd be humble enough to open our mind and open our hearts to you and allow you to work.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

And if you're ready to get going, say amen.

Amen.

We use the word idol and idolize in a lot of different ways.

Uh, one of them is like, you know, our fashion idol or our sport idol, like this standard that we are trying to attain.

This is how it's used with American Idol, right?

Used to be huge.

I guess it's still on TV.

I don't know.

American Idol, the singing competition, and the idea is like we are going to find the one talent this season that is so incredible that everyone in America can look up to them, idolize them, see them as this status symbol that they could try to attain to themselves.

That's that's one use of the word.

If you've been at Medichurch for any length of time, you probably know.

I'm also a huge Survivor fan, 47 seasons in.

I don't know if you're watching, I'm still watching, okay?

I love the show, Survivor.

And one of the aspects of the show is every week you have the opportunity to win an immunity idol.

And if you have the immunity idol on, you are protected and you cannot be voted off the island.

That's kind of another aspect of what idols represent for us is they give us some kind of protection or they give us some kind of promise of the things that we deeply desire.

Now, fun fact American Idol and Survivor are the two game shows I've personally auditioned for at different points in my life.

Maybe it's a sad fact because I didn't make either of them, and there's a really embarrassing audition tape out there that no one's ever going to see.

But uh let's just move on at this point, I guess.

To understand the significance of the first two commands today, what we have to try and understand is the context that God gave these commands in, all the way back in the Old Testament, in the Jewish scriptures.

These commands came from God, we learned in week one, to the nation of Israel.

That's who received these commands.

The nation of Israel was on their way to occupy the land that God had given them.

And that land was surrounded, literally, on all sides by pagan cultures who worshipped false gods and practiced idolatry.

In these lands, in these countries, there were idols everywhere.

There were small idols that would be all over your house, there were idols that would hang around your necklaces that you would attach to your clothes, there were large idols all over the country, so you were always close enough to go and make sacrifices to them.

There were massive shrines and massive idols on the mountaintops because they believed that the higher up you got, the closer you got to these false gods.

They were everywhere.

And this is the context that God gives the first commandment.

The first one, he says, do not have other gods besides me.

Do not have other gods besides me.

This is God making a claim to exclusivity.

In other words, God is not interested in you trying to fit him in among the other pantheon of false gods.

In the Jewish scriptures, God's name literally translates to, I am that I am, and I will be what I will be.

Scripture declares that he is the Alpha and the Omega, He is the beginning and the end.

God saying, You will have no other gods besides me is a claim to exclusivity, but it's not God denying there are other spiritual entities.

Scripture makes clear there are a whole host of other spiritual beings.

However, those spiritual beings are not God.

They were created by God along with everything else that has been created.

God is the timeless, spaceless, immaterial, uncaused caused.

There is nothing like him.

In other words, God is one of one.

The false gods of the pagan culture were really just personified desires.

And the false gods existed to try and give the people the desires of the people's hearts.

And so if they wanted rain, an abundant harvest, they would create idols and they could implore them to bring the rain.

You see, the false gods needed things from the people.

And if you gave the gods what they needed in this transactional manner, then they would give you back what you desired.

The pagan cultures wanted sexual gratification.

They wanted large families for large lineages.

So they created gods that personified that desire.

And they carved idols to feed them, hoping it would give them what they wanted.

In many of these pagan cultures, the temple rituals were filled with prostitutes and the worship service would devolve into large orgies, the purpose of which was to arouse the gods so the gods would be pleased and give you what you wanted.

The one true God does not exist to satisfy our desires.

In fact, we were created to live up to his desires for us.

God, as the creator and sustainer of all, knows that our best lives, our most fulfilled existence is one where we follow the paths that he has laid out for us.

God, unlike the false gods, the one true God, does not need anything from us.

He isn't waiting for us to feed him or appease him or entice him.

God is self-sustaining.

God doesn't need us, we desperately need God.

And the more we realize that, and the more we seek after God, the better our lives become.

Now, this leads to the second command.

The second command says, 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.

Now, this is not an exist an exhaustive list of what makes an idol an idol.

The command is actually do not make an idol for yourself, full stop.

Then it goes on to explain some of the very common idols in that area.

They would make things out of nature or animals that they saw, things in the sky, on the earth, or in the seas.

We know this because of the two key words, the word idol and the word shape.

That word idol in its original Hebrew, what it means is anything that is carved or hewn or forged or made or in modern terms, anything that is manufactured.

The Hebrew word for shape is the idea of the likeness of anything.

These two words combined to mean that an idol is anything, whether manufactured or even imagined, that takes God's rightful place in your life.

In the New Testament, here's how the Apostle Paul would describe humanity's longing to create idols.

He says this in Romans 1, claiming to be wise, they became fools and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for mere images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles.

They exchanged the glory of God, the transcendence of God, and they tried to contain it in these manufactured or imagined idols.

You see, putting God into an idol is a way to try and control and contain an uncontrollable, uncontainable God.

It is our desire for control and for power that corrupts and leads us to try and position ourselves above God.

And the same desire can lead us into other forms of idolatry.

Not only that, but when we begin to stick our toe in the water of idolatry, it isn't long until we are swimming in it up to our necks.

And more than that, the paths of idolatry that we begin to walk down, the successive generations begin to run down.

And that is why the second command comes with a tag in Exodus 20.

Exodus 20 says, Do not make an idol for yourself, whether in the shape of anything in the heavens above or the earth below or the waters under the earth.

But it has more instruction.

It says in verse 5, 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 a faithful love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commands.

There's a lot here.

So what exactly is this saying?

Well, first, it says that God is a jealous God.

Now I grew up in the church.

I was a good Baptist boy, and I knew jealousy was a sin.

I was told, you cannot be jealous.

And then I would go the next week and we would sing songs about how God is a jealous God.

So there was a disconnect for me.

Some like you told me I'm not supposed to be jealous, but you also told me that I'm supposed to try and be like God, and God is jealous.

So my neighbor has a bike, and I'm a little bit jealous, but I'm not supposed to be jealous, but God is jealous, so why can't I be jealous?

Like it was very confusing to me, you know?

And this is not jealousy in the form of petty envy over something we do not have.

What this is referring to is a serious and appropriate reaction to a relational infraction.

I'll give you a couple of examples.

If your spouse goes outside of the marriage covenant, you should not throw up your hands and be okay with that.

You should appropriately be jealous for your covenant partner.

If your kid starts entertaining bad company and leading them down dangerous paths that pull them away from God's desire for their life, you should not throw up your hands and go, they'll probably figure it out.

Nothing I can really do about it.

It should grieve you to watch your children walking down dangerous paths.

You should be jealous for their God-given purpose.

You should be jealous for them to follow you down the paths of godliness and righteousness that you are trying to set before them.

God is a jealous God.

God desires for his people, and far from that being a bad thing, I think we should be amazed by that.

That God loves his children, he loves us.

And God loves you so much that he is not okay with you going down paths that are not good for you.

That's what it means that God is a jealous God.

God goes on to describe how our choices, including our choices to worship false gods through idolatry, end up affecting multiple generations after us.

Now, here's what that's not saying.

It's not saying that children are held accountable for the sins of their parents.

We know that because God further clarifies that in the Old Testament law.

He makes it very clear every person is held accountable for their own sin.

What this is acknowledging is the reality that any of us can observe that most of our beliefs are inherited from our parents.

And so when our parents practice idolatry, when our parents, instead of serving the one true God, worship the false gods of this earth, we naturally begin to walk down those paths.

And if you begin tiptoeing down into idolatry, your children will walk into it, and their children will run into it, and their children will sprint into it.

And it takes someone very seriously and intentionally breaking that cycle.

That's part of what we try to do here at MetaCurch is observe the broken patterns in our life, allow the light of God to shine on them so we can break those patterns and live a life of purpose to the glory of God.

Amen?

Amen.

This is very serious, and we see this in the first generations of the promised land.

And so God gives these instructions in the wilderness to the Israelites on the way to the promised land.

Moses hands off leadership to Joshua.

Joshua moves into the promised land with the people, but he does not follow God's command.

He does not completely rid the promised land of idolatry.

Just a small tiptoe into idolatry.

And the next generation begins to walk into it, and the next generation begins to run into it.

Here's what it says in Judges chapter 2.

Judges 2 · chapter mention

It says, That whole generation was gathered to their ancestors, and after them another generation rose up who did not know the Lord or the works he had done for Israel.

The Israelites did what was evil in the Lord's sight.

They worshipped the Baals, the prominent false God.

They abandoned the Lord, the God of their ancestors who had brought them out of Egypt.

They followed other gods from the surrounding peoples and bowed down to them.

They angered the Lord, for they abandoned him and they worshipped Baal and the Ashtareths.

You continue this process, this slippery slope into idolatry.

By the time of King Solomon, the king of Israel had married into virtually every pagan nation that the Israelites were supposed to avoid.

Under his rule, they even began to intertwine pagan idolatry into the spiritual practices of Israel.

That's how fast it can happen.

Israel turned towards idolatry and they removed themselves from under the blessing of God, and eventually this led to severe disorder in their nation.

That disorder led them to serious consequences that we see all throughout their story in the Old Testament.

We have two commands.

The first is that God is one of one.

We are to have no other gods before him.

There are other spiritual beings, there is a spiritual reality, and yet God is the only one true God, the only uncaused cause, and he belongs at the pinnacle of our life.

He is the organizing principle of who we are if we are worshiping him appropriately.

And to safeguard that, we get the second command, which is we are to not have any idols, period.

And so, what does that have to do with us today?

What does that mean in 2024?

What does it look like here in the West?

Here's my guess.

I'm guessing you haven't offered any food sacrifices to Baal lately.

I'm guessing you haven't partook in the temple prostitution in your local area.

I hope not.

I'm guessing, as was common in the pagan nations, none of you have sacrificed your one-year-olds to a giant metal bull named Molech.

Those are things that are pagan and outdated and seem ancient to us.

Remember these two Hebrew words, the words Pasel and Timuna, both of these words are used together, no idols, not in the shape or likeness of anything, and used together, they cover the entirety of what could be an idol, which simply put is anything.

Anything can become an idol in your life.

It can be something manufactured or imagined, a career path or an obsessive hobby, an aspiration that you have or a relationship that you crave.

The list goes on quite literally without bounds.

The Lord confirmed this when he spoke to the prophet Ezekiel and he said, Son of man, these men have set up idols in their hearts and have put their sinful stumbling blocks in front of themselves, idols in their hearts.

Not something that they carved out of wood or forged out of metal, an idea, a value, an ideology, a belief.

So if anything can be an idol, how do we know if something is an idol?

How do we know if we have begun worshiping false gods instead of the one true God?

Simply put, an idol is anything that takes God's place.

An idol is anything that takes God's place.

Remember, we can't really understand the first two commandments separate from one another.

The first command is that God is exclusive, there's to be nothing that takes his preeminent place in our lives.

Idolatry is evidence that there is a false God occupying God's space in your life.

Let me say that again.

Idolatry is evidence that there is a false God in God's rightful place.

In other words, idolatry is a symptom and the false God is the disease.

So how do we know?

How do we know if something is sitting in God's place in our life?

I want to get quite practical.

And I want to leave you with some kind of mechanism that you can use to take audit of your life and see if God is situated in his rightful place.

Years ago, the psychologist Carl Jung posited that everyone, in essence, has a little g God, what scripture would call a false God, that is guiding their life.

He looked at this very practically.

Everyone has what he calls a hierarchy of values that they live with.

You have to have this.

Without a hierarchy of what you value, you could never make a single decision in your life.

You could not get out of bed.

You could not put one foot in front of the other without a hierarchy, a ranking of the things that you value.

Did you get out of bed and go for a jog yesterday morning?

Or did you snooze four more times and then hit up Taco Bell, right?

That's gonna be determined by what you value over the other in that moment.

And so let's talk about what this looks like really, really practically.

Most of you are familiar with what a very simple hierarchy might look like.

You see this in org charts, you see this in in all kinds of areas, and it's gonna be broken down.

What is at the top is gonna be preeminent.

That's gonna be the highest, and it works its way down into your lower values.

If this is a hierarchy of value, then at the very bottom of this, we're gonna have what I call I.

Don't care.

These are things that fall so low on your value of hierarchy that you just don't really care one way or the other.

I'll give you an example that's gonna seem kind of random, but we're gonna bring it around.

Maybe.

We're gonna try to make it make sense.

Um, it's like if you go to a coffee shop and the person in front of you orders a latte, one of the questions they're gonna get is, what kind of milk would you like in that latte?

And there's a whole range.

And some people will say, Oh, I don't care.

Now, those people are crazy, right?

You're telling me all the way from hole to skim to almond milk, and you don't care.

Some people really don't care, right?

Now, right above I don't care, all of a sudden you have developed a preference.

Now, preference simply means it's it's not a hill you're going to die on, but you do have some kind of low-level opinion.

And so they might say, What kind of milk would you like in your latte?

And it's like, well, if you have it, I'll take whole milk, which by the way is the right answer, okay?

I'm lactose intolerant.

Get over it, it's the right answer.

Some people have a preference, and it's like, you know, if you don't have whole milk, I'll take, I'll take whatever.

It's not a hill I'm gonna die on, but I do have a little bit of a preference, right?

If you go above the level of preference, all of a sudden you have an opinion.

Guess what?

When it comes to milk, I've got some opinions, all right?

In your latte, you get whole milk, and you take all the almond milk in the world and you throw it away, all right?

I have milked a cow, I know where the milk comes from on the cow, and I have inspected almonds so carefully, and I don't know how we're milking them, right?

No more almond milk.

That's my stand I'm gonna take today, right?

It's the hill I'm willing to die on.

I have an opinion on this.

Now, we're really good at having opinions in the West.

We have opinions about everything.

And part of the reason our culture is so divided is because most of us have almost nothing that we don't care about.

We care about everything for some reason, and then we don't even really have many preferences, we just have opinions.

And then we'll go on Twitter and we will fight for the stupidest opinions in the world, you know?

I saw trending on Twitter that people were beside themselves because the Miami Dolphins uniforms have a slightly different zero on their chests than they do on their shoulders.

Tens of thousands of people care about this for some reason, right?

Strong opinions.

We're comfortable with this.

We kind of know what our opinions are.

Some of us have crazy opinions about milk or whatever, you know.

We have preferences and we kind of know, like, I prefer this, but I don't.

And then anything below preference, you just truly don't care about.

You want to go out or stay in, I really don't care.

I will be happy either way.

Do you want to fly or drive to vacation?

I really don't care.

Genuinely, it will not change me at all, no matter what.

Now, often we get in trouble because we think we're in one of these categories and we're not.

We think we are, but we're not.

And probably the example that all of you who are married know is when you ask your spouse, hey, where do you want to eat?

Because they're gonna say, Oh, I don't care.

And then you go, great, let's get barbecue, and they'll go, Well, I wasn't really.

Oh, so you have a preference.

I mean, not my wife, y'all's wife, not mine.

It's like, fine, uh, we haven't had ramen in a while.

It's not really soup weather.

Okay, it feels like you might have an opinion on this, right?

We're pretty comfortable here.

We know our opinions, we typically know our preferences.

If we've paid careful attention, we know the things we really don't care about.

And that's good to know, because if you really don't care, you can get along with people really easily.

Here's where we get in trouble.

In this hierarchy of value, what we don't have a careful grasp on, most of us, is this top quadrant.

And this is where our beliefs lie.

And so we're Westerners, we're very opinionated, we're willing to die on all kinds of hills, we know what opinions we have, but most people, even most Christians, have not carefully audited their beliefs.

More than that, most of us don't even know where our beliefs come from.

And most of our beliefs are inherited from our parents, who inherited their beliefs from their parents, who inherited their beliefs from their parents, which is why if you have a false God that is organizing your life, it tends to trickle down and become more instantiated from generation to generation to generation.

And we have all kinds of beliefs, and and we get married and we don't really know what our beliefs are rooted in, but they make up a lot of our identity, they make up our worldview, they construct our ideology.

And so we have all kinds of beliefs.

Some people really believe, like, I should be wealthy.

That's a belief, it's a belief statement.

I should be wealthy.

Now you're not wealthy, which is one of the reasons that you're angry and depressed and mad at God, because you believe I'm supposed to be wealthy.

In our current day, where the top currency is attention, that is the top currency in the West, there is a whole generation growing up who believes they should be famous.

You know, if you're like older, millennial, and up, you just knew there were like seven famous people in the world and everyone else was just normal.

Social media has changed that.

Generations are growing up with a belief I should be famous.

It's like my right to be.

And odds are you're not and you won't be.

And it's incredibly discouraging.

And we don't know, and it matters because the way that the hierarchy of values functions is your beliefs inform your opinions.

And your opinions construct your preferences.

All of this trickles down.

We get married and we don't know what our beliefs are.

Two people get married, and one person believes that life is short and money is meant to be spent, and their spouse believes that life is long and hard and money should be saved.

Those beliefs are gonna create wildly different opinions about what you should do with your household income.

Those wildly different opinions will create massive conflict.

And you'll sit and argue at the level of opinion without having ever audited your beliefs.

Not only have we not investigated our beliefs and questioned our beliefs and held them up to reality, but as believers, most of us haven't questioned and interrogated our beliefs and held them up to the scrutiny of the light of God's word.

And because of that, so many people are living with beliefs where they have inherited subtle forms of idolatry that are pulling them away from following God.

Here's what Carl Jung believed.

He believed that out of all of our beliefs, there would be one that is preeminent.

And this, he said, was your litology God, or what scripture would call your false God.

This is the thing that you value highest in life.

And your highest value in life will inform your beliefs.

And your beliefs will inform your opinions, and your opinions will inform your preferences.

What that means is your highest value that sits in the preeminent place is not one value among many.

It's not one priority in a list of other priorities.

It becomes the organizing principle for who you are.

It becomes the mechanism that organizes and orders your entire life.

And what happens when we put anything other than the one true God in this place is it creates disorder.

Because only God can bring true order to your life.

Only the God who created you and placed a purpose inside of you can set your life in the direction to live that purpose out.

Only the one true transcendent God can order your life where you live with hope and peace and true faith in what is to come.

Only the God who gave his life for us and who loved us even when we were hardest to love can promote and produce a love for those who are hard to love in our lives.

Any false God that sits in God's place creates disorder because that false God at the top of our hierarchy of value will inform our beliefs, which will inform our opinions, which will inform our preference, which will guide and direct our life into disorder.

Everyone serves something.

Everyone has something at the top, the highest value in your life.

And this insight makes our conversation kind of simple.

Your God is what sits at the top of your hierarchy.

It will determine how you prioritize your time, your energy, your decisions, your relationships, your finances, your goals, your career, everything.

If your greatest value is wealth, then your life will be oriented around the pursuit of money and status symbols, which means your spouse, your kids, your friends, your health, your hobbies, your spiritual life, they will all be subservient to your pursuit of more and more and more.

You will worship the idols of money and lavish living.

If fame is at the top of your hierarchy, then your decisions will not be made through the lens of does this honor God, or how does this affect those around me, or even what are the long-term consequences of this?

Instead, you will do whatever it takes to grow your own glory.

You will worship the idols of self and status and influence.

If comfort is your God, you'll orient your life around convenience, even at the expense of your own personal growth or maturity.

If sex is your God, then you will pursue hedonistic gratification regardless of the physical, emotional, or relational toll that it creates.

The danger is most of us have never intentionally audited our hierarchy of values.

And so the little g, false God, that sits at the top of our life, organizing our reality, is not something we have carefully thought through.

For most of us were following the broken patterns of our parents, who followed the broken patterns of their parents, who lived out of the hurt from their parents, who were following the ways of their parents.

You see, idolatry sets a path that goes on down to the third and fourth generation until someone is courageous enough to stop and evaluate what might be sitting in God's place as the organizing principle of their lives.

And the power of that, the power that this gives you today, is you can break a pattern.

And God said in the second commandment that those who serve the false gods, it will redound to the third and fourth generations.

But those who break that pattern and set God in the rightful place in their life and begin to worship him and him alone, it will go on to the thousandth generation.

We can break the chains of the false gods who have caused disorder in our lives.

We can begin to orient our lives around the one true God, and it will lead our children's children's, children's children into the same path of bringing glory to God with their life.

And that is the power of orienting our life around God as our highest good.

There are all kinds of things that are vying for your worship, your time, energy, attention, and affection.

Money, relationships, status, wealth in our modern world, even technology.

Now, none of those are inherently bad things.

In fact, all of those things, placed in the proper order, can be things that lead us to glorify God and live out our purpose.

The problem is they are vying for the top spot.

And they will demand your worship.

But they cannot give you in return what only God can give you.

God is one of one.

Only God can give you true hope.

Hope is not wishful thinking.

Hope is the reality of what is to come, that this life is not the end, that death does not have the final word, that God makes all things work together for those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

They cannot give you lasting peace, they cannot give you life after death.

All of the false gods and all of the idols, they have no mechanism to ensure your flourishing.

And so the question for us today is has anything taken God's place in your life?

It is God alone who belongs in the top position.

And whatever sits in that top spot is not just another thing you value, it's not just another priority amongst all your priorities, it is the source of all values in your life.

It is the organizing principle determining all priorities in your life.

Whatever sits at the top of your life is your God.

But just because it functions as a God does not mean it is the God.

Remember the first command: do not have other gods besides me.

These first two commands are not an outdated rule about not whittling a little wooden statue and bowing down to a piece of wood.

It is a call to audit your heart, to question your values, to make sure that God remains one of one in your life.

The only thing at the top of your life from which all that you are flows from.

Now, you may still be wondering whether or not God remains supreme as the organizing force of your life.

You now have a template to work your way up your preferences, to opinions, to beliefs, to audit those and question those.

But if you're still stuck, there's one other way to see whether or not God is supreme.

A simple test.

You look for disorder in your life.

You see, when God is placed in his proper and rightful position as the sole focus of your worship, everything over time in your life finds its proper position.

Peace and purpose and hope, patience, love, clarity, which means disorder in your life.

Things like persistent anger, hopelessness, envy, greed, poor financial stewardship, insecurity, the list could go on and on.

These disorders are symptomatic that something is out of line.

If you are selfish in your relationships, God is not organizing them.

If you are foolish in your spinning habits and leave no room for generosity towards God, God is not organizing your wealth.

If you are filled with rage or hatred, God is not the author of those emotions.

And so the question is, what is in God's place?

And when you identify that, what does it look like to submit that to God and put God where he belongs as one of one?

Now, as we come to close, every week we leave time for reflection.

Today I want to do something together.

One of the amazing things about God's word is not only that we can read it and the Holy Spirit enlightens it and speaks to us, but we can also pray scripture back to God.

And one of the places that's like this treasure trove for that is in the Old Testament, in the book of the Psalms.

These are incredible poems.

Some of them are actual prayers to God, and we can take them and pray them back.

And so as we close, across our venues, anyone watching online, I want us to pray Psalm 139, verses 23 and 24.

Psalms 139:23

We'll put that up on the screens for you.

And I want us to pray this together.

And so let's pray now.

You can read off of your screens, pray like this.

Search me, God, and know my heart.

Test me and know my concerns.

See if there is any offensive way in me.

Lead me in the everlasting way.

Right where you are across our venues, if you'd bow your head and close your eyes.

That prayer out of the Psalms is what I would classify as a dangerous prayer.

God, search me.

Expose me.

Take audit, take inventory of my life.

Show me where there is disorder.

Show me where things are out of alignment.

Reveal to me, God.

What false God may be sitting in your seat in my life.

I wonder if the Holy Spirit has already been bringing things to mind.

Things that you know, if you're willing to be honest, are out of alignment.

Things that you know feel disordered, not organized by the God who puts all things in their correct position.

Having God at the very top of your value hierarchy does not mean life is easy.

It doesn't mean suffering never comes.

It means that you have peace in the midst of trial.

It means that you have hope when the world seems hopeless.

It means that you love not just those who are easy to love, but even those who are hard to love, even those who might be your enemy.

What would it look like for you to be intentional about exposing what has become idols in your life?

What would it look like to break generational paths of serving false gods?

For some of you who are here today, you may have never taken the first step.

To put God at the very top of your life first requires a relationship with God.

And yet, God loves us so much that while we were still in our sin and rebellion, God stepped out of perfection, put on human flesh, and came down to our world.

Jesus came into our world, he lived a perfect life, avoided all temptation, and because he was perfect, he was the perfect sacrifice.

What Jesus did on the cross is he exchanged his life for ours.

Jesus didn't come to call you into religion.

There aren't any steps to walk through, there are no hoops to jump through, there is no moral level to attain.

All Jesus asks is for your faith.

He did all of the work, and he will credit all of that work to our account by simply believing he is who he is, and he's done what he says he has done.

And so if you're here at any of our venues today and you have never had a moment in time where you have consciously decided that Jesus is your hope for this life and the next, I want to give you the opportunity to do that today.

With everyone's eyes closed, I want to ask you for a moment of courage, if you're ready to put your faith in Jesus, to simply raise your hand in the air.

And by lifting your hand today, you're saying, Today I choose to put my faith in Jesus.

A few things happen when you put your faith in Jesus.

Your sins, all of them, are forgiven.

You are given the gift of eternal life with God, and you are adopted back into his family.

For those who have raised a hand, I want you to know God sees and he accepts your faith.

And what I want to do is very simply help you acknowledge this moment today.

And so I'm gonna ask everyone who raised a hand across our venues to pray this, repeat this prayer after me.

I'm gonna ask all the believers to pray as well.

Let's pray like this.

Jesus, today I choose to put my faith in you.

I believe you are God that you died for my sins and rose from the grave.

I thank you for loving me and forgiving my sins.

Now let me pray over you.

Jesus, we give you all the glory, we give you all the praise for what you continue to do here at MetaCurch.

I thank you for every person here.

I thank you for the purpose you've placed inside of them.

We acknowledge that there are false gods fighting for our worship, fighting for our attention.

I pray that we would take careful inspection of our life and make sure that you are sitting in your rightful place, allowing you to bring order and peace to our life.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

And everyone said, Amen.

Give the Lord a hand for what he keeps doing at Medichurch.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

You can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.