modern day idolatry

So, two posts in one night . . .

The last couple of weeks that series of messages at the young adults group at my church has been on "modern day idolatry". It's been a challenging series to say the least.

When I think of idols and idolatry I think of people bowing down to an image of something or someone. So, with that thought in mind I usually don't then think of it as being a problem in our culture today. While I suppose there may be some people who do this, I would say that it's not a usual occurance in our western world.

But, in the message series, an idol was described as anything we turn to when we should be turning to God. That definition makes it a lot more relevant to our culture today. With that definition, our culture has many idols . . . work, sports, celebrities, cars, houses, computers, leisure, ourselves, financial security, material possessions, popularity, entertainment . . . to name just a few. Yikes! How many of us haven't struggled with the amount of value we put on some of those things.

This message series really hit home for me last night. Just thinking about what may have become an idol in my own life. I hadn't really thought much about it until then. And, if you'd asked me before the series if I had any idols in my life I would have told you no. But, now, if I were to be honest I would have to say that I do have idols in my life.

Really, it all comes down to how much we trust God. If are trusting God completely then we won't be turning to other things to try to find our satisfaction. But, it's when we're not trusting God completely that we can find ourselves turning to the things of this world to try to satisfy our longings.

A lot of this is a learning process. As we learn to trust God more we remove idols from our lives. And as we remove idols from our lives we begin to trust God more. The two quite often go hand in hand.