Series: Stewardship
Category: Core Seminars
Detail:
Idolatry – The Enemy of Stewardship
PRAYER
I. Introduction
Good morning! Welcome back to the last class in the Stewardship core seminar. You’ve made it! Over the past 13 weeks, we spent our time thinking about how to be a good steward of all the different gifts and resources that God’s given us. I hope this has been helpful to you. But I wonder—have you ever felt like not wanting to be a better steward? Or don’t think you can be a better steward? You know, “I’ve tried, but it just doesn’t work!”
Well, this morning we’re going to look at the enemies of stewardship—namely, the idolatries that live deep down in our hearts. Our problem isn’t so much about modifying our behavior as it is about recognizing who we’re really serving. We often serve gods other than the one true God and that’s the root of our difficulties with stewardship.
Just look at the life of Abraham. In Genesis 12 God appears to Abraham—still called Abram—and promises to make of him a great nation (Gen. 12:2-3). Later, God takes Abram outside in the dark of night and says, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them…So shall your offspring be.” Abram “believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:5-6).
Well, years pass, and at the age of one hundred, Abraham miraculously becomes a father. He and his wife Sarah are overjoyed and name their baby son Isaac. What a miraculous and treasured gift Isaac was to his parents!
Then what happens? In chapter 22 we read, “After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains” (22:1-2). And Abraham obeys! Then just as Abraham is about to kill his only son, an angel from heaven appears and stops him. God provides a substitute—a ram in the thicket—and retells his promise, “Because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore.”
God was testing Abraham like he tested Job. He tested him like you test gold in fire, to prove what really is. Of this Tim Keller says, “God’s extremely rough treatment of Abraham was actually merciful. Isaac was a wonderful gift to Abraham, but he was not safe to have and hold until Abraham was willing to put God first. As long as Abraham never had to choose between his son and obedience to God, he could not see that his love was becoming idolatrous[1]
Everything we have is a gift from God. Yet none of those gifts are safe to have and hold until our hearts are willing to put God first. When we love the gifts more than the Giver, we destroy both ourselves and God’s gifts and defame the God of glory.
So it’s to this last topic of idolatry that we now turn to conclude our three-month study of Stewardship.
Idolatry and Stewardship
So to begin, let’s define idolatry. What’s idolatry?
Idolatry is loving and trusting anything more than the one true God who is revealed in scripture.[2] God is a jealous God and will have no rivals. The first commandment says, “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:3). That means that every gift of God is a candidate for idolatry, all those things God’s given us to steward. Money, health, rest, time, your abilities can all be idols.
To make this more practical for us, I’d love to hear any humble examples from you of how you may have struggled with idolatry as it relates to God’s gifts. Would anyone like to share? [e.g. control of schedule/time; body image, family, material things, etc .]
So God isn’t only opposed to idols because they rival his supremacy; he’s also opposed to them because they’re unprofitable for us. Idols make terrible masters. They’re false and will fail us every time, leading us away from God and towards destruction. God doesn’t want that for us; he wants what’s best for us and that’s Himself.[3] But idolatry lies about God.[4] And it’s right here where idolatry and stewardship intersects.
If you recall the parable of the talents in Matthew 25 that we’ve framed this course around—what happened? The master went away and entrusted his three servants with different talents. When the master came back, two servants were faithful and put their talents to work because they trusted the master. But the third servant was unfaithful, he didn’t trust the master and buried his talent, presumably using his time in other ways. The master called him “wicked” because the servant’s actions lied about his master that he wasn’t trustworthy or generous.
What I want you to see is that the mindset of the third servant was ultimately a matter of idolatry. He treated something—his own time and wealth—as more worthy than the master.
Sometimes, we look at stewardship through the lens of results. For example, how much money are you giving to your church? Because Nina considers herself a Christian, she gives 10% of her pay and checks the giving box on her spiritual to-do list. But it takes zero faith to do that—even unbelievers give to charity. So through the lens of results, we’d say something like, “Nina, that’s great, but you can do better. You’ll please God more if you give 20%.” Our results always fall short. And is that what God’s really like anyway? Will he love us more if we give more? That sounds more like a manipulative earthly parent than our gracious Heavenly Father.
But the parable of the talents tells us to look at stewardship through the lens of faith. Through this lens, we might say, “Nina, you’re giving doesn’t come from faith, and it actually lies about the goodness of God. You’re not a cheerful giver. It’s like your trying to achieve some goal you set for yourself. Who’s the real god in your life?” Think of what Jesus said to the Pharisees: “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice’” (Matthew 9:13). Or Paul to the Romans: “For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23). Bad stewardship is idolatry.
I think that this offers both a warning and an encouragement. The warning is simple—stewardship can be a safe-haven for legalism. We can be tempted to equate our righteousness with how we use the things God’s given us whether it be our money, time, bodies, or skills. While it’s good to examine how we use these things, God cares about your stewardship in as much as it shows your faith and trust in Him and His promises.
As for the encouragement, Jesus said that if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, it’s enough. What matters isn’t the greatness of your faith but the greatness of your God. We can get all caught up in whether our stewardship can be better. That’s a fine question to ask, but it’s not ultimate. Remember, the question in the parable is not, “How strong is our faith?” but “Do we have faith?” In Matthew 25, what the servants did flowed from whether they trusted the master or not, and it’s the same with us and our trust in God.
Comments or Questions?
III. How Can I Find Idolatry in My Heart?
It’s not just enough to know what idolatry is, we also want to know if we’ve fallen prey to it. In John’s first letter, the very last words he leaves with his audience are, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21). So how do we do that? Well, we need to recognize that idolatry is fundamentally a matter of the heart.
Okay, but examining our hearts is hard work! Scripture says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9). How do I know if I’m lifting weights to serve a false god or to glorify God by being a faithful steward of my body? After all, our motives aren’t always 100% this or that; sometimes we’re 50/50 or 80/20. This is so confusing!!!
Well, what are the normal means of grace that God’s given to us to protect us from self-deception and how do they help us root out idolatry?
Scripture Holy Spirit Church
In God’s kindness, he’s also placed difficult circumstances in our lives that help to reveal the idols in our heart. Proverbs 17:3 says, “The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, and the Lord tests hearts.” These hard situations require us to either choose God or choose our idol. While Job sat among the ashes sick with painful sores all over his body, his wife tempted him to curse God and die (Job 2:9). “Be done with God, Job! If following God means to lose your health, then follow him no more! Get out of your pain.” It’s right here where you see a break of allegiance between Job and his wife. Where Job’s wife wants nothing more to do with God, Job testifies to the worthiness of God by accepting this hard providence given by him.
We said at the beginning of the class that our problem with idolatry isn’t just a matter of our behavior, our actions. Well, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean that our actions don’t have a role in discerning idols in our heart. Jesus said that “a bad tree bears bad fruit” (Matt. 7:17). Therefore, our actions can be used as data points in helping us to discern idolatry.
If you look on your handout, you’ll see some questions that we can ask ourselves and others to see where we might be idolatrous with those things God’s given us. Let’s briefly go through them.
Are you discontent or resentful? Are you irritated when your sleep is interrupted? Are you impatient to make that purchase because you don’t have the money yet? Do you feel that God’s cheated you out of something or put you into a hopeless position? When we have an idol, anything that sets itself up between us and it will receive our sinful anger. And when we get like this, it usually means we’re protecting an idol.
Is the time and energy committed to it excessive? Is your time being spent out of proportion in one area of your life to the detriment of your other callings? Are there things that hinder you from being regularly involved with church gatherings, serving others, or reading God’s Word and prayer? From being present with your children or spouse? Are you spending too much money on any one thing or fixated on your body image? Are you marked by something more than being a Christian? An idol demands our love and worship.
Are you fearful or do you worry? Are you anxious to serve the sick because there’s a small chance that you might get sick yourself? Do you fear that you’re behind your peers in anything—skills, economic status, families? Are you afraid to have children because of how it will change your body or because it will consume your time? Are you excessively concerned about financial loss and hoard, holding onto everything? Do you fear telling someone the gospel because it might hurt your relationship? Fear and anxiety often accompany idolatry in our hearts. We’re afraid to lose that idol.
Are you prideful? Do you forget 1 Corinthians 4:7 that you’ve been given everything you have and instead boast about your ability, family, or success? Do you criticize others who fall short of your self-imposed standards? Are you unforgiving? Are you unlikely to associate with others who don’t look like you? Do you serve others or is your time and energy more about you? An idol wants to be made much of and will trample over others to do so.
There’s no easy recipe for identifying the idols in our lives; it’s a life-long battle. Thankfully, it’s a battle God’s going to win, as one day we’ll stand before him “in splendor, without spot or wrinkle…holy and without blemish” (Eph. 5:27).
Fighting Idolatry
Okay, so you realize that in your stewardship you’re idolizing the gift over the Giver. What are you going to do about it?
Well, if you look on your handout, you’ll see the first part of James 4. James says,
1 What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? 2 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. 4 You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. 5 Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? 6 But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
Let’s think through this together by using a scenario. Let’s say that your health begins to decline, and you’re not able to do what you use to do. You’re desperately seeking every available treatment, but the outlook isn’t good. And so you find yourself angry at God.
Okay, let’s apply James 4 to our scenario.
Desire Demand
According to verse 2, where does this raging war start? [With a desire ] Is it wrong to desire? [No ] But in the idol factory of our sinful hearts that desire begins to go through a change. Our desire left unchecked soon becomes a demand, and when the demand is not fulfilled, anger takes root.[5]
So what’s our desire? [To be healthy ] Then what’s the problem according to James? Is the problem that you’re not healthy? [No, it’s that our desire turned into a demand ] The circumstances aren’t the problem according to James. That’s because our circumstances don’t create the problem; our circumstances only reveal the problem. The problem is that our hearts turned our desire into covetousness, which is idolatry (Col. 3:5).
Disobedience
So far we’re dealing with all this internally. But now it breaks out into action, into disobedience. In the case of verse 2, we act out by quarreling and fighting, even murdering. If our health declines, we’re going to do whatever it takes to fix it—regardless of what God says.
What might disobedience look like in our scenario? Withdrawing from spending time with God; Complaining; Taking excessive drugs to point of addiction; Insurance fraud to pay for treatment ]
Adultery
Then James throws us for a loop. He takes what’s been a horizontal problem and reframes it as a vertical problem. Even if we’ve murdered another person, James still sees the root of our problem as idolatry.
In verse 4, James calls us spiritual adulterers. He calls us this because we want our health more than we want to obey God. We might call it mixed motives, but James calls it being at enmity with God. Friends, even if our motives are 80% good and 20% bad, that 20% is nothing to trifle with; it’s still idolatry. When we go to work, we don’t labor 80% of the time on the clock for our employer who pays us and 20% of the time for their competitor. Our God is a jealous God, and his holy jealousy is against our idolatry, as it says in verse 5.
Submit
So that’s the low point of this passage—we’ve made ourselves God’s enemy. But look at verse 6: “But he gives more grace.” Praise God! When we’re powerless to fix our decrepit condition, God still acts and saves us from it—he gives us more grace, a greater grace! God gives what he demands.[6] And our response to God begins with a posture of humility. He calls us to submit ourselves to him.
So going back to the situation with our health, what would submission look like? [Praying for a change in heart; Acknowledging and embracing God’s goodness and sovereignty in the situation; Trusting his promises to care for us; Being willing to accept whatever may happen; Consider where we’ve been wrong ]
By submitting to God, we begin to trust him, and God promises to help us. “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” By submitting, we’re acknowledging God’s ways are better than ours, even if it costs us everything. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (Prov. 3:5-6).
Repent
But James isn’t done, is he? How does he say we’re to draw near to God? Continuing in verse 8, James says, “Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom.” This is language of repentance: Stop continuing in the guilt of your hands. Stop thinking evil thoughts. Stop rejoicing in your sin and living for today with no thought of tomorrow and God’s judgment.
So how might we repent in this scenario with our health? [Fight the urge to worry; Commit to pouring your heart out to God; Live one day at a time (Matt. 6); Practice being quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry (James 1;19); Give thanks in all circumstances (1 Thess. 5:18) ]
Love
Finally, the only way to displace the grip of an idol is to have a stronger love – a love for God.
In Luke 7 we see a sinful woman approach Jesus. She bowed before him and with her tears she wet his feet and wiped them with her hair. In love, she kissed his feet and anointed them with oil. Jesus says of her, “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.”
In the gospel, we’re freed from our idolatry, King Jesus forgives our sin; we become His child and God becomes our heavenly Father. It’s here where we can now move forward as God’s faithful steward. We can push hard to get treatment for our health. But we don’t do it with fear and desperation. We do it with the full assurance of hope that, even though our health may continue to decline, God will care for us. We want to be healthy for sure. But more importantly, we love God who has entrusted us with our bodies. And out of love for Him and what he’s done for us in Christ Jesus, we want to live for him, even when that means we’re not able to live as we like. But now our care as a steward is in line with the desires of the owner, who is God.
And what’s even more is that as we grow in love for God, we grow in joy, even when we suffer. Do you want to fight your idolatry? Then by faith choose to rejoice in God always, giving thanks to him continually, and remembering the gospel. This brings God glory in our stewardship. When we’re rooted, trusting in God’s sovereign goodness, nothing can shake us or steal away our joy in Jesus—nothing!
Comments or Questions?
Conclusion
Well, there you have it! Poor stewardship is ultimately idolatry—loving, trusting, and serving something more than God. As stewards, we fight idolatry by remembering the gospel and loving, trusting, and serving our gracious and loving master, Jesus Christ. It’s in Christ alone that we find joy in service as we go through life. He’s the perfect master to serve.
[If there’s time, ask the class if they want to share anything that’s been helpful to them over the past 13 weeks.]
And with that, we close 13 weeks on stewardship. Let me leave you with the charge Peter gives in 1 Peter 4:10: “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God's varied grace.” Amen! Let’s pray.
PRAYER
[1] Counterfeit Gods , page 14, paperback edition, Tim Keller defines idolatry as “anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.”
[2]
[3] They ran after false gods because they held out promises that seemed better than what the true living God made. “Worship Ashteroth and your crops will always be fruitful.” “Worship Molech and you’ll be blessed with financial prosperity.” “Worship Baal and you’ll be accepted by the nations around you.” But it’s not just that the false promises were attractive, what these false gods offered perfectly fit with our sinful nature! To worship Ashteroth and Baal meant indulging in sexual lust with temple prostitutes. To worship Molech through child sacrifice was an attempt to appease and control circumstances.
[4] He said, ““These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”…“Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD”” (Exod. 32:4-5). Aaron was intending to worship the LORD, or Yahweh. But by doing so, he broke the second commandment to not make an idol or worship its image (Exod. 20:4-6). To set up an image to represent God is to dishonor him. How can the infinite, invisible Creator God be made to look like a visible, finite creature? Any such image would only lie about who God is.
[5] War of Words (2000 Edition), Paul Tripp, p. 59.
[6]
