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.
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.