What Are The Idols In Your Life?

Repentance is difficult because it calls us away from the comfort of our self-made gods and idols.   ~~~   What are the idols in your life? In the case of the Israelites, they were to trash the foreign gods and Ashtaroth to which they were holding. These foreign gods were most likely local, or philistine gods, and the Ashtaroth was a female fertility god that, if served, was to provide kids for you and a good crop. So understand what Samuel was calling them to give up. He was calling on them to give up what they currently held as the source of all of their livelihood. Not only that, they were giving up a religion that fed the most hijacked of desires. One of the ways you worshipped the Ashtaroth was through improper relationships that fed the basest of man’s desires. Their temples were a mix between an altar-sight and a brothel. This is what they believed brought them blessing… a syncretistic view of the gods…the mixing and matching of deities to create the right combination for their lives, and they believed Yahweh would go along. But He will not. So what are the idols in your life? What are the idols that surround us? What is it that we worship? Nationalism? Conservatism? Affluence? Wealth? What about the idol of false identity? This is the idol of the younger generation, and what I mean by false identity is that the younger generations are finding their identities in what they can create themselves to be in the social media world so that they believe that is their real identity. They like their virtual selves better than the reality. To them, their social identity, their virtual self is the most important thing in their lives. The problem isn’t our phones or social media or any form of technology. It’s the value and utility we place on it that makes it a problem. When our lives revolve around how many likes we get, what our following looks like, or if we can’t sit in silence for 5 minutes without refreshing our newsfeed, we have an idol. Anything that takes the place of God in our life, anything that becomes more important than him, is an idol. Repentance is difficult. No one is saying that it is easy. Repentance is costly. It calls us away from our current comfort-giving gods, it calls us to sever those tentacles that have become so entrenched in our lives, to which we have become dependent, BUT repentance calls us to a greater, higher reality that we are to live in day by day.