A. One cold evening during the holiday season, a little boy was standing out in front of a store begging.
1. The little child had no shoes on and his clothes were mere rags.
2. A woman passing by saw the little boy and could read the longing in his dark eyes.
3. She took the child by the hand and led him into the store. There she bought him new shoes and a complete suit of warm clothing.
4. They came back outside into the street and the woman said to the child, “Now you can go home and have a very happy holiday.”
5. The little boy looked up at her and asked, “Are you God, Ma’am?”
6. She smiled down at him and replied, “No son, I’m just one of His children.”
7. The little boy then said, “I knew you had to be some relation.”
B. I begin with that story because of the accurate self-awareness of the very generous woman.
1. She had the correct understanding that we all need to have – “No, I am not God, I’m just one of His children.”
2. You might think that is an obvious self-assessment, and that none of us would think otherwise, but that is not always the case.
3. We might joke about someone having a “God complex” or a “Messiah complex,” and we know that some people in psychiatric facilities have suffered from delusions of grandeur and truly believed they were God, but they are not the only ones that can develop that problem.
C. Since the very creation of mankind, Satan has been tempting us with the possibility that we too can be God.
1. Adam and Eve fell into the trap, and countless others throughout time have as well.
2. Satan whispers in our ears, “Why serve God when you can be the ruler of your own life? After all, you have everything you need to be your own god.”
3. Every day we are faced with the same choice as Adam and Eve: Will we worship God and find our true place in God’s universe and the place He has arranged for us?
a. Or will I worship me and decide that I can somehow come up with a better life for myself than the Creator of all could design?
4. The truth that all of us must believe, embrace, and obey is that there is one God, and we are not Him.
a. That one true God must be given His rightful place on the throne of our lives.
b. And the god of me must be seen as a false god who is just a pretender to the throne.
D. It’s not coincidental that we have left this god, the god of me, for the last sermon in our series.
1. All of us may or may not confront many of the other gods that we have examined so far: the god of food, sex, entertainment, success, money, romance and family, but all of us will likely have to wrestle with the god of me every single day.
2. And the really dangerous part about the god of me is that he is able to hide himself so well that we don’t even recognize him.
3. Through rationalization and deception, we might not even recognize that we are not truly serving God the Father, but we are serving the god of me.
4. When the god of me and God the Father happen to be in agreement, we might not even realize that we are serving the one and not the other.
5. It is when the two are not in agreement that we might be able to recognize which god is really in control.
E. What are some of the symptoms that might help us recognize that the god of me has taken over the throne of my heart?
1. In Kyle Idleman’s chapter on this counterfeit god, he suggests three symptoms that reveal that we have allowed the god of me to be in charge.
2. One symptom is arrogance.
a. The god of me encourages us to trust in our own thinking.
b. The god of me says that I’m always right and that my way is the best way.
c. The god of me convinces us that we are better and know better than other people, but the really scary part is that he can also convince us that we know better than God.
3. Another symptom that surfaces when I start to worship the god of me is insecurity.
a. The god of me is consumed with what others think about me, because when you’re god it’s all about you.
b. The god of me is terrified about failure, because failure would show others you are not as great as advertised.
4. Another similar symptom that surfaces when the god of me is in control is defensiveness.
a. Have you ever found yourself taking the slightest suggestion or the blandest criticism as a personal attack?
b. What makes people react like that? Well, when you think you are god, then you must be perfect, and no one else could possibly be in a position to criticize you.
c. Do you struggle with submission and authority? Perhaps the god of me is on the throne.
F. I want to draw your attention to a very interesting section of Ezekiel 28.
1. The Bible says: The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, say to the prince of Tyre, Thus says the Lord God: “Because your heart is proud, and you have said, ‘I am a god, I sit in the seat of the gods, in the heart of the seas,’ yet you are but a man, and no god, though you make your heart like the heart of a god’ ” (Ezek. 28:1-2)
a. God goes on to say to the prince of Tyre that he was indeed wise, and that his wisdom made him successful.
b. But, because he had become proud, and had thought of himself as a god, that the one true God would punish him through the swords of foreigners, and bring about his death.
c. God said to him: “Will you still say, ‘I am a god,’ in the presence of those who kill you, though you are but a man, and no god, in the hands of those who slay you? You shall die the death of the uncircumcised by the hand of foreigners; for I have spoken, declares the Lord God.” (Ezek. 28:9-10)
2. Then in the verses that follow Ezekiel is told to give a lamentation over the king of Tyre, and in that lament God talks about how God had created a being full of wisdom and perfect in beauty that was anointed as a guardian cherub on the holy mountain of God, but then that being’s heart became proud because of their beauty and became corrupted in their thinking.
a. All that sounds like the description of Satan’s corruption and fall.
b. How the created thing began to think of himself as being as great or greater than the Creator Himself.
3. What happened to the king of Tyre and what happened to Satan, is also what can happen in our own hearts when we begin the serve the god of me.
G. As we move toward the conclusion of this sermon and this series, I want us to realize that there is hope for us.
1. The human heart is indeed an idol factory that mass-produces idols, including the god of me.
2. But as we have been learning throughout this series, idols cannot simply be removed, they must be replaced.
3. If we try to simply uproot them, they grow back.
4. Something else must be put in their place so it can supplant them.
5. What must the idols be replaced and supplanted by? God Himself.
6. I want to end with two biblical stories of people who finally discovered that God is all they needed and were therefore able to remove the false gods from their lives.
H. The first story is the story of Jacob.
1. We looked at part of his story in the sermon on the god of romance.
2. As you will recall, all of Jacob’s life he had been wrestling with Esau, his twin brother.
a. In their mother’s womb, the twins, Esau and Jacob were “striving with each other” (Gen. 25:22).
b. As they grew up, Jacob contended with Esau for the favor and love of their father and for the honor and leadership of their family.
c. Their father, Isaac, constantly favored Esau over Jacob, and there are few things more wounding to a son.
3. Finally, the day came when Isaac was to give Esau the ritual blessing that went with his birthright.
a. With his mother’s prompting, Jacob disguised himself as Esau and fooled his nearly blind father into pronouncing the blessing over him instead of Esau.
b. When Esau discovered what had happened, he vowed to kill Jacob, and so Jacob ran for his life into exile.
c. Jacob went to the area where his mother was from, and ended up working for his uncle Laban for the right to marry Laban’s lovely, younger daughter Rachel.
4. So Jacob’s life was one long wrestling match to get the blessing he longed for.
a. He wrestled with Esau to receive the blessing from his father’s lips.
b. He wrestled with Laban to find the blessing in life with Rachel.
5. But ultimately, his wrestling for blessing hadn’t worked, he was still needy and empty inside.
a. Jacob’s relationships in his own family were stormy.
b. His idolatry of Rachel and her children had poisoned the lives of Leah and her children.
c. Jacob had tricked Laban and with a huge herd of livestock and his family in toe, he ran from the region of his father-in-law and headed back home to face his brother.
6. When Jacob heard that Esau was on his way with a small army to meet him, he was afraid and spent the night alone with God.
a. The Bible tells us: And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, (means the face of God) saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.” The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. (Gen. 32:24-31)
b. Who was this mysterious figure with whom Jacob wrestled? Was it an angel of God, or was it God Himself?
c. Jacob concluded that he had encountered God Himself.
7. When Jacob realized it was God, he would not let go until God blessed him.
a. In that moment, I can imagine Jacob saying to himself: “What an idiot I have been! Here is what I have been looking for all my life: the blessing of God! I looked for it in the approval of my father. I looked for it in the beauty and love of Rachel. But all along the thing I needed was God. Now I won’t let you go until you bless me. Nothing else matters. I don’t care if I die in the process, because if I don’t have God’s blessing, I’ve got nothing.”
8. The Bible says that God blessed Jacob there.
a. A blessing in the Bible is always verbal, so God must have spoken words into Jacob’s heart.
b. We aren’t told the content of those words, but I wonder if they included the blessing that was spoken from heaven over the greatest descendent of Jacob – “You are my son, whom I love, with you I am well pleased.” (Mk. 1:11)
c. There is nothing greater in our lives than the blessing of God as His child.
9. Jacob walked away as someone permanently lamed, yet permanently filled.
a. Jacob had been humbled, and yet he was encouraged and reassured at the same time.
b. And if Jacob, who had never behaved as a moral paragon, who continually acted selfishly and deviously, was blessed by God, then we can rest assured that by God’s grace He will bless us also.
10. The blessing of a relationship with God is the only effective remedy against idolatry.
a. Only when we know the blessing of an intimate relationship with God do we realize how unnecessary are idols and counterfeit gods.
b. As with Jacob, we often discover this only after a life of looking for blessing in all the wrong places.
c. And, it often takes an experience of crippling weakness for us to finally discover it.
d. That is why so many of the most God-blessed people limp as they jump with joy.
I. The second story of someone who finally discovered that God is all they needed and were therefore able to remove the false gods from their lives, is the story of the Samaritan woman.
1. In John 4, the Bible tells us that Jesus “had to go through Samaria.”
a. But if you look on a map, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
b. There are ways to go around Samaria, and most Jews of His time did whatever was necessary to stay out of Samaria, because of the “bad blood” between Samaritans and Jews.
2. But John said that Jesus had to go through Samaria. Why? Because there was a woman that Jesus wanted to have an encounter with.
a. There was a woman who lived there who had been desperately searching for something or someone to put her hope in, but time and time again her search ended in disappointment.
3. When Jesus arrived in Samaria, he came to a well at about noon.
a. Noon was a part of the day when the heat rose and Jesus was no doubt tired from the journey.
b. He sat at the well to rest and to wait for someone to come with a bucket to draw water.
c. The well was likely very deep and He had no way to draw water from it.
4. When the Samaritan woman arrived at the well, Jesus asked her if she would give Him a drink.
a. She was surprised, and replied, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jn. 4:9)
b. Jesus countered, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” (Jn. 4:10)
c. My guess is that at this point she must have thought that Jesus was a little delirious from the hot sun, because he didn’t even have a bucket to draw water.
d. Jesus explained to her that if she drinks His water, she’ll never be thirsty again – in other words, He has something to offer that will satisfy her thirst forever.
e. Obviously, she was thinking about the physical, but Jesus was talking about the spiritual.
5. She had nothing to lose, so she took Him up on this magical water of His.
a. Jesus told her to go home and get her husband and come back together.
b. She told him that she didn’t have a husband.
c. Then Jesus replied (and I picture him saying this gently and compassionately), “You’ve spoken the truth. You’ve had five husband and the man you’re living with now is not your husband.”
d. The woman realized Jesus was some kind of prophet and immediately tried to take the spotlight off herself by changing the subject.
e. After a little back and forth, she tied to end the conversation saying, “Well, when the Messiah comes he will make sense of everything and answer all our questions.”
f. To which Jesus said, “I who speak to you am he.”
g. This is the only time we know of in Jesus’ ministry when he voluntarily revealed his identity.
6. Can you imagine what she must have thought and felt at that moment?
a. Her search had finally come to an end.
b. The fulfillment that she had been seeking in five husbands had never lasted very long.
c. But when Jesus revealed His identity to her, something within her knew that He was the thing her soul had been longing for.
J. What Jesus had promised to that Samaritan woman is a promise that He offers to every one of us: “The water that I will give…will become in you a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (Jn. 4:14)
1. Counterfeit gods and idols are broken cisterns, but Jesus is the wellspring of life.
2. In Jeremiah 2, God spoke through the prophet Jeremiah making His case against His people: “Therefore I still contend with you, declares the Lord, and with your children's children I will contend...Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit. Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” (Jer. 2:9, 11-13)
3. God explained to them that when they turn to other gods (idols) that are not gods at all, it is like insisting on digging our own broken cisterns to drink out of, instead of drinking out of the spring of fresh, living water flowing right beside it.
4. Cisterns were an important part of everyday life in Israel during Jeremiah’s time.
a. Rain was infrequent and scarce, and so people would dig cisterns and line them with brick and plaster to hold the rain water when it came.
b. But cisterns were always springing leaks and losing water.
c. And even when they didn’t leak, the water would often become stagnant or the supply would run out.
5. The illustration God used in his complaint against the people would have vividly communicated His point to the people of that day.
a. No one would ever choose a cistern as their water source when a spring of crystal clear water was available.
b. And that captures the ridiculousness of idolatry – why choose a god that isn’t real when you have the real God?
c. Yet we choose a broken cistern with stagnant water, instead of the spring of fresh living water, when we look to something or someone to do for us what God was meant to do.
d. And when we turn to something or someone other than God, we will never be satisfied, we will always remain empty and thirsty.
e. Why put our hope in someone or something that just doesn’t hold water?
6. So what are you thirsty for?
a. Are you stressed out and thirsty for peace?
b. Are you lonely and thirsty for love?
c. Are you bored and thirsty for purpose?
d. Are you thirsty for acceptance? For validation? For significance?
e. Or are you just thirsty for something more?
7. The counterfeit gods, including the god of me call us to chase after what they offer, but when we do so, we’re left more thirsty than ever.
a. All counterfeit gods are broken cisterns, but Jesus is the spring of living water.
b. Jesus invites us to drink from Him, and when we do, we will never be thirsty again.
c. Jesus is the living water that never runs out and always satisfies.
d. When Jesus is our God, then we have no need for counterfeit gods.
e. When we keep Jesus on the throne of our lives, then we can defeat the idols that battle for our hearts.
Resources:
gods at war, Kyle Idleman, Zondervan, 2013
Counterfeit Gods, Timothy Keller, Dutton, 2009
