Some of you have participated in “Twelve Step” programs at some point in your life, as part of your effort to break an addictive behavior. There are plenty of these programs out there — Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Sexaholics Anonymous, and more recently Internet Anonymous. They operate off a twelve-step approach for moving beyond a spiritual, physical, and emotional bondage, and countless people have found some measure of help through the required honesty and accountability involved.
But my experience has been that these programs produce very different results in people. Many (perhaps most) of the participants find help in coping with the symptoms of the problem. They are the ones who talk about themselves as “recovering addicts” for years and years after they finally establish sobriety. Then there are those who manage to hang in there for a while, but eventually give up — their success is only temporary, or maybe an “in and out” kind of thing. But there are some who really discover freedom as they work through the Twelve Steps, and eventually find themselves totally released from the influence and compulsion of the addiction.
And as I’ve thought through why some people find total release while others just find release from the symptoms, I’ve noticed something. True success in a Twelve Step program has a lot to do with your understanding of God.
You see, the first few steps go like this:
We admitted that we were powerless over [our addiction] — that our lives were unmanageable.
We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
We made a decision to turn our life and our will over to the care of God, as we understood him.
Now stop right there. The rest of the steps are pretty powerful — making a fearless moral inventory, confessing wrongdoing to God and others, seeking forgiveness, asking God to remove moral shortcomings, making restitution to the people that were wronged, and being devoted to prayer and helping others.
But there’s that little phrase that makes all the difference: “God, as we understood him.” That phrase crops up again in Step 11, when the addict commits to praying to “God as he understood him.”
And this becomes the key to true success, from what I’ve seen. Those people who understand God the way God understands himself — those who connect with the one true God — tend to find genuine freedom from their bondage. But those who have distorted understandings of God — from cultural misunderstandings to fanciful creations of their own — are sort of stuck relying on pure will power (a lacking commodity for most addicts). In other words, “The truth will set you free,” but there is little power in a shadow of the truth.
Now, some of your are thinking, “Hey, what’s all this about Twelve Steps? I thought we were studying the Ten Commandments this summer?” And you’re right. But look closely at the first two commandments with me, as they’re found in Exodus 20:1-6.
1 And God spoke all these words:
2 “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 3 “You shall have no other gods before me.
4 “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
If you’ll notice, these two commands are related to one another. (Actually, they’re also related to the next two, all of which talk about loving God passionately.) The first — “you shall no other gods before me” — talks about who we worship; we are not to turn to the false gods of other people. The second — “you shall not make an idol” — talks about how we worship; we are not to fashion a god of our own design. Together they say this: “God, and God alone, is worthy of the number one position in your life. He should be your passion, your reason for living. Nothing else should take priority. And he must be worshiped in truth — not as some shadow or distorted image of power that we might come up with in our imagination, but as the one true God. Those who worship God in truth and with single-minded devotion — those who worship God the way he wants to be worshiped — shall leave a legacy of faithfulness that extends to others.”
And that’s where the Twelve Step statement about “God as we understood him” falls tragically short. God is not given power by our understanding; he is power! You and I can’t pick and choose a god for ourselves, and we can’t turn God into some comfortable, fictional character of our own design.
I recently heard a conversation on a talk radio station about gay rights. At one point, the host grabbed a Bible and began reading God’s perspective of homosexuality as sinful behavior, and the consequences that would befall individuals who choose to reject God’s love and pursue distorted sexuality instead. (I think the host was just looking for a reaction, and he certainly got it.) The caller, who claimed to be a Christian, became outraged, saying, “My God would never think that! My God would never do that!” And I thought to myself, “Perhaps your God never would, but the true God has made his perspective clear.”
It’s interesting, isn’t it? Is God supposed to bend to fit our understanding and expectations of him, or are we supposed to bend our understanding and expectations of him to fit the truth?
Last week we began our journey through the Ten Commandments. You may remember that we talked a bit about what it takes to live life to the fullest — to experience the incredible satisfaction and unshakeable joy in life that the Bible describes. On a scale of 1 to 10, God wants each of us to live life at a “perfect ten.” But that means we need to do things his way. We need to establish a relationship with him, ask him to forgive our moral failures and give us a fresh start, and put our faith entirely in Jesus Christ who offered up his own life in our place on the cross to pay the debt of our sin. And then we need to look carefully at his strategy for living life to its fullest; after all, he is the designer — it’s safe to assume he has a pretty good idea how life is supposed to work.
The very beginning of living life as a “perfect ten” is to put God first — above everything. And once we have established who we worship, we need to establish how we worship. It won’t do for us to reduce God into something that simply makes us comfortable, or something that we can manage. When it comes to worshiping God, we have to do it his way!
Sometimes, when we think of idolatry, we think of a remote tribe of heathens dancing around a campfire in front of a giant stone statue or something. Or we think of eastern religions paying homage to fat sculptures of Buddha, or Hindu people lighting candles around shrines of goddesses with lots of arms and swords. Or maybe we even think of those people who come from all over the country to lie down on the rocks up at Sedona in hopes of being rejuvenated by the “vortex” of some force or god of nature.
My guess is that if you’re here this morning, you probably feel like I do: You shake your head at that stuff in disbelief. Why would anyone bow down to a piece of rock, or light a candle to a statue, or make a pledge to a painting, or say a prayer to a medallion around their neck? The way I figure it, if a human being can create it, then it certainly didn’t create human beings, and it makes no sense to worship it.
But the truth is that idolatry can creep into our lives in unusual ways. For instance, did you know that this second commandment is not included in the traditional Catholic list of the 10 Commandments? They either tack it on as a subset of the first commandment, or skip it altogether and move on to number 3. (They still manage to get 10 Commandments by splitting up the last statement about coveting into two parts.) Well, frankly, it’s no wonder Catholicism downplays the issue of idolatry, what with prayers being said to Mary and various saints, lighting candles to statuary, and, of course, the rather frenzied devotion to the Pope as the mouthpiece of God. In many ways, Catholicism seeks to worship God, but to worship him on their terms, using imagery, and intermediaries, and doctrine that fits their agenda. And you have to admit there are probably Catholics in your neighborhood who practice this form of idolatry without really thinking about it.
I suppose that there are plenty of other forms of idolatry in our modern, western culture. And the sneaky thing is that people worship things that not only don’t seem like gods or religions, but they might even be “good” things to an extent.
There are people who worship their careers — their jobs consume all their time, energy, creativity, passion, and priorities. And hard work is a good thing, but it was never meant to be elevated to the status of a religion in our lives.
There are people that worship their families — their relationships, their children, or even their parents consume so much of their attention and focus that there isn’t really much room for God anymore.
There are people who worship themselves — who have put humanism into full practice, by becoming narcissistic and indulgent. They are building their lives to suit their own appetites and desires, and have essentially made themselves to be their own private deity. You know the mantra of this cult already: “Have it your way.” “You deserve a break today.” “You owe it to yourself.” “Do yourself a favor.”
And, of course, there are those who worship hobbies, or entertainment, or money, or sports, or any manner of things.
But these sorts of things are really addressed in the first commandment: You shall have no other gods before me.” God is to be our number one priority — the passion of our lives, our focus, our reason for living, the one thing that makes our heart beat faster and occupies our thoughts day in and day out.
This second command grapples with a more difficult issue: Not only is God to be number one, but he is to hold that position on his terms, not ours.
You might remember the story of Exodus 32. Essentially, while Moses was receiving God’s instructions for living life at a “perfect ten,” the people grew restless. They didn’t know what happened to Moses, because he had been gone so long. So they turned to Aaron and said in Exodus 32:1,
1 …“Come, make us [a god] who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”
So Aaron gathered their gold, melted it down, and made a gleaming statue of a calf. Then, in verse 4, he proclaimed,
4…“[This is your god], O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”
You see, it wasn’t that they wanted a different God; it’s that they wanted to worship God in a different way. F.B. Meyer once wrote, "Had anyone suggested that Israel would apostatize from the God of Abraham, they would have stoned him to death. They had no desire to break the first commandment and to have gods other than [Yahweh,] but they found the demand of the second command to be too vigorous. They must have an image, a visible representation, an idol."
In other words, they wanted God, but they wanted a tangible god that they could see with their eyes and touch with their hands. So, rather than seeking the truth about God, they tried to make God appear they way they wanted him to be.
Think about it for a minute. God is spirit, according to John 4:24. He is unseen. And you and I are so used to living in a tangible, material world that it’s difficult for us to swear allegiance to something we can’t see or touch. We want something we can relate to — something that makes us comfortable and familiar. And God understands this; I think it’s one of the reasons he became a man 2,000 years ago and walked through human history.
But sometimes we struggle with being satisfied with God as he is. We want him to fit our perspective, rather than change our perspective to fit him.
This past week I read a story about a man named Jack, who was walking along a steep cliff one day when he accidentally got too close to the edge and fell. As he slid down the cliff, he reached out and grabbed a branch that was sticking out and hung on for dear life. He looked below him and saw the chasm stretching down hundreds of feet. He looked up and saw no footholds with which to climb back up. So he hung there, absolutely terrified, and began yelling for help.
“Help! Help! Is anyone up there?” He heard his own voice echo for hours, but nobody responded.
Then finally he heard a voice. “Jack! Jack! Can you hear me?”
Jack was thrilled and his heart swelled with hope. “Yes! I can hear you! I’m down here, clinging on to this branch”
“I can see you, Jack. Are you alright?”
“Yes, but…who are you? Where are you? I can’t see you?”
“I’m God, Jack. I’m everywhere.”
“What? You mean the God?”
“Yes, Jack. That’s me.”
“Okay. Well, Lord, please help me out here. I promise that if you get me out of this one, I’ll never sin again. I’ll be the nicest person in the whole world. I’ll go be a missionary in Africa or something. Just get me out of here.”
“Hey, take it easy on the promises, Jack. Let me get you out of there, and then we can have a long talk. Now, here’s what I want you to do. Listen to me carefully.”
Jack shouted excitedly, “I’ll do anything you say! Just tell me what to do.”
“Okay, Jack. Let go of the branch.”
There was a long pause. “What?!”
“I said to let go of the branch, Jack. Trust me. Just let go.”
Another long pause. “Um… Is there anyone else up there?!”
And that’s how many of us respond to God. We want him, but we want him on our terms. I remember chatting with a woman after church one Sunday last year, and she told me that she believes in God, and she believes in heaven, but she doesn’t believe in hell. When I asked her why not, she replied, “Because I can’t imagine God letting anyone go to hell.” In her mind, she had created a god that had plenty of grace and mercy, but not any of the justice that the Bible talks about. Somehow it made her more comfortable to worship a God that is like a big, cuddly grandfather who invites everyone to come and sit on his lap, and is willing to overlook any wrongdoings.
However, Jesus made it very clear what God expects from us in worship. In John 4:23-24 he said,
23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”
God is who he is. You and I must worship who he is, not just who we want him to be. And we must worship him truthfully. Anything else — any shadow of reality that we might conjure in our minds or craft with our hands — is idolatry.
We have become so used to substitutes in our lives. If I want to cut out sugar, I can always have Nutrasweet, or saccharin, or honey. If I want to save a little money at the drugstore, I can get generics to fill my prescription. My wife might enjoy wearing a strand of real pearls, but most people will never know the difference if she wears a quality imitation. Substitutes are really no big deal.
But when it comes to God, they are a huge deal. Why settle for the imitation when you can have the real thing — especially when we know that the imitation is powerless and even harmful?
If I stand in front of a bright light, I cast a shadow on the wall. In many ways, that shadow looks like me. It’s the same shape, it follows my movements, you might even recognize my profile. But it’s not me. It’s not real. It’s just a shadow.
And when we settle for “God as we understand him” instead of “God as he really is,” we’ve made an idol out of his shadow. There’s enough resemblance that we feel comfortable and secure, but there’s no power. And who really wants a powerless God?
Besides, did you catch the warning and the promise that comes with this second commandment? Exodus 20:5-6 says,
5 …I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
If you and I have a distorted, self-created impression of God, how in the world can we pass along an accurate impression of God to our children and grandchildren? If God is not the center of my life, how can I expect my children to make him the center of their lives? If I make God out to be some vengeful, thunderbolt-throwing, cosmic policeman to my kids, they’ll live in constant fear of him. Likewise, if I worship a god that is all warm and fuzzy and never holds us accountable for our actions, my kids will never know what the true fear of the Lord is all about.
What’s worse, if I keep giving presenting my kids and grandkids with a distorted shadow of God to worship, they’ll become distorted themselves. Just listen to the words of Psalm 135:
15 The idols of the nations are silver and gold, made by the hands of men. 16 They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but they cannot see; 17 they have ears, but cannot hear, nor is there breath in their mouths. 18 Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.
In other words, idols are powerless — they can’t communicate, they can’t see, they can’t hear. They’re not alive. And anyone who worships an idol — anyone who desires to serve a God of their own design rather than the God who designed them — will be powerless, blind, deaf, and dead. And if I teach my kids to follow after a shadow, they’ll be doomed (unless the grace of God intercedes and compensates for my distortions).
So how do we fulfill this second commandment? I’m sure all of us want to live life to its fullest. All of us want our lives to be a “perfect ten.” So we need to start with that first commandment that we looked at last week; we need to make sure that God is our number one priority. But we need to make sure that we’re talking about the right God — the one true God of the universe.
And the only way to do that is to make a sincere, unwavering commitment to our relationship with him. We need to dedicate ourselves to know God, and knowing him better every day. We can’t accept any substitutes. We need to spend time with God, cultivating our intimacy with him, and truly knowing him — not just knowing about him.
After all, God is jealous of our attention and affection. He says so here in Exodus 20:5 — “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.” Guys, imagine for a moment that your wife is doing the laundry and finds your wallet in your pants pocket. She pulls it out and discovers that there is a picture of another woman in your wallet, right alongside the picture of her. The two of them are very similar — same hair, same eyes, same complexion. They both have the same smile. And it even looks like that other woman shares the same taste in wardrobe. So your wife marches in and thrusts the pictures in front of your face, saying, “Who is she?!” Is your wife supposed to tolerate the look-alike substitute in your life? Is she supposed to say, “Well, gee, he fell in love with me. I suppose I can understand him falling in love with someone just like me.” Do you think she would go on believing you when you say that you love her with all your heart? Of course not! That’s because she has every right to expect your exclusive devotion to her.
In the same way, God has every right to expect your exclusive devotion to him. He won’t tolerate a substitute in your life, no matter how similar it might be to him. And you shouldn’t either. If you really need something tangible to help you know God better, then look no further than Jesus. After all, Colossians 1:15 says, "15 [Jesus] is the image of the invisible God…"
Hebrews 1:3 says, "3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being…"
So if you want to make sure that you’re worshiping the genuine article — if you want to make sure that your focus is on God as he really is (rather than on God as you understand him) — then get to know him better. Get to know Jesus better. Spend time with him. Make it a priority to read the Bible to hear what he has to say about himself. Make it a priority to talk with him and let him know what you’re thinking and feeling. Make it a priority to have some quiet time in your day when you just pause and listen — to allow his Spirit to stir in your heart and mind and draw you closer to him.
It’s that simple. Love God with a genuine passion. Worship him in spirit and in truth. And then watch as he begins to build upon your understanding and help you live life to the fullest!
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Copyright ©2000 by Scott F. Heine. This sermon and data file is the sole property of the copyright holder and may be copied only in its entirety for circulation freely without charge. All copies of this sermon and data file — written, recorded, or electronically transmitted — must contain this copyright notice. This sermon and data file may not be copied in part (except for small quotations used with citation), edited, revised, resold, or incorporated in any commercial publication, recording, broadcast, performance, display, or other product offered for sale, without the written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for permission should be made in writing and addressed to: Scott Heine, Estrella Community Church, 16069 Desert Bloom Street, Goodyear, AZ 85338.
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