Day 2359 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.


Exodus 20:3 NIV

I've been reading through Exodus for a few days now and read about the golden calf last night. If you haven't read it you really should! Moses had gone up Mount Sinai to talk with God and receive the commandments. And while he was gone the people waiting for Him got kind of bored and decided to make an image of a god that they could worship. Then God tells Moses that he better get back down the mountain because the people done lost their minds and need to be straightened out. So Moses heads down to take care of business, smashes the Ten Commandments, chucks the statue in the fire, and lets the people know what they've done in going against God.

That's just one of those stories that always seems to click. It's something that we're still doing today. It's something that's sadly even more common in our modern world. But we may not even realize it. We might not notice that we're worshipping idols ourselves. That's because we think of idols as statues. We envision things that we hang on a wall or place on a shelf. We think of something shiny, gold, expensive, valuable. And we might not have anything like that in our lives. But that doesn't mean that we're not worshipping idols. That doesn't mean that we haven't allowed something or someone else to become a god in our lives.

So we need to look at the things that we're devoting our time to or praising in some way. And there's an almost endless list these days! Political parties. Athletes. Singers. Actors. Social movements. Flags. Collectibles. Cars. Houses. Jobs. Titles. Money. Our own vanity. Our own popularity. Our own comfort. We place a high priority on so many different things. But do we even notice that we're serving those things? Do we realize that by focusing on them and spending our lives trying to earn them that they've become a god that we're serving? Do we spend more time thinking about those things than we do our Father? Do we worry more about them than our personal relationships with our Savior? If so then we're wrong!

The Bible makes it as clear as it can possibly be. God is a jealous God. He is our only God. And anything that takes our attention away from serving Him is something that needs to be addressed. I understand that our world makes so many things seem important. And all of us have fallen for that lie. We have chased things only to find out they're hollow. We have joined in doing as everyone else does thinking that it would lead us to something special. We have surrounded ourselves with everything that caught our eye only to be left still feeling like something is missing. That's because we're serving the wrong things. We're making the wrong things our god.

We have to stop letting other things take God's place in our lives. If it's made by human hands then it's not that important. If you can buy it then it isn't that valuable. If it can get dusty, rusted, ruined, lost, or broken then why spend any of our time focused on it instead of something that has eternal significance? When all of this world has passed away, God will remain. When the things we've chased lose their luster and fade from memory, our relationships with God will still matter. Please don't waste your life serving something that is only temporary. There is more than that, and we can't afford to ignore that truth!

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