Joshua 24:14 “Now fear the LORD and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshiped beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD.”

We have a hard time leaving “our fathers’ gods,” that is, the things our ancestors held dear, tangible and intangible. Real change has to start with the fear of the Lord, and few people seem to have that much at all. They fear death without understanding that God has provided victory over death. Serving God always involves letting go of things that aren’t God. Sometimes those things are good, or even very good, but if we cling to them over God, they have become idols. God calls for undivided allegiance. Today there is a massive assault on even the concept of absolute truth, which is another way of saying the concept of God. If God is not absolute then He is not God, and neither is He God if He is not true. Many cultures have very relativistic roots, which means that to come to God out of those cultures, you must indeed come out of them. That is far easier to say than to do! The world is not simple black and white, but unless we have our anchor in an absolute God, we have no anchor at all.

I have the enormous blessing of having been raised in a home that held true to a Biblical world view, but even that blessing itself has the risk of becoming an idol. Even the snake that Moses raised on a pole in the wilderness later became an idol. (2 Kings 18:4) I must cling to God and God alone, and serve Him with my whole heart. I am to fill my heart with His Word, but not make the Bible itself an idol either. I have seen more than enough churches where the Trinity was treated as Father, Son, and Holy Bible! As important as it is, I am not to treat this church as an idol. It’s not my property, it’s God’s, as is every person in it. I have been given the privilege of participating in it as pastor and I am to love it, but I am not to love it above God. I have no wisdom or power to shepherd it on my own, but I must trust God to do it well through me, for His glory.

Father, thank You for the current circumstances that are forcing me to look at this issue. Help me see people, myself included, with Your eyes, and not just with the eyes of flesh. (2 Corinthians 5:16) Show me how to establish the foundation of this church on You, and not on me. People coming to church because they like me can be a useful tool for evangelism, but if I fail to get their eyes off of me and onto Christ, I have failed. People have come because of me, and they have stumbled because of me. It needs to be that they will come to worship God even if they dislike me. Father, I have no wisdom to bring that about, so I ask You to do it. May Christ alone be lifted up in this place, for the salvation of many and for Your glory. Thank You. Praise God!