You can wholeheartedly and passionately serve only one god. The “who” makes a massive difference though. Idolatry of things, food, people brings bondage. Worshipping God brings freedom. Checking your heart right now, do you feel bound or free?

“Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.” ― Charles Spurgeon

I felt God press on my heart to write about idolatry. Something is shifting in the spirit and this will be one of the keys to walking in the fullness of what He is about to do.

Today God might be pointing something out to you which is actually stealing your joy and most definitely stealing from your relationship with Him. “Your pain could be God prying open your life and heart to remove a gift of His that you’ve been holding on to more dearly than Him.” Tullian Tchividjian.

In Exodus 20 we read that one of the ten commandments given by God was “You shall have no other gods before Me.”… “For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God...” Idolatry could be present with any object, lifestyle, social media, food, person, etc. Martin Luther summed it up nicely: “Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your god, your functional savior. ”

As God was showing me an area of idolatry in my own life, I found my heart echoes the same words as St.Augustine of Hippo “I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them.”

Dear reader, my prayer is that God will reveal to you today what or who has become more important to you than God Himself. It happens so easy and subtle and before you know it, like a weed, it has grown its roots into different parts of your life and it is stubborn – not wanting to let go. Suddenly we realize that we have fear driving us, we have less strength, we are not healthy, the first and last thought of our day is about our idol – it consumes us completely. Mostly we do try to squeeze in a few minutes for God but that’s only when there’s time and even those few minutes are occupied by our thoughts trailing back to our idol. Does this sound familiar?

“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other.” (Matt.6:24)

The word “master” in Greek is “kurios” which is described as “he to whom a person or thing belongs, about which he has the power of deciding; master, lord; owner, one who has control of the person; supremacy; controller”.

But I think most of us could testify that in actual fact, we realize now, that we have someone or something (maybe even ourselves) more important than God. Our daily thoughts and decisions belong to something or someone else and not to God.

“You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never rises from the soul, and sways the heart of every single hearer, with the deepest power, in simple ways. You’ll sit forever, gluing things together, Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps, blowing on a miserable fire, Made from your heap of dying ash. Let apes and children praise your art, If their admiration’s to your taste, But you’ll never speak from heart to heart Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe might have been referring to music here, but his words are such a good description of what happens when we allow people or idols to be master and king in our lives – though shallow and fallible, consuming our lives and stealing our joy. As opposed to serving only one Master, worshipping wholeheartedly only one King. The King. There is only one Person who will fill our deepest heart with utter joy and that is Jesus. And from that place of deep fulfillment in our hearts we live outwards to everyone and everything around us.

“Mindset of the man too busy: I am too busy BEING God to become LIKE God.”
― Mark Buchanan

Thing is, we were made to worship. It is just the “who” that we get wrong.
John Wimber rightly said, “Our heart’s desire should be to worship God; we have been designed by God for this purpose. If we don’t worship God, we’ll worship something or someone else.”

“You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship.” -N.T.Wright

Let’s repent and invite Holy Spirit once again to help us to “not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” Rom.12:2

Renewal of mind takes time though. Every time your idol start entering your thoughts, rather proclaim out loud that you worship one God and that is God Almighty. He is your Master, you choose Him. Daily you will find this becoming easier. I strongly sense we are in a time where we need to get back to the basics again, return to our first Love but I feel that the result will not be basic at all. Deeper depths will be reached with this awesome God who is our true Master. He is our Lord, our Owner, the One who we choose to have control over us, we choose Him to have the power of deciding when it comes to decisions we make in our daily lives. We WORSHIP Him!

Luk.10:27 “The two greatest commandments are “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbor as yourself.’ ”

Lastly, and interestingly, the word “worship” in Greek is “proskuneo” which is described as “to kiss the hand, in token of reverence, to fall upon the knees and touch the ground with the forehead as a expression of profound reverence, to kiss – like a dog licking his master’s hand”.
This word is a derivative of “pros” – “to the advantage of” and “kuon” – “a dog”.

Dogs are great examples of worshippers. They are always overly excited to see their master, tail wagging and barking-excited. They would follow their master everywhere and if necessary they would protect them with all they had. Everything in their short lives on earth revolves around their master. The word worship means exactly that – only we get to be that excited about God – Who sees everything and Who is even more excited about us! Now that is good news!

“But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him.” John 4:23-25