I've talked before about how I watch too much TV, so this is where most of my illustrations end up coming from, it seems. But if you've ever seen VH1's Behind the Music, I like that show because it's the same story over and over and over again. It's predictable. There's some musician who sets out to prove himself to the world They aspire to be famous. They aspire to reach the top of the charts. They want to win Grammys. They want to reach the top of their profession. They want fame. They want notoriety. And they really do believe deep in their hearts that if they win those Grammys and if they achieve the kind of fame and adulation that they crave, that they'll be totally and completely happy and content. But how do these stories always go? They reach the top of their profession. They reach the pinnacle of the music industry. And what happens? They feel completely, totally empty. They end up turning to drugs and alcohol and sex and whatever else they can find to ultimately fulfill them. And the very fame, the very thing that they were living for They end up totally resenting. They resent their fame. They resent the fact that they can't go out to eat. They resent the fact that they can't go to the grocery store without paparazzi following them around. The very thing that they lived for ultimately lets them down and they feel devastated. Surely you've seen that play out. If not on VH1, in normal life. Man's approval has always been that elusive thing for me. We've talked about this many times if you've been here before. I've always wanted people to approve of me, to like me. In fact, growing up I wanted it so bad that I began to do everything I could to earn it. And in Tulsa, Oklahoma, what do we idolize? We idolize sports. That's why you go to a high school field that's bigger than most college fields in America, right? I mean, we idolize sports. And I thought, well, you know what? Maybe this is my chance. Because I've got some good genes. All right, my dad was an All-American high school player coming out of West Virginia and ended up playing at the University of Arizona basketball. And I have an uncle who played football for Florida State, and I have a cousin who played middle linebacker for Clemson the year they won the national championship, okay? And I thought, I've got the genes, I've got it. I was about this tall in eighth grade, and I thought, oh yeah, baby, here it goes. I'm going to have my dad's 6'4 frame with all these muscles to go with it, you know what I mean? And I thought, all right, I'm going to do this. So the first thing I did was I went out for baseball. I was terrible. I was the worst player ever. The ball would come to me and I'd scream like a little girl and put my, put my, sorry, I didn't mean to be, I just realized that was probably bad to say. But anyway, so I'll just go on my next one. So I played basketball, because again, I was this height in eighth grade, right? And so I was playing center. And then I stopped growing. You can't play center at 5'10". I don't care what high school you play at. So I gave up basketball. So I started playing football, because I had the girth. I had the girth to play football. But along with the girth came extreme slowness. And to be honest with you, I would rather, if I had the choice between two-a-days in August and a flogging I hated football practice, and so I wasn't very good at that. So I tried wrestling, thinking that wrestling would make me a better football player, but I wrestled heavyweight, and football is a team sport. I mean, wrestling is a team sport, and so by the time that it got to the heavyweight match, usually my team was counting on me. And I went one in 11 my freshman year, and so I said, okay, that's not it for me. Maybe the shot put in the discus will be my thing. And so I went and tried the shot put in the discus, No one told me that you had immense amounts of leg strength. And I'm, you know, one of those guys that all my weight is like from here up. Okay, like I've got little skinny stick legs and this big upper body. I had no leg power and so I was terrible at that. And I can honestly tell you that I tried and tried and tried to find what I was good at so that people would like me. I became addicted to approval. Everything I did was fueled by approval. I thought, if people like me, I will be ultimately happy. I'll be ultimately content. And I developed a very outspoken, brash demeanor where I tried to hide my insecurity by exuding confidence. But instead of exuding confidence, it exuded arrogance and it turned people off. And so I was on this perpetual cycle You see, approval controlled me. It's what I lived for. I was enslaved to it. Because when people liked me, when I had a girlfriend who liked me, when I had success, I was on cloud nine. I was as happy as I could be, but when people were mad at me, or a girlfriend broke up with me, or I let people down, or I'd be fired from a job, I would be devastated, ultimately devastated. Why? Because it was my idol. It's what I worshipped, it's what I bowed down to, it's what I lived for. It was the most important thing in my life. What people thought about me was the very thing that ultimately controlled me. The question I have for you today is what is that for you? Because every single one of us lives for something. Every single one of us is controlled by something. Maybe yours is like mine. Maybe you, like me, worship the idol of approval. Maybe you're driven by success. Nothing will get in the way of you and success. Maybe it's your kids. Maybe you worship your kids. And that plays out in wanting them so badly to be healthy, to be successful, that you're ultimately devastated when those things don't happen. We all live for something. What I wanna talk to you about today is this idol in your life. We're gonna be talking about idolatry in a big sense because we're all idolaters, we're all sinners. And in the deepest part of our souls, we worship things other than God. And I'm gonna show you how we do it this morning and how you fix it this morning. The text we're gonna be looking at, we're gonna be looking at the very first of the 10 commandments. It's a big one. It's a short text and so our scripture reading for this morning is going to be pretty quick. So hear the word of the Lord from Exodus chapter 20 verse 3. The Lord says, you shall have no other gods before me. This is God's word. What I hope to show you this morning are three things. What is an idol? How do you identify what your idols are, and how do you replace your heart idols with Jesus? Let's pray. Father, we are a broken people, in desperate need of being set free from the things that enslave us. Holy Spirit, I pray especially hard right now that you would reveal to us what it is that we actually worship. When we are sinners and we put something else in front of you, reveal it to us what we go to so that we would learn how to replace those things with Jesus. Without your help this morning, Triune God, this sermon will not go like it needs to go. So we invite you here to heal us, to restore us, because we long for that. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. I wanna talk to you about idols. An idol is anything that is more important to you than God. We've likely heard pastors talk about idolatry before. If you're like me, you grew up maybe in a church and you used to hear the pastor say something like this. Anything you put before God is an idol. And I don't know about you, but when I used to hear that, I used to think, well, golly, I put everything in front of God. How do you not? There's 24 hours in a day. I sleep, I eat, I watch TV, I play. You know, maybe on a good day, I'll read my Bible and pray. I talk to my friends, I do this and this, I work, et cetera. I go through my whole long list of things and I go, man, everything comes before God, except that 30 minutes I spend with Him in the morning. And I started thinking to myself, man, it cannot mean that. That's too broad of a definition, this whole idea of you can't put anything before God, because everything, you can do everything in your life to God's glory, can't you? I can play with my kids to God's glory. I can eat and drink to God's glory, it says in Ecclesiastes chapter two. Do all to the glory of God. I can work to the glory of God. I can worship God to the glory of God. And I don't think that God's ever called us to be Tibetan monks that live in seclusion where we spend all day long every day in worship and prayer and never interact with the outside world. I don't think that's what we're called to do. So what does it mean to have an idol? What does it mean to have something to you that's more important than God? An idol is almost always a good thing. a God-given good thing that becomes essential to you. It's almost always a good thing that becomes an essential thing. It can be anything that becomes so central and so important to your life that should you lose it, your life would hardly feel worth living. It is so important to you that if God took it away from you, you would be ultimately devastated. The true God of your heart is what your thoughts effortlessly go to when there's nothing else demanding your attention. What do you enjoy daydreaming about? It's very important that you engage with me on this. Because you will not be affected, you will not realize what your idols are if you're not connecting with me and going through these exercises with me. What do you daydream about when nothing else has your attention? What is it that if you lost it, you would be ultimately devastated? Do you daydream about how you'll look at the beach? Do you daydream about what your dream home would feel like and look like? Do you daydream about how happy you would be if you had that person in your life who loved you? Do you fear more than anything else that being taken away from you? Could it be your kid's happiness and success? What is it that if you could just have it, you would feel ultimately satisfied with it. Tim Keller in his book, Counterfeit Gods, we're gonna be talking about that book, which deals with this very issue quite a bit this morning. He defines an idol this way. He says, it's anything you love, it's anything you trust, and it's anything you obey, which gives you the ultimate happiness, the ultimate security, the ultimate contentment, and the ultimate identity that you crave, that you live for. It's anything you love, anything you trust, anything you obey that's going to give you that identity, security, contentment, and joy that you truly desire. As I was reading through his book for about the 18th time, it's a great book, Counterfeit Gods, if you haven't read it. If this sermon is for you today, then go out and get it. In New York City, these idols portrayed themselves as desires for money, sex, and power. Wall Street greed, sexual infidelity, corporate power are huge idols for the typical New Yorker. And I started thinking, okay, well, we don't live in New York. This is a very different culture than New York City. What do we as Tulsa people really struggle with when it comes down to this idea of what do we live for? Surely money, sex, and power come into play to some extent. but I think it plays itself out a little differently. Let's start with money. In New York City, which is where Tim Keller's the pastor and he's the one who wrote the book. In New York City, money is king, right? Wall Street is all about making as much money as you can in the shortest amount of time as you can to be as filthy rich as you possibly can, right? You put in 80 hours to 100 hours a week trying to earn as much money as possible because that's what gives you what you're living for, right? And I think to myself, we don't put in 80 hours a week. Not at work. But I know a lot of moms and dads that'll put in 30 hours a week at work and then put 40 or 50 hours into their kid's team. And I'm not kidding. Every single day, hours in the backyard, taking them on trips to the batting cages, private tutoring, coaching the teams, all weekend tournaments. 80 hours a week at least with athletics. A Wall Street guy may be controlled by his desire for wealth, but we are often controlled by a desire for our own kids' achievement and their resulting happiness, that we think if they can just achieve, they'll be happy. If they can just make it, then they'll be happy. And if they're happy, then I'm happy. And essentially, we make them our idol. Maybe that's not true for you. Maybe you don't have kids, or maybe your kids aren't in the athletic thing. Maybe that's not your issue. Let's talk about power. Instead of climbing corporate ladders to gain power, there's a whole lot of folks here in Tulsa that are small business type people. We're not big parts of the huge corporations here. We don't have a lot of the high rises here. And all you people at BOK went, yes we do. You're the only one I know, OK? So look. Their struggle is control and power in their huge corporations. Our struggle is being ultra in control of our own little world, of our own little businesses. We struggle with control in our churches, control in our kids' sports, and control of their sports teams, control of the school boards. We struggle with control. It's just in a different way. It's the same kind of power, idol, just played out in a different way. And that desire for power can definitely be an idol. It's something you look to for ultimate peace, ultimate contentment, ultimate identity. Or maybe it's sex. While New Yorkers oftentimes will stay single into their late 30s now, that's the trend there, and maybe they struggle with this idea of having intimacy with the right people in order to get ahead in the world, Tulsans largely get married in their mid-20s. And so what is their struggle? Well, we have a lot more free time on our hands than New Yorkers do. And so a lot of the struggles that we see as pastors is things like pornography. Things like making sex an idol within marriage, where if a woman says no, he's ultimately devastated, ultimately angry, or maybe even through affairs, we can make sex an idol. Oklahoma is sky high on the list of divorces due to affairs. Why do people make an idol out of this? Because they believe that by getting what they really want, they're going to be ultimately happy, ultimately fulfilled, ultimately content. There's a guy in our congregation this morning who for the last six years has struggled and struggled and struggled internally with this issue. And he has tried and tried and tried to overcome it through willpower and through repentance. And he has struggled through this. And almost every single guy that I know struggles with this. This is hard. This is real. So we've identified what an idol really is. It's a good God-given thing, right? Because intimacy within marriage is a good God-given thing, and we make it our ultimate thing, to where if we can't have it, we make up ways to get it, or we go outside of God's bounds to get it. Whether it's money, sex, power, kids, whatever it is for you, we long for it. It's a good thing that's become an essential thing. So how do you identify what yours are? like I was talking about with Tim Keller in his book Counterfeit Gods, he says the reason we sin, the reason we can't seem to get over the things in our life that we know we should be getting over, is because deep down inside me and you, there is something that we feel we have to have in order to be happy. Something that is more important to our heart than God himself. So how do you know what it is? We've already looked at the imagination. What do you daydream about? What do you long for when there's nothing else demanding your attention? Another way to discern what they are is to look at how you spend your money. So what do you fantasize about? And where does your money go? How do I know that that's a good way to tell? It's because Jesus said, where your treasure is, what? There your heart will be also. Tim Keller says, your money flows most effortlessly toward your heart's greatest desire, towards your heart's greatest love. That's where your money oftentimes will go. So where our money goes can tell us what we love. So you can use, what do I fantasize about? Where do I spend my money? But I think the most effective way to figure out what your heart idols really are, is to look at where your most uncontrolled emotions lie. The two emotions that we're gonna look at are anger and sadness. In the book of Matthew, chapter 12, if you'd like to flip over there, you're more than welcome. We'll show the words up here on the screen. Matthew, chapter 12, verses nine through 14, we're gonna see this illustration of anger. Listen to what Jesus says, he says, The story goes, going on from that place, he went into their synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Looking for a reason to bring charges against Jesus, they asked him, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Here are these Pharisees, they know the law, they know that the law says you are not allowed to work on the Sabbath, you're not allowed to perform any big deeds on the Sabbath, et cetera, and we're gonna bring, we know this guy loves people, this guy loves people so much, there's no way he'll be able to not heal this guy. So they make sure that the guy with the shriveled hand is in the synagogue when Jesus gets there, and then they ask him the loaded question. By the way, Messiah, is it lawful to work on the Sabbath? Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? And what does Jesus say, verse 11? He said to them, if any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a person than a sheep? Therefore, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath. I read a book one time called Permission Evangelism. And in this book, he says, look, Jesus never forced himself on anybody. Jesus never went to people and healed them without them asking for it first, except for one time. This was it. Jesus looks over at this guy, and he says, hey, stretch out your hand. So he stretched it out, and it was completely restored, just as sound as the other. And the Pharisees went, you know what? This is a great thing, you know? I mean, we brought this guy in, poor guy, he's a shovel hand, you just fixed him, you know? You went against the law, but you know, we're so thankful. No, that's not what they did. Look what happens, verse 14, but the Pharisees went out and plotted how they might kill him. I don't know about you, but I cannot imagine getting that mad if somebody were to heal somebody, even if I thought it was against the law. Why were the Pharisees so irate that they wanted to kill Jesus? What was it that Jesus was taking away from them that caused so much anguish? It was their whole identity that Jesus was robbing them of. Do you understand this? Their whole identity was wrapped up in this kind of self-righteousness. If I obey the rules that I have helped to make, then I will be in great standing before God, and that gives me importance, and that gives me identity, and that gives me contentment, and as long as I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, I look down on everybody else, and I'm the king. And Jesus is robbing them of all those things in one statement. He's saying, not only are you not righteous, but you're not even right. And it makes them so angry that they wanna kill him. What makes you really angry when it's taken away from you? Is it when somebody tells you where you fall short? When someone criticizes you, do you lash out at whoever criticizes you? Do you love power and control? If so, you'll know how angry it makes you when someone takes it away from you. When someone goes over your head. Do you get angry, guys, when your wife says no to you? Do you punish her by ignoring her or by shutting off your emotions towards her? Anger is a way to know where your heart idols lie. Let's look at the other one. Let's look at sadness. Matthew chapter 19, just a few pages over. Just then a man came up to Jesus, we're in verse 16, And he says, teacher, what good thing must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says, why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you want to enter eternal life, keep the commandments. The guy says, which ones? Now watch what Jesus does here. Does he start with commandment one? Jesus knows Exodus. Does he start with one, you shall have no other gods before me? No, look what he does. He starts with the ones that he knew the guys kept. Well, you shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony or lie. Honor your father and mother and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus was baiting him. And he goes, whew, all these I have kept. The young man said, what do I still lack? And Jesus goes, oh yeah, one more thing. One more thing. Forgot the first commandment. If you wanna be perfect, go and sell all your possessions and give it to the poor and you'll have treasure in heaven. Then come follow me. Why did Jesus say that? Because he knew the guy had an idol. There was someone before God to this guy and it was his money. This guy's money gave him the power, the approval, and the material possessions that he lived for. How do we know this? Because he couldn't live without it. Look what the text says. When the young man heard this, he went away sad because he had great wealth. What is it that if it were taken away from you would make life seem not worth living? What is it that would utterly sideline you from being effective for the kingdom of God? I was talking to a guy this week, and I was telling him what I was preaching on, and he said, you know, he said, I was thinking to myself as my family was traveling not too long ago, that if anything happened to them, if they were taken away from me, I don't know if I could move on with my life. And then he said, I've realized that my family has taken the place of Jesus in my life. There was somebody who lost their live-in girlfriend this past week, and the guy was so devastated when he heard the news that she had been in an accident and died that he screamed out, I don't know if I can move on with my life. She was my life. She was my oxygen. She's the one I was living for. What was it that if it was taken away from you, you don't think you could move on with your life? You can identify where your heart idols are by looking at what you dream about, where you spend your money, where you're deeply angry, where you're deeply sad, And by this point in the sermon, I hope that you're thinking about what controls you. And I would encourage you, if nothing's coming to your mind, to sit down with whoever knows you the best and say, I need you to tell me where I'm blind. I need you to tell me where my blind spot is, because I can't figure this out without talking to somebody about it. Figure it out. Come talk to me, I'll help you find it. Because you'll never be able to get over your idolatry if you don't know what it is that you're deathly afraid of giving up. So how do you replace, once you identify what they are, how do you replace them with Jesus? Point number three, Tim Keller says this. The only way to free ourselves from the destructive influence of counterfeit gods is to turn back to the true one. The living God who revealed Himself both at Mount Sinai and on the cross is the only Lord who, if you find Him, can truly fulfill you. And if you fail Him, He's the only one who can truly forgive you. When confronted with my idol of approval, when I applied with the Acts 29 Network three and a half years ago, and I said, I really wanna be a church planner, and I really wanna be in your network, and they said, the first thing you need to do is go do an internship, and you need to repent of your idol of approval, because it'll kill you. And I've told you this before, they essentially were rejecting me for my approval idol, which totally sent me into this downward spiral, to where I had to go find a counselor to figure out what it was about me that I couldn't figure out. And their advice to me was this, repent every single day. They said, walk in repentance and believe the gospel. Walk in repentance and believe the gospel. And I've been doing it for three and a half years. Every time before I preach, I did it this morning, I pray that I would not be concerned with what you think about me. I pray that I would not try extra hard to be funny. That I would not try extra hard to be liked. I pray every time I preach that I would be confident in the Lord alone who gives me the ability and the courage and the privilege of expounding God's word. That whether people like the sermon or not, whether they like me or not, it's not important. It's what God thinks about me. And every Sunday I have to preach the gospel to myself and I have to go, Jesus, you know how hard I've worked. You know how hard I'm trying. You approve of me. And it doesn't matter what anybody else thinks. But it isn't simply repenting of your idolatry that'll help you. Repenting and trying are good, but you can't replace your idols with sheer repentance and pure willpower. The only way, listen, the only way to truly replace your counterfeit gods with the one true God, is by looking heavenward. And as it says in Colossians chapter three, setting your heart and mind on things above where your life is hidden with Christ and God. When we do this, Tim Keller says, Jesus becomes more beautiful to our imagination, more attractive to our hearts, more incredibly moving than our idols. This will replace our counterfeit gods, he says. I mixed in a little Tim Keller with a little John Piper when I started thinking about this because what John Piper says is when we are most satisfied in God, when he brings us our ultimate joy and our ultimate contentment, it's then that he is the most glorified. The more joy we can find in being forgiven, the more joy that we can find in our adoption as His sons and daughters, the more peace that we'll find even in our sufferings, the less we'll look to other gods to fill us. Maybe you're here today, and you're saying to yourself, you know, I've been coming to church, or maybe I'm getting back into church, but I've never really understood why I can't get over these things that completely and totally enslave me. I've got good news for you. Jesus came to set you free from those things, to give you abundant life. Jesus came to set you free. You see, before you're a Christian, you're completely and totally enslaved to the belief that there's something out there that's going to make you happy, that there's something out there that's going to bring you that contentment and that deep-seated joy, and you live for it. Whether that's people's approval, whether that's success, whether that's your kids, whatever it is, you live for something and it controls you. Jesus came to deliver you from that. And some of you in here this morning may be so desperate to hear that message that today's the day that you need to believe. Some of you need to say, I am repenting of the belief that my family will make me happy, that having kids will make me happy, that finding a husband will make me happy. I'm repenting of that and I'm acknowledging to the Lord that Jesus is the only one that's gonna fulfill me. because He gave up everything for me. And He died on the cross for me to deliver me from this slavery, from this awful bondage that I'm in. I bow my knee to Jesus, I give Him control of my life, and I'm pursuing happiness. I'm pursuing satisfaction. I'm pursuing contentment in Him alone. And some of you who have been Christians a long time, and you've been struggling, and you can't seem to figure out how to get over this thing that seems to be enslaving you, like my friend who for the last six years has been totally enslaved to pornography. And I've got great news about that guy, that he started setting captives free about a year ago. And he got about, Setting Captives Free is a 60-day online devotion thing that preaches the gospel to you every single day. And it's like an accountability program, and it goes to your mentors and all these things. And he got about 20 days in and messed up, and we started him over. And he started it again, and he messed up again, and we started him over. And we said, you've got to give up these idols, man. And he said, OK, I'm going to try harder. And so he tried harder and willed himself to do better. And he failed again. And we said, look, man, the gospel is not sinking into your soul. This is not about willing yourself. It's about believing different. It's about believing that Jesus is the only thing. He's the only one that's going to deliver you. if he's more beautiful to you than that, then that will be ugly, and that will be gross, and you won't want that anymore. And he said, okay, but he didn't fully get it, so he tried really hard again, and he failed again, and I said, you've got to repent, and he started crying, and he said, I want this so bad, I'm done with it, and I said, then let's do it together. I said, every single night, I'll call you at 10 o'clock in the evening, and if I don't have an email from you saying that you've done your thing, then I'm gonna preach the gospel to you every single night, and he said, okay, deal. Today is day 60. And I'm so proud of him, you know? I'm so proud of him, not because he's trying harder, but because Jesus is more beautiful. Jesus is more beautiful. The sin has become gross. The bondage has become bondage. It's no longer something that he wants to hold on to and keep just in case he needs it. And it's beautiful. Every single one of us has got to get to that place where the gospel becomes more beautiful, where Jesus becomes more beautiful than having a baby. Where the gospel becomes more beautiful than my family getting along. That my gospel becomes more beautiful than the way I look at the beach. The gospel becomes more beautiful than how much money I make. The gospel becomes more beautiful than what people think. Let's pray. Jesus, we need you so bad. There is no way that we can simply repent and try harder to get over these things that completely enslave us. The only way is through the gospel working itself in to our soul. And you're the only one that can make that happen. You say, if anyone seeks, he will find. If anyone, when you knock, they will open the door and you'll come in. And so Lord, we pray For anyone in here who needs to hear this message, that you would come in, that you would show yourselves to them, and that you would save us from the control of false gods. Thank you for your commandments. They are given for our good. We pray this in the name of Jesus, our Lord. Amen.