The first few things I would want to affirm will be fairly straightforward, as I hold pretty orthodox views on the basics of Christianity. These are things that, for the most part, are not really contested within Christianity, and I would go so far as to say that these cannot be laid aside without abandoning Christianity. As such, I'm just going to toss all of these into one post and then focus on more secondary and/or controversial topics for the remainder of the series.

The Christian faith stands or falls on the resurrection of Christ, and this is where I started when I began my deconstruction phase. I did not consider anything short of a literal, physical resurrection from the dead to be acceptable; if Christ was dead, or never existed, then I was prepared to throw the whole religion out as baseless and false. If Christ did not exist, then all of Christianity is built on a lie; if He died and stayed dead, He failed to prove Himself to be God in flesh, and therefore Christianity is built on a lie. A symbolic or metaphysical resurrection is not even worth considering, as it cannot be verified and means essentially nothing. I recently saw a tweet where someone asked, "if it was absolutely, undeniably, 100% demonstrated tomorrow that Christ was still dead in a grave, how would that affect your faith?" and I read through response after response of people saying it wouldn't do anything to their faith.

I don't know what their faith is, but it isn't the one Paul declared would be in vain if Christ had not been raised.

I looked at the gospels as historical documents, because that's fundamentally what they claim to be. I could go into detail in another post, but I was convinced that they were faithful recollections of real events, with Luke and John having the most convincing lines of argument for me. Luke because of his research; the number of details that Luke includes that support his claim to be operating from eyewitness interviews was staggering. Luke stated outright that his goal was to ensure his reader(s) could have confidence in the teachings they've received, and he makes sure to name sources, include stories that other gospels didn't include that show Christ interacting with people beyond the disciples, provide geographic and cultural details that improve clarity, and (as he continues into Acts) distinguish between the things he personally witnessed and the things he didn't. John stood out to me for his honesty and intimate familiarity with the story, how he really turns his focus to who Christ is and lets the person of Jesus stand out on the page even more than the specific things Jesus did or what order exactly He did them. The bit where John and Peter run to the tomb and John is the only writer who records that, well actually, he won that race, but that's an aside; details like that drove home that this was a real person telling real stories about his own real experiences, show a bit of the character of a man who wants to note that he ran faster than his friend, but is willing to admit hesitance to actually enter the tomb.

Incidentally, and this isn't a core doctrine, it's just a side note here, but John is also why I believe in a very early dating of the gospels, which was important to my acceptance of their claims. There is no dispute among scholars, Christian or secular, that John was written after the synoptic gospels, and almost certainly after Acts. Everyone agrees that John wrote last. A great many people, however, put John after 70 ad, and I don't. My reason isn't historical or based on any specific papyrus or anything--so take it how you will--but rather it's literary. As a writer, I am struck by the fact that John has no apparent sense of dramatic tension. He shows throughout his writings that he is a writer who cannot allude to something and then wait to reveal what he's alluded to. Consider this segment of John 2:

I want to note two things about this passage. The first is that John, at the very beginning of his gospel, gives away the ending because this is the type of writer he is. Jesus has alluded to His resurrection and John, writing about it later, simply cannot contain the urge to tell us exactly what this is a reference to and exactly how you, dear reader, should respond to that. The second is that the writer who cannot hold onto spoilers, who cannot help but point to the fulfillment of anything hinted at in his text, does not connect a conversation that predicts the destruction of the temple to the actual destruction of the temple. Even when he points out that Jesus' primary point here was to talk about Himself rather than the temple, he doesn't contrast that with the natural post-70 reading of the passage that would remind people of the temple's destruction. It gets no mention, not even as a thing to be corrected. If John is the kind of writer that I have claimed he is, if he's the kind of writer I see when I read him, the only explanation for this oversight is that John did not yet know about the literal destruction of the temple when he wrote it. This, in my mind, dates his gospel to before 70, which means all the other gospels are even earlier, and this serves to help the case of gospel validity. That Matthew, Mark, and Luke all wrote and distributed their accounts, with names and sources and identifying details, during the lifetime of eyewitnesses and people who knew where Jesus had been buried, and no one trotted out His body or wrote any damning contradiction or managed to show any evidence to the contrary, is a fact that I cannot ignore. If Jesus was a fictional character, or still dead, then the opponents of the church would have held all the cards and could shut these claims down just as quickly as they shut down the claims of other contemporary false messiahs. That they didn't means that the story of Jesus Christ was different in a way that ensured they couldn't. And that way must be that the accounts were true. Jesus Christ really walked the earth, really taught crowds, really performed miracles, really died, and really rose from the dead, and those closest to Him really had their entire lives changed to such a degree that they couldn't help but tell the world what they'd experienced in His presence.

Everything else is built on this.

In the most recent sermon I've delivered, I claimed that everything we know of God the Father we know through Christ. This is because I was specifically talking about knowing God the Father at that time; it would be more accurate, as a general statement, to say that everything we know of the Godhead, the supernatural, and even our own fundamental natures, we know through Christ. When God the Father speaks, it is Jesus' voice we hear. When God the Spirit makes us aware of truth, it is God the Son He is delivering. When human writers sat down to put the scriptures into writing, it was the Eternal Living Word that filled their minds and found translation in the act of recording. This is, I maintain, the fundamental nature of God the Son's function in the Godhead: He reveals and realizes. His death and resurrection are revelatory at their core, displaying the weight of our sin and the love of God for us and the grace that He has available to cover that sin; and in doing that work, He realizes (that is, makes into reality) the salvation of God's people. As the means by which all things are created, He reveals the creative purposes of God and realizes them, and as the One for whom all things are made, He reveals the God-centered order of creation and realizes the God-directed purpose of creation. He is both the light that shows us what God intends us to see and the means by which the revealed is made concrete. The credibility of God the Son, then, is paramount. If there was any deceit or falsehood in Him (and, therefore, in His words), if anything we know of Him is false, then we can know nothing He speaks on with certainty. The resurrection of Christ proves that He is who He says He is and will do what He says He will do. By proving Himself to us, He assures us that He is the credible source of all His other claims. Now, having come to understand that credibility, we can look at what He has revealed.

Third, that a proper relationship with the Father is characterized by allegiance* to Him alone, through Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit. God will not split our affections, and will be second to nothing. Submission to Him is submission of all that we are, and we become all we were designed to be in the process. I tell people that I'm evangelizing to that I'm not just giving them a chance to escape Hell someday, but rather, I'm asking them to lay absolutely everything at the feet of Christ; our lives, our histories, our skills, our goods, our relationships, our bodies, our identities, our views and habits and desires and goals, everything that defines our sense of self, absolutely everything is given over and nothing is held back. All that we can rightly have when He sends us into the world as a redeemed soul is that which He gives back to us, which always includes a body to stand with and a Father to love and a King to bow before and an eternity to enjoy all of it. I am asking them to consider the person they have been so far utterly dead, and to start a brand new life, whatever that may mean in God's plans for us. Everything else, everything but Him, falls in line behind this overarching drive to be who He has called us to be and live as He has called us to live and do as He has called us to do; and anything that contrasts with that purpose, regardless of how comfortable or important it has been to us so far, must be dropped aside. In salvation, we are not merely recipients of a transaction, we are adopted, and while I will go into this more in the next post, the basic idea here is that we are brought into a new family and held to the expectations and identity of that family.

These, I believe, are the basics of the Christian faith. Everything else stems from them or explains them in more detail. All our models, all our atonement theories, all our theological frameworks and terminology find their soul here. Here we have creation, fall, and redemption; here we have God and man and our need for Him and His love for us. Here we have the Bible, in which God the Son reveals God and ourselves and what God has done and how we respond to that work, which can have no falsehood without sacrificing its essential purpose. In these things we must have unity and unwavering adherence; any deviation from this, any different Christ, any other gospel, any allegiance placed equal or higher than God, any ultimate source of truth other than the Father revealed through the Son through the lens provided by the Holy Spirit, is not Christianity. It may share many things with us, but it is not of us.

The final session of the Gods at War series by Kyle Idleman presented the claim that all of the other idols covered in the series came down to one root idol: ourselves. That, fundamentally, we must choose between serving, trusting, and giving glory to God or to ourselves. That no matter what form the worship of self takes, it is ultimately about a rejection of the one true God and an elevation of self as the ultimate end of all we do. There was a lot wrapped up in this, but one question stood out specifically to me: have you ever chose not to pursue something because you felt it would lead you further from God? For the first time in this series, rather than God using my past errors to show me what this means, He reminded me of how great it is to serve Him rather than me. But I did not learn that lesson quickly.

I don't know if you know this about me, but nearly every federal election cycle hosts a temptation for me. Now, this is partly a religious thing, a desire to see someone in office who stands for the values I stand for without adding in a bunch of stuff I really cannot abide. But when I'm being honest, that isn't my primary motivation. Mostly it's that I have anarchist tendencies (when I'm being more generous and less angry they can be disguised well as libertarian leanings) and a pride issue and this makes me want to get into the government and start tearing things down and rebuilding it in a way that would actually work. Because, obviously, I'm so great and clever that I could do that better than any of the jokers we keep electing. I now know, on a practical level, that this is nonsense and the process would hurt a lot of people, but no one ever said our temptations had to be good or sensible things.

Understand, it isn't that running for office is a bad thing, it's that my heart wants it for bad reasons. If I go into politics, I can let myself believe that I'm saving the world and doing it my way. But ministry, which I have been called to, doesn't allow that. Ministry has a knack for reminding people that we are just servants participating in God's work, and his plans are far better than ours. When I am fighting off the temptation to turn astray from my calling to pursue public office, I am fighting off a very direct idol of self and trying to reject following and trusting God. This will look different for all of us, but we must not give in to whatever it is that pulls our affection away.

By the time I moved from Norwood to Amherst in 2009, I knew that my future involved church planting. I didn't know what that would look like, I didn't know where it would happen, I didn't even know how to start exploring that fact. But it was a fact, I knew that somewhere deep in my soul. God's process of working on me had kept coming back around to this, it was constantly on my mind, and even though our brief and poorly-handled church planting attempt in Norwood went belly up within a few months, the act of being there for it just burned a desire and joy into me that has never really left. And as I spent time looking at what would be required of me to run for office, campaigning around an area that at the time occupied nearly half of Massachusetts and doing interviews and filling out paperwork and raising money, I was forced to realize that I didn't have time to both run a successful campaign and invest in my church in the way I needed to. I had to choose.

​I never turned the paperwork in.

In 2017, I was invited to preach at my friend's church in Vermont while he was out of town. He gave me a passage to preach that would lead into a series he would be starting the following week. The actual message I preached was about taking seriously the fact that we, as Christians, are representatives of Christ and the things we obsess over tell the secular world what God obsesses over. The things we oppose tell the world what God opposes. Do we represent Him well? Do we showcase in all that we do that our trust is in Him and His grace, rather than governments or armies or even our own works? When we advertise what it means to be a Christian, are we making more noise about God's love and grace or His judgment and law? In the service they had done a congregational reading of the ten commandments and so I asked, how quick are we to beg with tears that monuments of the ten commandments stay posted in our town squares as a sign of our faith, and how does that compare to how quickly we preach the gospel to the homeless who sleep under those monuments? Are we as serious about the things Jesus described about what a Christian life looks like as we are about the rules? What do you think the world believes about the gospel when all they hear is rules?

Now my friend and I have joked about the fact that, afterward, there were emails about that sermon. I got emails about that sermon. He got emails about that sermon. These were not terribly encouraging emails. I haven't been back to his church. The real reason is that my family moved two hours away and I got pretty busy with another church so the opportunity just hasn't been there as much, but when we ran into each other at the Small Town Summit I joked that it was because of the emails we got from that sermon. My pastor sat in on the sermon and when he heard about the emails he told my friend that he wasn't really surprised. It truly is an act of grace that my pastor let me preach at our church after that.

But in one of those emails, a member of his church asked me what he seemed to think would be a gotcha question. "If you knew that being elected would ensure that you could stop abortion right now," he asked, "and save the lives of so many precious little ones, would you do it?" He was trying to get me to confess to a certain reliance on political power that I had condemned in the sermon, and oh, how tempting that question was. Not only because I am pro-life, but ever since the 2016 election I had been struggling even more with the temptation to get elected and burn the whole system down from inside. This guy was pushing exactly the right button, and I realized it wasn't an accident. So I prayed before I replied.

"I would not run," I answered. "Not because I do not value that cause, because I do value it; but because God has called me to a different path and I would rather turn down a great work than refuse that which God has commanded." I hit send and never heard from that guy again. And that moment has given me great comfort ever since.

I tell you all that so I can tell you this: nothing in my life has brought more joy, peace, and growth than following the road God has chosen for me. Whenever I have sought after my own will, He has reminded me of His call and forced me to make a choice. Idleman noted that God consistently does this throughout scripture and in our own lives. He will not share us with any other lovers, and whatever we choose apart from Him, he will ensure that we must make a choice at some point. He did it in my life when I was seeking political power. He did it in my life when I wanted to give up on Boston and go back to PA but knew that doing so would ensure I fell right back into the same vices and idols I'd been chasing after before He started His intensive work in my life. He did it when I was pursuing a degree in Astrophysics and realized the only school I could reasonably apply to would be a two-hour drive one way and my wife and I came to the conclusion that if I was going to sacrifice my entire day between classes and commuting I better be certain that it is to pursue what God has for me. I do, as it turns out, drive two hours one way to school now during semesters when I'm enrolled in classes; but the degree I'm working toward is pastoral ministry with a minor in church planting.

When people ask me why I feel called to serve in full-time ministry I usually tell them that God has told us as much, and has confirmed that calling multiple times. What I don't mention as often is that He has also made it very clear that I don't belong anywhere else. Any time I go off and start trying to make my own plans and serve my own interest about things that I think will make me feel important and powerful and successful at forging my own path and saving the world because obviously I'm really equipped to be the savior of the world, He makes me choose. And each time, I have to stop and look at the door I'm trying to force open and be reminded of the one He's put my name on, and I have to let go.

And it gets easier. There are things I still struggle with and I'm sure there always will be, but they're diminishing and changing. As I have matured and grounded my joy on Christ more, I have found myself pushing off in my own direction less often. Because in the end, none of my attempts to make my life work by my rules ever brought me lasting joy or peace. Just look at the rest of the posts in this series and see a sampling of the pain I've endured and inflicted on others through my quest for self-fulfillment. When I serve me first, I can drift off into becoming a true monster, and it isn't worth it. Are you any different, really? Does your idolatry of self improve your life and soul and mind any more than mine has?

The Leader's Guide had us close the final session with Psalm 16, and while the whole psalm is worth consideration, I want to highlight two verses as I end my thoughts on this series.

Everything in this series has challenged us to seriously analyze our hearts and our lives to identify and tear down the idols we have erected, and replace them with the Lord God. This has not and will not be easy or comfortable to do; but it has been my experience, and I hope it has and will be yours, that the act of breaking idolatry is much better when we really, truly understand these verses. That not only in God is there fullness of joy and pleasures forever, but there is nothing truly good for us apart from Him. God will always make us choose, He loves us too much to be happy as our side piece; but when we recognize that we are choosing between true joy and poisoned pleasure, how much easier and satisfying it is to choose Him daily.

Our study through Kyle Idleman's Gods at War this week focused on money. Our discussion time was actually heavily distracted--the nature of the questions spawned a lot of rabbit trails--but there were a few things that came up in the video, questions, and discussion that are pretty important to remember.

One thing that came of the discussion was that nearly everyone in the room came from some degree of poverty. None of us are there now, but the stories of our childhoods had significant overlap in that way. And it seemed fairly clear to me that there had been a sense in some minds there that this sort of background inoculates people against the idol of money. Idleman noted in the video that this isn't actually true, but the narrator for the video told a story that focused on being at least briefly rich, and that raises the question: what does it look like when money is an idol? I mean, if it doesn't look like the rich person hoarding all their wealth (or at least, doesn't only look like that), then what is the common nature that is shared across demographic lines?

As Idleman has been saying throughout the series, the core issue is trusting in anything other than God to do what only God can fully do. It is trusting in anything other than God for our salvation, whether eternal or immediate. The idolatry of money looks like treating money as our functional purpose, our immediate savior, our great help in time of need. It looks like basing our identity on our net worth. My one friend back home, who lived in a lower-income part of town, showed this idolatry when he refused to let our friend from a nicer part of town enter his home for years because of what he assumed the higher class friend would think of him on seeing his house, just as surely as the 1% show it by flaunting their wealth.

It's so easy to fall prey to this one, far easier than we tend to acknowledge. After all, money goes a great distance in defining our daily lives. Study after study has shown that our income bracket has a direct impact on the economic and higher educational opportunities available to us, our access to healthcare, our mental state, our likelihood of crime and drug addiction (and the punishment when we're caught), and the quality of our public schools.* We are judged constantly on our income, inside and outside the church. I have been turned away from a preaching class hosted by my pastor because my two work incomes still weren't enough to get us off food stamps and I was deemed "worse than an unbeliever" and therefore unable to preach based on a particular, and I believe twisted, read of 1 Timothy 5:8. I've had disputes with people, Christians and non, about whether or not I was allowed to use those same food stamps to buy something nice for my family once in a while instead of just the bare minimum every meal. These are Christians defining their views on morality based on income (amusingly enough, these same Christians will condemn the prosperity gospel without ever apparently seeing the connection they have to it).

It's natural to want to avoid these things, we want to avoid being the ones who get judged and dismissed and ignored because of our socioeconomic class. I can tell you that living that life is not comfortable or enjoyable. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to give our families a better life, to oppose injustice, to engage with our culture in a different way. But what can happen is we can view the trials we face as being bigger than the God we claim to serve, and put the opinions of individuals and our culture above the view God has of us. And once we do this, once we allow ourselves to be defined by something other than our identity in Christ and rely on something other than God for our immediate salvation and hope, we have set up an idol.

Our self-examination on these issues needs to go beyond the obvious. We need to be willing to submit to actual scrutiny of our intentions, our desires, our hopes and fears. And whenever an idol is found hidden away in one of these corners, we need to have the humility to repent and hand its place over to God.

The third week of the study we're doing in Kyle Idleman's series, Gods at War, is titled "Love." It focused on the practice of putting other people into a position where you expect them to fulfill and complete you, to be the lover for you that God alone can be.

While the lesson was titled "Love," it really came down to significance and meaning. The video for the week, as well as many of the questions, leaned heavily on the way people use love and its trappings to find value and significance in their lives. Where last week's idol was built up by our desire to find comfort and peace in this life, this week feeds on the desire to give this life meaning.

But, as we discussed in the group and was touched on in the leader's guide, we don't search for love in just one way. All forms of love can fall subject to this idol. Family relationships, friendships, romantic partners, strictly sexual partners, and any other place where we seek to fill this need for companionship can fall into the trap of expecting the other party to define our lives and our worth. I can assure you I have even known people with a love for their pets that may have been idolatrous in this way.

Where the idols of pleasure are insidious because they seem to work, the idols of love are insidious because they don't. See, they don't fail us in a way that makes us realize they aren't worthy of our affections; rather, empowered by our culture's push for particular flavors of romance, they fail us in ways that make us feel like we are unworthy of them. We look within ourselves for the flaws, the thing that made this pursuit not work, and punish ourselves and change ourselves and do everything we can in our own power to make ourselves worthy of our idol's attention.

I've personally watched this play out. The type of idol I have historically struggled with the most as been self (which looks like it'll be covered in a later lesson), and before meeting my wife I was engaged to someone who very much seemed to, in retrospect, fall into making an idol of us, or me, or at least some aspect of our relationship. And those two idols worked together really, really well. There were things going on with her that I wanted to help her with, and because of my idol that meant I needed to fix them for her, and it often came off as though I needed to fix her. While her view of me meant that she kept striving to be good enough for me, to get that feeling of value and affirmation from me, and she could never quite do good enough to get it, so she would try harder and push herself farther and I'm seeing that these things are destructive and expressing my desire to see her not hurt herself and she's just hearing that she's failing even worse and this was just a constant downward spiral that almost destroyed us both.

The thing is, we don't have to prove our worth to God, He isn't going to put us into that same trap of striving to show ourselves good enough to warrant His love. He just pours it out, freely. Going to the cross while we were still His enemies. Calling out for us while we were not yet seeking Him. It's important to recognize this because the idols of love have twisted it and make us miss the real benefits of confession. Confession, when done in a Biblical manner, isn't part of an abusive relationship where we need to be constantly reminded of how inferior we are so we can be beaten down and twisted into a state of constant pain and self-abuse and attempts to prove ourselves. Even a healthy marriage has issues sometimes, and communication about those issues that cause friction so they can be addressed and handled in a healthy way is necessary; and this is a more accurate picture of confession. We are identifying the places in our relationship with God where we are experiencing friction and distance and clearing the air, not to prove we are unworthy and grovel for a taste of acceptance, but because we have already been accepted unconditionally. It is an act of walking forward together in openness and honesty. It is not a means of gaining access to a deeper love from God but a practice born out of an existing access to the fullness of His love.

Abusive, and manipulative, and controlling idols of love have given us a false understanding of what it means to talk candidly about the things that hinder our walk. And works-based salvation models have made this problem worse. But if we will be vulnerable, and honest, before our God and our fellow members of the body, we can experience the freedom and relief that comes from a truly confessional life; marked not by a seeking after meaning and value in love, but by a comfortable recognition of the value we already have to the One who loved us first.

I'm just gonna keep working though my thoughts on the Gods at War series by Kyle Idleman here as we continue it in our weekly LifeGroup.

This week we discussed idols that fall under the broad category of pleasure. Most of the discussion centered around sex and food, but we did branch out to other things as they came up. One of the issues we talked about was the danger in trying to solve one's idolatry on one's own power; if we have made an idol out of food, for instance, we may try to solve it by going on a diet and exercising. But if that's all we do it's very likely we'll just set the exercising routine up as a new idol. The post-workout endorphin rush can be just as effective a god in our lives as the one that comes from eating to cope. There's a lot that can be said about this, but it's also true of basically all of the forms of idolatry that will be discussed in the series, so this week I want to focus on something that came up that was specific to the topic at hand.

As we were discussing the ways that we can identify pleasure idols in our lives, I started to notice that the language we were using was largely the language of addiction. The study materials didn't, it should be noted. They used language of reliance, turning to pleasure for comfort and peace or making people suffer to get the pleasure being offered. It was our attempt to discuss that matter where addiction language began to arise, but it was apparent that we lacked any better words for the issues at hand and I think it possible this will arise elsewhere, as well. Now, it's been a while since I read the original book so I'm not sure if it was addressed there, but the question of "is addiction idolatry?" seemed like it needed to be asked, and it wasn't being asked in the leader's guide that accompanied the video series. So I went off-script for a moment and asked the group whether these were the same thing.

See, our church is located in a town that has been significantly impacted by the opioid crisis. There's also a state college in town, with youth who have been exposed to addictive substances in their first outing away from home, and a not-insignificant level of poverty which tends to exist in the same space as various addictions. Between our food pantry, general outreach, and a growing number of members who live in the city, we interact with addiction. As such it was important for us to get this issue down.

How we view addiction will define how we treat addicts, and how we treat addicts impacts our ability to be effective witnesses of God's love to our communities. If we operate from the assumption that it is a moral or theological failing, we have a habit of being harsh and, in many cases, demanding change before they are welcome in our churches and outreaches--an approach that is not done in love or justified in scripture. So there is value in understanding the secular studies that have shown a medical aspect to addiction; however, if we hold only to that, and write all of the related symptoms off as always being addiction, we will never be able to recognize idolatry when it arises. We must help those who need help, support those who need support, and tear down false gods; and we must do so in a manner that always glorifies God and points our communities to Him in love.

We ultimately came to the conclusion that pleasure idolatry and addiction are broadly overlapping issues that may or may not arise in the same person, even with the same substance or practice, but are nevertheless distinct. That we need to get to know people well enough to be in a position to recognize the difference between a physical placebo and a spiritual one. Both addiction and idolatry need to be addressed, but in different ways, but in the end only Christ can cure either. We must put Him, and His guidance, first in all that we do.

My wife and I host a LifeGroup for our church, basically a home-based Bible study aimed at building relationships and discipleship and our version of small groups. For this cycle of LifeGroups, we're doing a series from Kyle Idleman's book, Gods at War. It's a very good book, and a strong follow-up to us having done his book Not A Fan last cycle, and in peeking ahead to plan for the group I can say it shows promise for our goals in having the groups. The series, and the book, are about idolatry and the ways it sneaks into our lives in a variety of forms. We're accessing the videos through RightNow Media, if you would like to look into it yourself.

In the first session, the Leader's Guide has a section where it encourages us to talk about the nature of worship. The video describes idolatry in terms of worship, so it seemed suitable to define that term. The definition given was:

One of the things that came out of discussing that definition was that we found ourselves needing to redefine idolatry as having both an active and a passive form. This wasn't discussed in the video, at least not overtly, and wasn't mentioned in the guide, but I ended up feeling the need to suggest it as things in the conversation clicked together and then we all began to engage with it. So I wanted to take that concept and expand on it slightly.

It seems to be the default to think of idolatry as something we do. Whether we're thinking about it in overt forms, like literally bowing down to stone effigies, or in more covert forms like turning to something other than God for comfort and peace, the point is that we actively choose to perform some act of devotion that shows where our commitments lie.

Now, this is accurate. All of these things are idolatry (and I have, on more than one national holiday, gotten into some trouble for observing the ways in which this definition of idolatry seems to fit so well the way we treat our flag, and national anthem, and military/police, and nation, but that's something for another post), and should be recognized as such. We must acknowledge the ways that worship shapes our behavior and recognize where our gods are revealed. But I feel we don't always say clearly enough that idolatry is also passive.

In the video, Idleman explained that all sin is, at the heart, an expression of idolatry. That we sin because we, at least in the moment, place something else as more worthy of our worship than God. I submit that this is the basic concept behind passive idolatry; that idolatry isn't just an activity, but a filter by which we determine other aspects of our lives, including but not limited to behaviors. Let's look at two areas where idolatry-as-filter can be explained, with the understanding that they are not an exhaustive list of examples.

What lies at the root of our goals and alliances? What is it we are ultimately trying to accomplish? We have to dig deep here. Sure, our reason for having a given job is to make money in order to meet our needs in order to survive, but is that it? Does it go deeper than that? What is it we intend to do with that life, with that money, with that title? See, if we don't go any deeper, if we let the question end at "I have a job so I can survive," then either we are using our survival as the ultimate governing principle or we are not allowing us to see what our ultimate governing principle actually is. Either way, any 'ultimate governing principle' in our lives functions as a god. It is the end to which we will devote our energy, our time, our resources, our gifts. It will be the final deciding factor in what jobs we take, what we do in our off hours, and how we view all of it. What is the purpose of our politics? Is it enough to want our country to look a certain way? I talked to a lot of one-issue voters in the last Presidential election, whether that one issue was opposing Trump or supporting a pro-life appointment to the Supreme Court or whatever else, in no case did any of them tell me their one issue was facilitating the spread of the gospel. It is possible the gospel was an underlying reason for their support of that one issue, but many of those cases gave me some amount of reason to doubt they were thinking that far ahead. The question was, in every case, what are you willing to sacrifice in order to see your one issue reached? What are you willing to accept as long as it comes with the promise of that one issue? The election cycle and the years that followed, I believe, show that we are willing to lay quite a lot at the altar of achieving our political ends.

We may not always be acting in a manner that directly interacts with our idol. We may not even really be thinking about our idol in a given moment. But we will fashion our lives and words and alliances in a way that draws us ever closer to what we believe our idol demands of us. We will give our idol priority in our schedule, in our relationships, and in our decision-making process. And that, even if not active in that moment, is part of worship. We need to ask ourselves occasionally, what is our ultimate governing principle? And whatever we say it is, do our lives actually reflect that? Because if they don't, then we're misleading ourselves about what our principle actually is.

The things we hold as ideals can very quickly become absolutes. We may be well and good in liking, for example, the idea of a stable household with a husband and wife and a handful of obedient children who were all conceived in the context of that marriage, but once we start judging people, especially the value or moral standing of a person, on whether or not their home life meets that standard we have gone into idolatry. We have, in that moment, determined that the image we have of the perfect family is not only good, but the arbiter of goodness. We have made this thing a judge, and if our first reaction is that criteria, we have probably made it the supreme judge. And that title can belong to none other than a god.

To what do we give the right of judgment? What is it that we allow to measure the value of a human life? What is our standard of morality?

The point of all of this is that idolatry is a problem we can't just write off or fix with behavior modification. We need to go all the way down, to our core beliefs about the world, mankind, and ourselves and look for anything that isn't God. And when we find it, and I think all of us will sooner or later, we need to repent and remove that thing from a place only God can occupy and fight against giving that spot to anything but Him.