Idols are not your friends

When I read this I knew I had to post it right away. The observations below by Justin Buzzard are well said and absolutely critical for the Christian believer to understand and act upon:

Everyone has to live for something and if that something isn’t the one true God, it will be a false God–an idol.

An idol is anything more important to you than God. Therefore, you can turn even very good things into idols. You can turn a good thing like family, success, acceptance, money, your plans, etc. into a God thing–into something you worship and place at the center of your life.

This is what sin is. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything (even a good thing) more than God.

Do you know the idols you’re prone to worship? At our church we talk about 4 root idols that we tend to attach our lives to.

CONTROL. You know you have a control idol if your greatest nightmare is uncertainty.

APPROVAL. You know you have an approval idol if your greatest nightmare is rejection.

COMFORT. You know you have a comfort idol if your greatest nightmare is stress/demands.

POWER. You know you have a power idol if your greatest nightmare is humiliation.

Read the whole thing.

Resurrection Sunday: Two must-reads

Two of my favorite writers have posted exceptional essays about the events surrounding the Resurrection:

Russell Moore:

How the Resurrection Undoes Our Need to Be Proven Right

“If you had been there to pull open his bruised eyelids, matted there together with mottled blood, you would have looked into blank holes. If you had lifted his arm, you would have felt no resistance. You would have heard only the thud as it hit the table when you let it go. You might have walked away from that morbid scene muttering to yourself, “The wages of sin is death.

But sometime before dawn on Sunday morning, a spike-torn hand twitched. A blood-crusted eyelid opened. The breath of God came blowing down into that cave, and a new creation flashed into reality.”

Thabiti Anyabwile:

Why Do You Look For The Living Among the Dead?

“Because Jesus was raised from the dead and keeps our inheritance in heaven by His power—He puts our joy safely beyond the reach of all our enemies, including the enemy of death.”

I couldn’t do my friends a better service than to point them to these two articles.