idolatry part one: LORDSHIP YARNS

Welcome to part one of two posts about IDOLATRY! This entire post has been copied and pasted from a serious NOVEL that I wrote for my pal Kate on Facebook Messenger over a year ago now. I found it in my notes on my phone the other day and basically haven’t edited it at all (except for a couple of blatant spelling errors) so it’s going to be a bit of a different one! The side of idolatry we were talking about was lordship and surrendering parts of our lives to Christ, followed by next week’s post on temporary highs and ‘cracked cisterns.’

So I don't know where my actual notes on this are but let's have a cheeky lil yarn anyway yeh? So firstly what the frick is salvation? Well if you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord then you're saved right, but I'm sure we all know heaps of "Christians" who don't actually live this out. They genuinely believe that Christ died for their sins, but as James 2:19 says, even the demons believe this and they shudder in fear. The point is that you can have salvation and be born again as a Christian without actually having Jesus as the Lord of your life. Romans 12:2 instructs us not to conform to the pattern of this world but be TRANSFORMED by the renewal of our mind. So this transformation is the part that we call discipleship and lordship - we've accepted Jesus in but now we hand him the keys and say this is my life, do what you want with it, wreck it, have your way, all for your glory. Whoah. Like dude Christianity is so much more rugged than so many people believe, like we are literally called to lay down our lives and pick up our cross daily, not just attend church on Sunday and say prayers before bed every night. Okay that was a tangent, reigning it in. Back to surrendering it all to Christ.

So obviously we all have idols in our lives be it drinking or partying or our own imagination or whatever. I'm reading through Ezekiel at the moment and it is so flippin heavy, people just getting hardcore rebuked left right and center for these idols they are giving themselves away to. The thing is that us modern day Christians don't like the God of the old testament; we don't teach on repentance and fear of the Lord. Like God seems all judgement and despair until Jesus comes and we really just don't understand cause he seems like a bit of a dick, we don't GET his righteous anger and jealousy. It gets heaps clearer when we read the Bible through the lens of LOVE and the new covenant of Jesus Christ- that this judgement isn't on us any more, we're off the hook cause he payed the ransom for our sins.

So sweet, he saved us, we're good, but our problem is that we tend to stop there and don't think about what our response should be to this. The perfect law that he has written sets us FREE - but that doesn't mean we're meant to just take it for granted and get an easy ride up to heaven. I reckon if that is our outlook then we don't really understand what he did for us. We're not free to go out and destroy ourselves and commit idolatry against God, we're free to love Him and to love others. Loving him means obedience right, and obedience comes from fear of the Lord (it talks about that in Psalms of Proverbs or some jazz I can't remember right now).

Oh heck man I found it, Psalm 119 is pretty long but so flippin good! It talks about hiding his word in your heart so that you may not sin against him and your actions would reflect his decrees. When you think about it, the law for us isn't the law of Moses right, it's not the Levitical covenant that's all about rules and regulations. Those laws were written on stone tablets, not anyone's hearts. Which is the reason that the people could never measure up - the law was always just a mirror, to show Israel that they could not measure up to God's standards through works. God is so HOLY - so SET APART - and the law is for his people to be set apart too. He got his people out of Egypt, and now it was time to get Egypt, to get sin and idolatry, out of the people. That's why Leviticus gets so hung up on ceremonial cleanliness right, on purity, to set His people apart from the stain of sin.

Okay tangents keep happening but we're just sending it cause fricken yolo dude. So basically read all of Psalm 119 my whole takeout from it was the law = obedience = love = fear of the Lord = FREEDOM. And I'm not writing this cause I think you have an obedience problem or anything, but I reckon it really helped me to understand what it means to give God our everything, no distractions, and seek first his Kingdom in literally every circumstance. This dude Isaac on my outreach team would always share about how you can't expect to see God in your weekdays if you've only given him your Sundays. Thinking about that was so important for me to start being obedient and even just pay attention to God's voice in the little things. At the moment I've started just praying every morning saying hey God I commit this day into your hands, I give you my actions and my thoughts and my words and my heart for this day. Sometimes we think we've done this but it's so good to do every day cause God doesn't want to act on his own, he chooses to use us and partner with us and will never step in to our lives where he isn't invited. He handed us the keys back in the garden, but the deepest desire of his heart is for us to love him enough to hand those keys back to him.

It's like sometimes we lay something down, we give it up to God after recognising that it's become an idol in our lives. We hold the things of this world loosely - palms open, as an offering up to Him. Cause you know then if these things are not the highest for us and we give them to him, he will take them away and it will be for the better. But if these are things that are good for us, he will give them to us cause he's a good father. We gotta remember that nothing was ours in the first place - every good thing comes from him. You think about when parents give their kids money at Christmastime so little Timmy can buy a Christmas present for mummy. Like obviously that money came from mummy in the first place, and she could have just bought herself anything she wanted, but she loves Timmy and wanted it to be from him. God loves our crappy preschool pasta artwork and sticks it in the prime spot on his fridge. We can't give him anything of worth that he didn't already give us in the first place. Life is a gift and the GIVER IS GOOD!

So he gave us our lives right, gave them of himself because he sacrificed his son for us. So the good stuff or the bad stuff, healthy or not healthy, all he wants is for us to give back to him what is truly his. It's such a tiny thing compared to what he has done for us in his eternal perspective - but from our viewpoint it's only everything we have, our entire lives. He wants every little part of us. Dude that's so crazy - you are so DESIRED and so VALUABLE and WORTHY to the Father, to God, that he has called you and chosen YOU to be a part of the Church, the bride of Christ. He's our first love. For me it really puts a new view on the way I look at submission. When the Bible talks about wives submitting to their husbands and I get all like nuh uh UH gurl, but then you look at the selfless way Christ loved the church in laying down his Life, and then the way the church is called to honour and love Christ, and the way marriage is only a fraction of the intimacy and relationship that we have with God... dude I still don't know all my thoughts on this topic but it gets me thinking. Cause relationship is GIVING, right, not getting. He gave it all for us and now we give it all for him.

I feel like I haven't even started to talk about what you were thinking about with giving your distractions up to God and all that and I also feel like this whole thing has just been a super long rant that doesn’t belong on Facebook messenger but fricken yippekayay mate crikey dingoes.