Acts 19:23-41
The Gospel and Idols
So we continue to look at the book of Acts. One of the reasons we are doing that is because Acts shows us real and authentic Christianity. I’d say today to both Christians and skeptics of Christianity are both struggling a little bit to figure what is real Christianity. So often when I talk to skeptical person, usually when I talk to a person who is skeptical of Christianity, at some point they’ll say something like this, they’ll say, “I can’t be a Christian because I don’t believe XYZ,” and that gives me a chance to say, “I’m a Christian minister and I don’t believe XYZ either.” That’s not part of real Christianity. You have to know what real Christianity is if you’re going to reject it rightly. And you certainly have to know real Christianity is if you’re going to embrace it rightly. And therefore how do you decide that? Well, that’s a complex question and answer but, there’s no place that has, there’s nothing that has a great claim to the title, “Authentic Christianity,” then the Christianity we see in the book of Acts. That’s what we are looking at. And here we come in chapter 19 to a very unusual, in fact one of the most unusual of all the accounts in the book of Acts, I’ll tell you what some of those distinctives are in a bit, but it’s about idolatry. The riot at Ephesus is about Idolatry. And actually this has been a theme all along in the book of Acts, we haven’t really treated it in length and we are going to do it now. We haven’t treated it at length here in a while so we’re going to do it now. What we are going to learn here from this text is the pervasiveness of idols, the weakness and power together of idols, idols are powerful and weak, the prevalence of idols, the weakness and power of idols, and the cost of smashing idols. It always exacts a cost.
Prevalence of idols
First of all, something about the prevalence of idols. Look at this verse 26, Demetrius the silversmith, you’ve just read the passage or heard it read, Demetrius the silversmith is probably not someone who went to hear Paul. He was a maker of idols and he was very unhappy with Paul, that’s the whole idea, he’s unhappy with Christians but what’s interesting is he’s able to summarize something that Paul teaches. He says, “this fellow Paul,” verse 26, “he says that gods made by human hands are no gods at all.” Evidently, Paul must’ve been preaching this so often and so much that it had become a slogan that even his enemies had heard about it. In fact, if you look at it, as an epigram, it’s actually quite potent. If you make your own gods, they’re not gods! And it had been spreading around and people had been talking about it and it had a huge impact that it actually changed the economy. But what this must mean is, Paul always preached on idolatry, in fact, whenever he preached the gospel, he always preached the gospel as opposed to idols. And therefore, we can maybe push this a little bit and say, “I’m not sure if you fully grasp the gospel or the implications of the gospel until you see how the gospel is opposed to idolatry.” In Acts chapter 17, if you were here last week, we looked at Acts 17; this is the Athens, Mars Hill, the Areopagus, the cultural elites, now the leading intellectuals elites and philosophers and Paul had an opportunity to address them and if you look at his address, it essentially climaxes with a critique of idolatry. He says in verse 29 of chapter 17, “don’t think that God can be made through human design and skill.” So Paul never preached the gospel without preaching about idolatry and we shouldn’t either. And then you say, “wait, understandable objection, that was then, this is now, we don’t live in an Animistic, Polytheistic culture, we live in a secularized culture and people don’t have, people don’t believe in many gods anymore, they hardly believe in god! So why in the world would you say that we still need to preach about idolatry?” To say that shows, you’re somewhat naive with all due respect because if you say, “we don’t have to talk about idolatry today,” if you want to understand American culture, you couldn’t do better than read a book that was written some time ago but still very relevant by Robert Bellah and others called “Habits of the Heart.” And in it he say, he’s analyzing American culture and late modern American culture and in it he says, the heart of American culture is what he calls, “expressive individualism.” And when that is applied to religion, it means this: “that Americans feel that no one has the right to tell them who god is, no one has the right to tell them what they have to believe, they have the right to shape their own spirituality, their own faith, they have the right to worship the god that they like that they prefer.” In other words, Robert Bellah says, not in these words, at the very heart of American culture is the very thing that Paul says is wrong. You are not allowed to create your own God. Huh? “Don’t think that God is made through human design and skill,” and yet that’s the very essence of what we can consider, the right of an American, and so idolatry is at the very heart of American culture so please don’t say it’s relevant, it certainly is absolutely relevant. So then what is an idol? If it’s not necessarily bowing down to a statue or naming a god, “I worship this god or that god,” what is an idol? And we talked about this before but let’s say it now, and let’s spend some time thinking about it, it’s too important not to. You may believe in God, you may believe the bible, you may believe the Christian teaching, you may go to church all the time, but if there is anything more than God that is functionally more important to your happiness, your identity, your hope and your meaning, that is functionally your god. Idolatry is not doing bad things. Idolatry is taking good things and making them ultimate things. Idolatry is taking relative and created things and turning them into absolutes. The language of idolatry, if you recognize it in yourself, would be something like this: your heart says, “well, yes, you believe in God and all that, it’s very important, but if that have that, if you could achieve this, if you could only get to that, then (emphasis added) you’d really be somebody. Then you’d be happy, then you’d be safe, then everything would be okay.” Whatever that is, it’s more important than God to you; you love it more than God; it’s a greater source of happiness, identity, hope and meaning than it’s actually a god. What that means is all good things, especially the good things, see bad things, see people that talk about being addicted to drugs and alcohol is very, very bad but, and that’s a form of idolatry, certainly it is actually, because it is something that you are looking to instead of to God to help you face life, yes of course it is. But it’s a mistake to think that most idolatry is like that. The most powerful idols are good things we turn into ultimate things; so family is a very powerful idol; either your parents approval or your children doing well; career and money of course is; achievement; acclaim is; your looks or the looks of your partner; your moral record and your moral decency; any kind of romantic relationship; some political or social cause; your competence in skill. There’s all these things, they’re all good things but you see, when you go back to Ancient times and you read the book of Acts and you see a god in every corner, there was a sex god and a war god, there was a work god and a play god, everybody had a god, there was a god behind everything! There was an agricultural god and there was a financial god, and there was the god of the arts and the god of music and you say, “wow! Isn’t that weird, what superstitious people!” Don’t you understand? They understood something. They were overt about something that we are covert about. They were explicit and actually conscious about something that we are completely unconscious of. That any relationship, any activity, anything in this world can be turned into a kind of salvation, a kind of god, a kind of a source of our hope and meaning. And then what we are doing is we don’t call it that but we’re worshiping that. Some years ago I’ve read an article, it wasn’t written by a Christian or a religious person, it was just written by an observant person. This person had lived in Boston, New York, and Washington D.C. and this person said that “the god of Boston is knowledge and education. And the god of Washington D.C. is power and influence. But the god of New York City is money and if you don’t believe New York City worships the god of money,” he says, “I want you to realize, let me argue, here’s the evidence, every year, thousands of children are sacrificed. New York is one of places where they practice child sacrifice. Every year thousands of children, they’re best interests are sacrificed for money and career of their parents.” And it’s true because that’s what, that’s when you know that something is actually, you’re worshiping it, something has become god, become your master, become your spiritual master, when everything else even good things have to get ditched because “I’ve got to get that.” Yes, idolatry, idols are prevalent. Point one.
The Weakness and Power of Idols
Point two: idols according to the bible and you can see it even in this passage are a strange paradoxical mixture of weakness and emptiness and at the same time power. You can see the power. Paul is just preaching again idolatry and there’s a riot! And his life is hanging in the balance, and we’ll get back to that in a minute. And the point it, just by pushing against idolatry, look at the violent response. And the simple fact is, if you try to take something away from somebody that’s a good thing, they’ll be sad, or maybe mad but if you try to take something from somebody and it’s an ultimate thing, it’s their meaning in life, it’s their very sense that they, it’s the thing that gives them hope and safety, they’ll go ballistic. They won’t just be sad, they won’t just be grumpy, they’ll go ballistic and that’s what you see here. So in that sense, idols have a great deal of power. They control the people who worship them and what they do is they, if you push back on them, they push back, sometimes violently. They have a great deal of power! A great deal. On the other hand, the bible, it seems paradoxical, there’s some place where the bible talks about idols and false gods as very powerful, other times as nothing, as empty, as powerless. Now that actually comes out here in this passage I just told you this is one of the, it’s a unique account, Acts is a series of historical accounts of things that happened to Peter and things that happened to Paul but do you notice that the ending of this incident, which is very dramatic and interesting, it doesn’t end with a speech by Paul. It doesn’t end with a speech or sermon by Paul or Peter or any Christian. It ends with the kind of speech by the city clerk which is very unusual in the book of Acts, that’s unique. Most commentators say that therefore, this speech is probably more interesting than it looks because when you first read every time I used to read it over the years I would read it, it was sort of like, “okay, it was a pragmatic argument: ‘hey watch out, we may be arrested’,” and everybody went home. Okay, so, the moral of the story is what? But actually, most commentators across the spectrum say it's very cagey of Luke to keep this in here and show us this and that’s because what this city clerk is saying is essentially this: “you say that these guys are disrupting the social order but you’re the ones disrupting the social order.” See that you’re saying, “these people over here, because they are undermining idol worship, you’re disrupting the social order but actually, you’re the one who are disrupting the social order because the Romans could come down on us. They could declare martial law, this is a riot, you don’t have any good reason for it!” And so what he’s actually saying is, “you say idols is the basis of our social order but actually, it’s the idolatry and the violence of the idolaters that’s disrupting the social order,” and this is actually a narrative version of something you’ll see all through the bible which is, “idols never give you what they promise.” They actually give you the opposite. They won’t give you social order, they’ll give you the opposite. They won’t give you happiness, they won’t give you love, they won’t give you self-esteem, they will always give you the opposite. So let me give you a couple of examples. In earlier this year, on the New York Times blog, not in the, I think it was the opinionator blog, it wasn’t in the printed version, there was a man named Benjamin Nugent who wrote. He was a writer, creative writer, and he wrote a very interesting column on what he called “monomania,” “monomania.” Now let me just read you what he says, he says, he basically says that for a big part of his life like a lot of young people, he wanted to be a writer and that was the only thing he wanted, he wanted to be a good writer, he wanted to have his stuff have an impact, he wanted to write beautiful stuff, great stuff and he began to realize that he was shooting himself in the foot. Here’s what he says: “When good writing was my only goal, I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth. For this reason, I wasn’t able to read my own writing well. I couldn’t tell whether something I had just written was good or bad, because I needed it to be good in order to feel sane. I lost the ability to cheerfully interrogate how much I liked what I had written, to see what was actually on the page rather than what I wanted to see or what I feared to see.” See what he is saying? In other he said this, I’ll go on in a minute, but what he’s saying is, when the main thing in his life, when he made writing the main thing, “the quality of my work the measure of my worth.” It actually destroyed his ability to write well because he couldn’t really tell whether what he’s done was good or bad; he didn’t have the distance because he had to be good, why? He was in the grip of an idol. The idol was, this, if you become a successful writer, then you’ll know you’re okay. Then you’ll be able to really be sure that you’re a person of value which meant if I’m not a good writer, I lose everything, it’s not just “oh, I’m sad, I’m not a good writer,” it’s like, “ahh!” End of the world! And he went and he said, it’s interesting as a writer, he noticed that writers, the 18th, 19th, the earlier, writers of the past couple of centuries were much better at describing what he called, “monomania.” He says, “writers of the 19th century wrote deathless novels about monomania.” So for example he talks about captain Ahab and Moby Dick and the fact that he had a, that the whale had beaten him and now he had no self-esteem and now he was going to get his honor back, you know, by finding that white whale. Then he talked about Victor Frankenstein who knew that if he just scientifically unlock the secret of life, then he knows, and Benjamin Nugents says all in the same column, he says, “[but] Frankenstein’s creature opens its eyes, Frankenstein is repulsed and runs away. Ahab’s confrontation with his whale does not restore his self-esteem.” So what Nugent calls “monomania” is what the bible calls idolatry, it’s the same thing. It’s the very same thing. It always fails to give you what it says it’s going to give you, it gives you the opposite. Anything, you make more important than God will do that. Anything! Another, also, wrote in The New York Times, earlier this year, this was in the printed edition, she had been, she had made, she was CFO of a major investment bank at one point, she was really at the top of the field and she wrote an article called, “Is There Life After Work?” And she dealt with what she considered the main, one of the main New York City myths and one of the main city myths is this, “you work like a dog to make money for a while.” You spend a number of years, you work like a dog, you get up and make your money and everything else is put second and you work, and you work, and you work, and then you kick back, and you got the money to kind of live the way you want in the last two-thirds or half of your life, you know, you’re able to do what you want, and she says, “what a lie that was.” Because she was successful, why? Because she worked like a dog but why? She says, inevitably, when she tried to leave, when she left her job, she did leave her job, “it devastated me. I couldn’t just rally and move on. I did not know how to value who I was versus what I did…[because] What I did was who I was.” Work she thought was her servant, it actually had become her god. She couldn’t feel good about herself unless she was being incredibly busy. She couldn’t stop. She didn’t know who she was. The idols, always, always, do that to you. Now, why did we say, and this is the main thing that I’m trying to get across to everybody here, why does Paul talk about idolatry all the time when he’s preaching the gospel? I would like to submit to everybody that, yes, the gospel is that Jesus died for your sins and if you believe in him, you have a right relationship with God but unless you contrast that with idolatry, I think Paul is telling us, I think the bible is telling us, I’m telling you that you don’t fully understand all the depth, implications of the gospel. The gospel is that you are saved, you are forgiven, you are justified not by anything you do but by what Jesus Christ has done for you, in your place, death and resurrection, right? That’s the gospel. But, everyone, everyone, everyone, whether religious or secular, everyone is trying to, even though they don’t use the term, be saved, be forgiven, be justified, through something they are doing! Now the classic opposition to the gospel, the classic opposition to the gospel are people who think that by being very moral and very religious, God will bless me, he will answer my prayers, he’ll do everything I want… See that’s the classic opposition of the gospel, it’s called “pharisaism,” moralists, it’s becoming very religious. And many people discovered the gospel after a life of being moral and religious wasn’t getting them anywhere. They left inadequate, they felt angry, they felt anxious, they were always angry at people, they could tell if they were bigoted, what was going on here? “Where is the peace and joy that I’m supposed to have?” Then they became to, “wait, wait, wait,” this is what Charles Spurgeon learned years ago, the day he became a Christian, he said, “I wanted to do 50 things for God in order to be saved and now I realize that I just had to look. I just had to believe, I had to receive the salvation.” Okay so many understand the opposite of the gospel, is trying to be really good, religious, and moral but do you realize, even if you are a secular person, you don’t think yourself is religious at all. Through idolatry, you’re trying to do the same thing, you’re trying to justify yourself, you’re trying to save yourself, you’re trying to get forgiveness, you just don’t use those terms. And that’s also opposed to the gospel. Every bit as much as the religious people. So for example, nobody had said this better to me than Ernest Becker who wrote a book that pretty much forgotten today, in the 1970s but it won the Pulitzer Prize called the “Denial of Death,” and in there, Becker who is not a Christian, not a believer in God at all, Ernest Becker said, now that we don’t believe in God, now there’s always smart people who don’t believe in God, he says, “what are we going to do?” Because in the past, we always felt like you have to live for something, you have to have a sense of being, heroic, that you’re life meant something, you know, we don’t want to just to hear “that life is hard then you die then you rot and that’s it,” we need to feel that’s there’s something important about us and so he says, “we are investing (today in our secular world), things like work and money and sex and romance, with the same kind of spiritual significance that people used to give only to God and faith.” So he gives one example which is romance, modern romance. Which, he says, is completely out of control. He says this: we still need to know that our life matters in the grand scheme of things. But if we no longer have God, how are we going to do this? One way is the romantic solution…the love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one’s life. So all of our spiritual and moral needs that we have, which used to be focused on God becomes focused on the individual.” What is it that we want when we elevate the love partner into that position? He writes, “we want to be rid of our faults, we want to be rid of our feeling of nothingness, we want to be justified, we want to know that our existence has not been in vain, we want redemption, nothing less. Needless to say, romantic love cannot give you that.” And you know, if there’s anybody in your life, romantic or not, anybody in your life that you love more than God or whose love you rely on more than God’s love, he goes on and says, that person, “you will crush that person under your expectations and they will crush you under their imperfections.” See you need, just like Benjamin Nugent said, “when I live for writing, I needed my writing to always be good and it just killed me.” Well, when you need somebody, to always be loving you, to feel okay, you’ll kill them with your expectations and they’ll kill you with their imperfections. Idols are empty and yet they are incredibly powerful! They totally control you and yet they give you nothing! They give you nothing! I remember some years ago I talked to a professional athlete. He’s very, very well, he had deep self understanding but he was in trouble. He had belonged to christian churches all his life, he had brought up in born again christian circles, he was really a devout christian, I think he was a christian, sure, but when he was a professional sports athlete, he made the top, he was actually pretty well known, and then because of injury, he had to retire and he went into a spiral, he went into despondency, depression, alcohol and drug-addiction, I remember him saying to me, he said, “you know what, all my life, I always said, ‘oh I believe in God,’ but God was out here in the periphery, here in the center of my life, was my athleticism, my athletic ability, and the glory I got from it, that’s really what turned my crank, that’s really what I lived for and I’m just, if I don’t get God in here now, because this is gone, this is gone, if I don’t get God in here, I’m not going to make it,” he was absolutely right. He was a christian but he was in the grip of the idol. In the grip of the idol. Because, see, an idol is a god and that god makes a covenant with you, if you’re a great writer, then you’ll be okay, if you’re a football, all pro, hall-of-fame, then you’re okay, if you’re children love you, turn out fine, then you’re okay, you know the idol, and if you fail it, if you fail it, it will just punish you. It is merciless. I’ve had people, one more example, a trouble with this subject is I have a lot of stories. I remember some years ago talking to a woman who aspired to be a great concert violinist and parents really wanted her and put a lot of money into her lessons and so on and she really hadn’t done a good, she hadn’t done well, and she was so discouraged, so depressed, and so upset, in fact, she was in and out of a mental institutions and at one point, we were talking about it and she says, “you know my parents forgave me, they said, ‘look, if you didn’t make it, that’s fine, we love you, you’re our daughter, my parents forgave me, I know God forgives me and I’ve asked forgiveness but I can’t forgive myself.” And then you say, you’re so wrong, that wasn’t the problem. See she has made a covenant with her parents approval, not even her parents, and parental approval, in other words, “here what I always wanted from you, and you didn’t make it,” it was just punishing her, it was driving her into the ground. Until God’s opinion was more important than her parents. Until God’s love was more important than that. She was a slave and therefore, not only her idols pervasive but they are both powerful at the same time empty.
The cost of smashing idols
Point three. The only way to destroy and smash idols is to do so at a cost. The third thing the bible tells us is, and what we see here is, there is no way to destroy idols except that they exact a cost. What is so intriguing here is Paul is just about, almost killed because he opposed the idols. Paul wanted to appear before the crowd but the disciples would not let him. Even some of the officials of the province, friends of Pauls sent him a message begging him not to venture into the theater. He would’ve been torn to pieces! That’s the rage that idolatry had stirred their idol-worshippers into, see? And therefore, if you, there’s no way to oppose idols except it exacts a cost. I remember when I was a pastor in my church in Virginia, a little town in Virginia, there was a young man whose funeral I never forgot. He was a young guy about 20 years old and he had a girlfriend. She met the world to him and she started to say, “I think, we need to break up, I’m not sure if I want to be together with you anymore,” he was freaking out, he was going ballistic because, see, deep in his heart, he believed what “The Righteous Brothers” said, in that song, “without you baby what good am I?” You’re right, and one night, they were driving home to her house and she said, “this is the last time we’re getting together, it’s over,” and he was weeping and so on, and she got out of the car, went into her house, closed the door and he went up to the house, I remember the porches pretty well, he went onto the porch, knocked and she wouldn’t open up and he says, “if you don’t open up, if you don’t resume our relationship, I’m going to kill myself right here on the porch.” She didn’t open the door and he walked back to his car, he got a revolver out of the car and back to the porch, blew his brains out, right there. And I did the funeral, I remember it pretty well. What happened? His idol ate him. Why do you think the bible talks “about principalities and powers”? They’re not just psychological because you got a soul. You’re not just neurochemistry, no matter what “The New York Times” tells you. You’ve got a soul and that means that idols are not just psychological factors, they are spiritual forces behind that. There are evil forces behind that. And the bible talks about idols and demons; principalities and powers! They are, and it’s very difficult to fight them! Very difficult. When he tried to fight as it were, it ate him. It ate him. It ate him. But it’s also true if you try to oppose somebody else’s idols, they can eat you too, btw. I knew, years ago, there was a cop in a big city police force, and he told me one of the problems, well, one of the reasons he had to leave where he was that it was typical that the pimps in the particular region would go into the precinct and pimps would bring money in and say, stay away from my girls on “such and such” corner, “look the other way” and they would pass the money around and say, “look the other way,” on this corner and he wouldn’t take the money. Somebody came along to him, one of his friends and said, “why aren’t you taking that money?” “This is, I don’t think it’s right, it’s wrong,” “if you don’t start taking that money, I can’t answer it for you.” He wasn’t doing anything! He wasn’t doing anything! And yet by not going along, there was going to be payback. Idols are absolutely destructive and therefore there’s a cost. So how do we smash the idols? Paul, listen, here’s the answer: Luke wrote two books, he wrote the book of Acts and the book of Luke. Here in Acts, we have a situation in which Paul is almost put to death by a crowd that is furious because of the powers and principalities that control them. By the end of the book of Luke, there was another person, Jesus Christ, who was killed by a crowd that yelled, “crucify him” and the power and principalities were behind it and yet, we’re told “the world, the flesh, and the devil” brought all their forces on Jesus Christ who went to the cross, he bowed, you might say, his head into that storm, and yet he defeated them. It says in Colossians 2:15, “he disarms the powers and the authorities, principalities, he made a public spectacle of them on the cross, triumphing over them.” Now how did he do it? I’ll tell you how he did it. He paid the cost for our idolatry. There’s always a cost and usually it’s more of the cost than we can possibly pay but he bore it. There was a, some years ago I read a book by two Jewish philosophers just called, “Idolatry,” and it was the study of the idea of idolatry. It was a Harvard University press book, very academically rigorous, very scholarly, but one of the things that they did in studying the various parts of the bible of the Old Testament that talked about idolatry, they said, “one thing that was very odd to them was this place where in the Old Testament, where the prophets liken idolatry to spiritual adultery.” See, in the Old Testament, God says to Israel, “I am your husband and you are my bride. And so the prophets said that when Israel would turn to other gods, it was like a woman who is married, a wife turning to other men. And so there many places where God says to Israel, “You are playing the adulterous! That when you put yourself into the arms of the other gods, you are being unfaithful to me, your true spouse.” You see that, so idolatry is always seen in the Old Testament under the metaphor of spiritual adultery. But the scholar said, one of the things they couldn’t understand was especially in Hosea, but even in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, God says to Israel, “because of your adultery, I’m going to divorce you but I’m going to bring you back.” “I’m going to divorce you but I’m going to bring you back.” And they said, well, that doesn’t make any sense because as you know, in the Old Testament, the penalty for adultery is not divorce, what is it? It’s death. And so they said, well, it doesn’t really quite work, it seems like God is actually violating his own rules in the Old Testament. If a human woman, or a man actually committed adultery, a penalty was death, and here’s God saying, “you committed adultery, but I’m just going to divorce you and bring you back.” And they said, “I don’t get that,” so they said, I guess they said, “the metaphor breaks down.” “No metaphor is perfect.” “Metaphor breaks down.” Aww, but if you are a Christian reading from the vantage point of the New Testament, you know the metaphor did not break down. Jesus Christ our true husband came to earth and went to the cross and he died in our place. He bore the cost of our idolatry. He died in our place and he paid the penalty, took our punishment so that He can both judge evil some day and yet in the same time have us in His arms. He can end evil without ending us because we are forgiven! He did it, he bore the cost! Now, it’s not enough for you just to say, “well that was very interesting, I like how Tim gets to Jesus at the end, that’s all very helpful, he ties it all up really nicely.” But here’s your problem, your problem is if anybody in this room has any self knowledge, you seen something of yourself and what we’ve talked about here, haven’t you? What are you going to do about it? And I don’t want you to go the Greek Stoic way. See the Greek Stoic way was, they understood that if you attach your heart too much to something and it creates all these enslavements and addiction, so what they said is detached your heart from everything. No, no, you do not need to love things less, you don’t need to love your career less, the people around you less, you need to love God more in proportion to them! That’s what you need to do, how do you do that? You can’t just go home and say, “okay I’m gonna love God more,” that’s abstract, no, here’s what you have to do: you have to look at Jesus dying for you. David Martyn Lloyd Jones years ago told a story that I’ve never forgot, it was one of I’ve listen to in a sermon recording, he says, “the problem with marriage,” marriage is a huge problem, you know what? Because if you have a bad marriage, it’s just like a running wound but if you have a great marriage there is the problem of idolatry and that person becomes the most important person in your life, really more important than God functionally, and he said, “now here’s the problem,” he says, “if you have a real God, a true God and savior, that God and Savior must always be present with you when your heart is breaking.” And he says, “if you’re married one of you, and you have a happy marriage, one of you or the other of you is going to see the other person in a coffin, and if that person is the most important person in you life, how will he or she will help you when your heart is breaking?” You need to see Jesus laying in the tomb for you. You need to see him dying for you. You need to sense that, rejoice in that, recognize that, be melted by that, until your heart goes out to God and it raises your love, so that money just becomes money and people just become people though they are wonderful people, they are the greatest people they are just people, they are not saviors - and then your world will be turned upside down. Then you’ll be free. Let us pray.
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