Weekly Theme April 27 through May 3

God’s at War

 “Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony,

slander. These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.”

- Matthew 15:17-20

When we encounter our sin it feels like we are just not operating the way God wants us to, it is so very hard to change.  In fact, it is so hard to change that we rarely want to talk about sin. We want to say, “I don’t want to think about my sin because it is so hard to get rid of, I just want to skip ahead to the grace part. This is true. It is through the grace of God in Jesus Christ that we can overcome sin in our lives, but too often we are treating the symptoms of sin and not the cause.  Now, what do I mean. The sins we often notice in our lives are usually caused by idols.

Kyle Idleman recently wrote a book, in which this sermon series is based, called God’s of War. In it he posits that Idolatry is not just a sin it is the sin. This thought occurred to him while he was teaching his daughters about the Ten Commandments. He began to ask his daughters which commandments they thought they had broken. They discussed anger, murder and honoring your father and mother. But the little girl told her dad the one she knew she had not broken was making an idol. He thought to himself, as we do, how it seems so easy to say we do not make idols. We can easily say that we do not have a ten foot golden calf in our living room. But, an idol is so much more than this. An idol is anything that we turn to or follow rather than following after God. If we take any sin that we commit and trace it back, we will find an idol at the core of it.