Good morning!
Welcome to your morning coffee! May our Heavenly Father reveal us to ourselves today. Father, we are so quick to functionally forget you in our everyday lives. Call us to repentance, Father. Convict us of our sins and call us back to your side. We need your help to wage war against our fallen flesh and the idols that arise from out of our sin-broken, wellspring-hearts. Help us guard our hearts. Help us to take every thought captive in and for your Son Jesus. In Jesus's name help us to more fully and practically entrust ourselves to you, your character and power, that we might better obey your Will and share in your joy. We love you Father! Amen. Amen. Amen.
Your Morning Song: "Your Name is Power" by Rend Collective
Your Morning Scripture: Exodus 32:1-4
When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”
Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”
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Have you ever been like me? Have you ever read about the sin and foolishness of the people in the Bible and thought to yourself, "Well I would never do that?"
How could these people say this about God? He had performed miracle after miracle in Egypt and from out of Egypt through the sea split in two. God had proved Himself over and over and over. And not only to them, but to Aaron as well. Sometimes I feel like my walk with God would be easier, that I would be a better Christian if He would speak to me out loud, if He would appears to me (on my terms), if He would do crazy wild miracles. How could these foolish Hebrews so easily and so quickly abandon God?
But as I get older I know that this isn't true. I am just as broken and fallible and weak as anyone in the Bible. And I am infinitely capable of all of the sins in the Bible.
Instead of judging these people, I am convicted by the shadow of my own sins that I see cast out through their sins. They turned their backs on God and made an idol that they could control and please their own impatient pride.
Can any of us honestly claim that we've never done that? How many of us "amen!" on Sunday morning and then get back to worshiping our golden calves by the afternoon? You don't? Are you sure? I certainly do. And I repent, and I struggle, and I fight against my own desire to be my own God.
But in my guarded heart I am still an idolater. And so are you. What a hopeless bunch we are. Our marriage. Our children. Our church. Our job. Our house. Our car. Our business. We are master idolaters. There is nothing we can't make into an idol.
Even God Himself. When we make church our building instead of Christ's body. When music choice is enough to make you leave. When preference and tradition replace the Gospel. When cultural superstition and dusty Bibles replaces sound doctrine and obedient living. When our way replaces God's waiting. When "my will" replaces "thy will." The depths of our depravity knows no bounds.
We are daily in desperate need of Jesus. When we deny this, we are no different than these people and their golden calf, for our need never changes, only how we respond to it. Only Jesus, only our Heavenly Father, only the Holy Spirit, only God is worthy of worship. We have never been. We are not. We will never be.
What are your golden calves? What idols have you embraced? What idols have you struggled with? Christ died that you would be free from them. And even now, brothers and sisters, their eternal grip is gone. What in our lives do we love too much? What in our lives do we functionally/effectively worship? Do we even interact with God on His terms? Or on our own do we make of even Him an idol?
May we live for God, on His terms, obedient to His ways. And may we be a people known for our struggle with our own hearts and minds to deny ourselves. May we be a people known for picking up our crosses and walking with Jesus.
May we be known for our sincere, obedient, desperate, self-denying love for Jesus.
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