Where’s your heart at? I have been blogging a bit about what we have been going through with our City Group the last couple weeks and this past week we looked at “Idolatry – The Sin Beneath The Sin.” I was excited to see what God did and is doing among us as we have delved deeper to see why we worship certain things in our lives rather than Him. Tim Keller always stresses Christocentric preaching and this small group series has definitely been Christocentric and gospel-centered.

Idolatry is a huge issue among us humans. We were made to worship. In the very beginning God made man in His own image and man was to worship God and have dominion over the earth. But in Genesis 3 things changed. We decided we had a better plan for our lives than God did and that forever changed the way we lived.

So we all have this inclination to worship someone or something, but being born sinners our objects of worship are usually anything and everything but God. You see, idols don’t necessarily always have to be bad things, they can be good. Pastor Mark Driscoll has said before to “be careful not to worship a good thing as a god thing for that is a bad thing.” We can make family into an idol, money, careers, sex, recreation, and anything else we can think of. It isn’t hard because we were made to worship and if God isn’t in the preeminent place that He should be in our lives, something else will take His place.

So how are we to deal with this problem?

Go deeper into the gospel.

That can’t be it, can it? Whenever we can identify an idol in our lives we try to get rid of it by either focusing more on that idol to take care of it or by looking deeper into ourselves for the answer. A lot of times we do need to look deeper into ourselves to find the root, but that is not where we find the solution to our problem.

The gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ’s finished work on the cross; His death, burial, and resurrection and how that brings us back into a right relationship with God. That is good news because without Christ we are hopeless. This gospel or good news is outside of us. It is a proclamation of something that has been accomplished for us in history.

So if we look at what Christ has already accomplished for us and keep reminding and preaching the gospel to ourselves, we will not be “navel-gazing” or continuing to look at our idols or into ourselves, but to the cross. The more we do this, the more we are impacted by what was accomplished there for us and the more we will be gripped and captivated by our Savior. And guess what? When that happens He takes that ultimate place in our hearts and the idols just fall away.

There is power in the gospel, don’t be so quick to think you “got it down” or to move from it. Where’s your heart at?