Who do you worship?
While many of us chose to leave arithmetic behind in high school, there is (at least) one fundamental truth that math teaches us about life:
In order to get better answers, you have to ask better questions.
For a mathematical problem, changing the approach to the question can help you better map out the path to the correct answer. In life, however, great questions come with more consequential results.
One of those significant questions is this:
Who do you worship?
Who or what dictates…
how you spend your money?
what you do first thing after waking up?
what you think about as you fall asleep at night?
how you treat others?
how you treat yourself?
As I spent the last academic year walking through the Biblical book of Acts with a college small group, I was drawn time and time again to the (necessary) focus on idolatry for the early Christian Church. Faced with overwhelming odds and intense scrutiny, Paul and other leaders went toe-to-toe with the idols of their day by making the bold proclamation that Jesus, a Palestinian Jew put to death by the state, was their resurrected Lord and the only God.
This declaration of Jesus as the one and only Lord and Savior turned the world upside down - and still does today. When we clear the throne of our hearts of everything else and place only Jesus at the center of lives, things cannot help but change. With our time, treasure, and talents focused on Jesus over anything else, our daily lives will be transformed.
But idols can alter your life too.
As Christopher J. H. Wright points out in The Mission of God and “Here Are Your Gods”, idols are nothing compared to the Biblical God, but they can hold sway over their followers. This is because whatever we place at the center of our lives will become what our lives revolve around. Our time, focus, and resources become governed by something/someone when we give it the central position in our lives.
Put differently, you become what you worship.
And that is why idolatry - both in the Bible and today - is so dangerous. We are molded into the image of whatever is the thing we think about most, spend the most time engaged in, and ingest the most content on.
While we may not live in the world of Paul where there is a temple for every idol, society today is still drenched in idolatry. From celebrity obsessions and political saviors and from social media to (il)legal drugs, our 21st century world provides a large array of attractive idols.
Things to comfort you. Things to fear. Things to build you up. Things to tear others down. Things to numb you. Things to excite you. Things to imitate love. Things to imitate intimacy. Things to manufacture meaning. Things to win attention.
From these idols we are promised the same things the devil dangled in front of Jesus in the wilderness in Matthew 4:
Provision
Protection
Power
And, simply put, we can find no long-lasting solutions to the brokenness of life apart from surrendering our need for provision, protection, and power to Jesus.
What are you being made in the image of?
Who do you worship?
These are foundational questions for our lives because the focus of our worship changes us. Using the solar system as a metaphor, the “gravity” of what we worship exerts an influence on all aspects of our lives. And if we have an unhealthy focus on modern-day idols - or a poor view of God - then we will feel the ripples throughout the rest of our lives. “What we think about God will determine what we think about everything else.” (World Upside Down)
It is important to ask deep and hard questions of ourselves and others as we journey with Jesus. And no question is more important than asking who/what is central to our lives. This type of question must not be simply answered in words, but wrestled with by reflecting on one’s daily actions. Your life is the evidence of who you worship.
For Christians, any form of idolatry is dangerous and detrimental to the world as a whole. We are called to show the world a different way of living and being.
The people of God either walk in the way of the Lord, or walk in the way of other gods. The Bible shows that God’s greatest problem is not just with the nations of the world, but with the people he has created and called to be the means of blessing the nations. And the biggest obstacle to fulfilling that mission is idolatry among God’s own people. For if we are called to bring the nations to worship the only true and living God, we fail miserably if we ourselves are running after the false gods of the people around us. (Cape Town Commitment, Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization)
What does this mean for you?
You are being formed. The question is into who? And by who/what?
You are being molded by what you spend the majority of your life around - media, friends, books, music. Be intentional on what is speaking into your life.
Your actions are a more accurate compass than your words or Insta bio as to what your true north is.
Intentionally or not, you are worshipping something with your life.
You can choose who you worship and what you serve.
May you truly uncover what your life revolves around and who you worship. May you ask better questions about your life and about the influences you surround yourself with.
And may you settle for nothing less than the life-transforming, world-upending worship of Jesus of Nazareth.
“You become what you worship.”
