the weekly sermon podcast of The Grove Church – a diverse Presbyterian community in the heart of the Hickory Grove neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina
This Sunday, we smash our last idol: control. None of us have it anyway, so it’s long past time to stop worshiping it. And we learn how to worship what gives us life: grace. It’s even more than you thought.
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We prayed and plotted out this Smashing Idols worship series months ago, asking the Holy Spirit to give us wisdom and direction. And, how amazing is it that God led us to decide that on March 22, 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting public health and economic fallout, we would explore Fear and the false god that it is—how it steals and imprisons us and how we can break its power in our life.
Listen in to be encouraged as we keep moving, despite our fears, into God’s calling for us in this season.
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Greed is probably our favorite idol to redefine. We agree that greed for other people is a problem. But for us? Well, we just put another label on it and re-frame the situation as if it is good for us to have the blessings we do, regardless of how it impacts someone else. But greed is more than consuming or saving . Greed is the assumption that everything — including every blessing — is for our own personal benefit and advantage.
That’s what makes greed an idol: the fact that we find security in it. And if there’s anything we’ve learned over the last week of crisis dealing with COVID-19, it’s that our storehouses of anything material are not truly secure.
So what do we do in response? We invite the Holy Spirit to smash an idol we have been grasping on to so that God can replace it with something better. Listen in to learn how.
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“Love people and use things,” the old saying goes, “because the opposite never works.” Still, we constantly find ourselves doing the opposite—loving things and using people. Anytime we treat a person like an object, even if only in our thoughts, we destroy a little piece of our own humanity. We hide it, we rationalize it, we normalize it—but Jesus isn’t having it.
So, listen in as we talk about the way Jesus defines lust, as opposed to what The Church or culture says it is.
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This Sunday, the first in the holy season of Lent, we begin a new worship series called “Smashing Idols.” You may be thinking—when is the last time anybody saw an idol? I promise you, they’re hidden in plain sight.
An idol is anything we put our trust in other than God—and, these days—our idols aren’t statues that we bow down before. Honestly, they are the sins we’ve normalized and enshrined in our personalities. This Sunday, we’re starting with the biggest idol of all—pride.
It’s pride that led the first humans to turning away from God in the garden, and it’s pride that blinds us to our own sinfulness. The good news, though, is that Jesus teaches us what it is like to come face-to-face with the enemy and to be tempted towards and yet turn down the spiritual snare of pride.
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