Remembering God: Guarding Faith Against Forgetfulness and Idolatry

we need to be different on purpose. Be different on purpose. The Israelites, there was nothing about them that distinguished them from the culture around them. Instead of making sure they walked in God's ways and aligned themselves with God's covenant, God's promise, they became like the culture around them. They took on the culture and religion. They took on the Canaanite life. They failed to properly critique and compact and combat a godless culture. [01:01:05] (37 seconds)  #BeDifferentOnPurpose

It is said that the church is always one generation away from extinction. How many of you have heard that saying before? The church is always one generation away from extinction. And what it's pointing us to is that the church, the faith, the gospel is a gift that has been entrusted to us. It's been given to us not just to bless our lives, but to bless the generations after. And so we have to be faithful stewards of that to pass that down to the next generation and then the generation after them. [01:04:41] (35 seconds)  #PassTheFaithForward

Deuteronomy six does not tell you to go and hold Bible lectures to your family. It says model the faith. Teach the faith. Teach the faith in the ordinary concrete moments of life. That's where we learn real faith. That's where we learn wisdom. We allow the gospel. We allow God's word to impact our decision making, to impact our priorities. [01:08:35] (31 seconds)  #ModelFaithDaily

So this call to be in the world but not of the world, it's not just being a nonconformist for the sake of being a nonconformist. We are not conforming to the world because we are intentionally and actively conforming to who? Jesus. And God's word. It's not, well, I'm gonna be like me no matter what the world thinks about me. It's no. We wanna be like Jesus. No matter what the world thinks around us, no matter what my brokenness wants to do, we want to be like Jesus because in Jesus we can experience life. [01:03:45] (40 seconds)  #NotOfTheWorld

Tim Keller said this. He said, the greatest danger for us as Christians is not that we become atheists. In other words, we stop believing in the God of the Bible, but it's that we ask God, the God of scripture, to coexist with idols in our hearts. To coexist with idols in our hearts. I mean, think about it. We see it clearly in this passage, and we see it throughout the Bible that the human heart has the capacity to worship multiple gods at the same time, to have hearts full of idols. [00:55:18] (37 seconds)  #NoRoomForIdols

Yahweh says here, the God of scripture says his name is jealous. He's a jealous God. Jealousy is the flip side of love. Scripture compares our relationship with Yahweh over and over and over again as the relationship of spouses, of a husband to a wife. That there's supposed to be that intimacy in our relationship with God. There's supposed to be that commitment between us and God. So the opposite of love is not anger. We like to think that. That the opposite of love is anger, but that's not true. The opposite of love here is prostitution. [00:58:15] (45 seconds)  #JealousLove

Prostitution is a strong word. It has a well earned negative connotation. Essentially, they began sleeping around with other gods. They were selling themselves, not even to the highest bidder, but just to the next one that came along. They were in a covenant relationship with God, yet they were having multiple gods. In second Kings, it says, they followed worthless idols and themselves became worthless. They followed worthless fake idols, and they became worthless themselves. [00:53:38] (42 seconds)  #IdolatryDegrades

So what does it mean that they served the Baals or they worshiped the Baals? Well, don't imagine that Baal worship looked like this. That they came in, and there was a nice building, and they sat in pews, and everybody dressed in their Sunday dress and their coat and tie. And in between the call to worship and the first hymn, they shook hands and greeted one another. No. It was nothing like what we experienced here. Don't envision that. Instead, it involved extreme behavior. They had prostitution in the temple. They had human sacrifice. They were literally killing their own children to please these foreign gods. It was weird, dark, evil stuff, and the Israelites go all in on it. [00:54:19] (46 seconds)  #BaalWorshipExposed