“You shall have no other gods before me.  You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.” -God speaking in Exodus 20:3-4

“Now fear the LORD and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshiped beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD.  But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.” -Joshua challenging the Israelites in Joshua 24:14-15

Elijah went before the people and said, “How long will you waver between two opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.”   But the people said nothing.   -Elijah confronting the Israelites in 1 Kings 18:21

“No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” -Jesus teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:24a

“What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: “I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.” -Paul, to the believers in Corinth, 2 Corinthians 6:15-16

“You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.  Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.” -James addressing immature believers in James 4:4,7-10

Pretty straight-ahead message today as you follow in the way of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I’ve been given lots of opportunities lately to think about the difficulties that Christians in the United States face as they attempt to imitate and be conformed to the likeness of their Savior.  My next few entries will probably attempt to point out some of these difficulties, in an effort I hope will shine some clarifying light on your own struggles to be a disciple.

I’d like to begin with a question:  who is the master of your universe?

If you believe poets like William Ernest Henley, we are the “captains of our own souls“–we build with our hands, we live, we direct, and ultimately, we are our own masters.  That humanist sentiment is found nearly everywhere in our culture. It is present in concepts like the American sense of ‘rugged individualism’ or the “Protestant work ethic.”  The American Dream is at least partially built on the premise that we can achieve it by the work of our own two hands.   In music, we see it in songs across many genres.  The most obvious example that came to me as I considered this was the Garth Brooks track, “The River,” in which Brooks sings several times that he will “sail his vessel,” even while claiming during the bridge that good Lord is his captain.    Apparently, the songwriters conception of the captain of a ship doesn’t extend to the captain actually guiding the ship anywhere.  There is perhaps no where in American life where this sentiment is more obvious than our tendency as a culture to separate our public and private lives.  Our relativism and pluralism have led us to the place where speaking beliefs of any kind in public can earn you scorn, or worse.

Leaving aside for a moment the debates about government, politics, individual rights and ethical systems which usually accompany this discussion, I want to focus only on what this means for us as followers of Jesus Christ.  Our modern confusion as believers today can center on how much our faith can inform our public life, and how much of it should remain private.  There are those who would claim that all beliefs should remain exclusively in the private sphere.  It would seem that these people are telling us that what happens in our home or church is our own business, but that we ought to make sure it stays there.  Today, I’m going to attempt to show the disastrous consequences for your spiritual walk if you adopt that system of thought for your everyday life.  In fact, I think that in practice this divided system of thought is impossible for anyone to apply consistently and uniformly.

All of us carry ideas about the way the world works.  This sum total of all our ideas is a worldview.  Everyone has a worldview.  We form our worldviews a variety of ways.  Some of it we inherit from our environment.  Other parts of it come with education and relationships.  Some of it comes through study.  No matter what, we all form ideas about how the world operates and how we should respond to it.   Because all ideas are different, they effect worldview formation differently.  If it helps, think of a worldview as a test-tube in a chemistry laboratory.  All the ideas that exist in the world, in this analogy, would be like the chemicals and instruments you could mix or use to make something in that test-tube.  Some combinations of ideas are volatile…others are stable.   Sometimes you put things in the test-tube and they don’t mix at all, they simply separate back into layers.    Modern conceptions of the world teach us that it’s okay to have a bunch of items in your test-tube that don’t form a single compound thing.  In fact, they would tell you that the proper way of ordering your life is that it should separate into two parts–a public part and a private part, and there should be a definite and consistent separation between the two.   But it is here where this analogy breaks down for those who want to follow Lord Jesus as his servants and disciples.

Throughout the Bible, God repeatedly tells those people who want to follow him that they must follow him with everything they have–no separation between different parts of their lives.   I’ve noted just a few at the top of this entry.  I’ve made sure that they come from a variety of locations and personages, so that you don’t think I’m cherry-picking my examples.  In fact, the sin that God’s people are most frequently accused of in the Old Testament–idolatry–is really nothing more than religious double-mindedness.  Most of the people who are accused of idolatry (a violation of the first two commandments, which are at the top of this entry) are not guilty of not worshiping God–they are guilty of not worshiping ONLY Him.  In the prophetic literature of the Old Testament, God repeatedly tries to get this point across, ultimately unsuccessfully, to His children.  He will not be satisfied with “some” of the devotion of his people.  If he is God, then He is the Lord of the Universe and the sole object of worship, praise, honor, glory and adoration by those people who believe.  If He is not worthy to be worshiped as the ONLY God, then He isn’t worthy to be worshiped at all.   Jesus’ pointed responses to the legalism of the Pharisees is largely based on this fact–if God can be reached solely by observance of rules and regulations  (e.g. humans gaining salvation by their own efforts), then God is not God–He would be impotent and unworthy worthy of worship.   The Apostle Paul is also strident on this point.  In short, it is impossible to have a Christian worldview while simultaneously believing that you can have one part of your life that does not include Christ.

The net result of this for us as Christians is two-fold.  First, if we are going to rightly call God our “Lord” he must be actually be Lord of the entirety of our lives–there is no place for “having two opinions” or “serving two masters.”   We must actively serve Him in all the areas of our life, purposefully.  Second, we must be careful not to serve any idols, no matter how closely those images might fit our idea of how “God should look.”  God is not a negotiable being, with traits that can be selected by his followers as though He were some of kind of deity buffet.  You don’t get to build your own Savior.  You can follow the one that God provided, namely God himself in the person of Christ, taking on all that entails, or you can struggle in sin and serve an idol instead.   There are no other options.

As it applies to the matter of the public/private split so prevalent in modern thinking, hopefully you see what this means.   It won’t do to be a model Christian at home and a ravenous sinner in the marketplace.  I hope you see that’s absurd.  But what is equally absurd is to assume that all Christ demands from His followers in the workplace is that they “play nice with the other children.”   In your vocation, and indeed in all of your public life, you represent the risen Lord.  If He is not the Lord of your public life, He will never be the Lord of your private life.   Christ himself tells us why this is.  Functionally, it is impossible to live with a divided mind.  You will automatically default to one side or the other–one side of your life or another will ultimately prove more important to you, and that is the one you will choose.  In his discussion about wealth (quoted in part from Matthew 6 above), Jesus speaks the plain truth of the matter–either you will love one and hate the other, or you will serve one and despise the other.  If you choose to make your public face entirely secular, you are denying Christ, and you are worshiping an idol instead.  (To anticipate a question, yes, acceptance, success, fear, sloth and most of the other reasons why people would deny Christ control of a part of their life are themselves or directly representative of an idol.)  While that might sound harsh, it’s the plain truth.  Anyone who has ever been in the dreaded position of hedging on their faith in public in order to “get by” will testify as much.

Even those who proclaim the worldview of double-mindedness know this is the case.  Functionally, all pluralists are single-minded.  They are not nearly so interested in a plurality of opinions in public as they are in their own ability to live however they please privately.  However, to achieve the freedom to live however they please privately, they must also remove all private choices from the realm of legitimate public discussion, which is exactly what the culture’s move toward relativism has done.  Those with minority opinions have shamed the majority into silence in the public sphere, and without the ability to agree culturally, all we are left with is, “what happens behind closed doors is their business.”

But before we go too far afield, let’s return to the more important matter:  your life and attempts to serve Jesus Christ.  If as you read this today you have separated a part of your life out and have not allowed Jesus Christ into it, you have an idolatry/sin issue you need to confront.  This is, quite literally, the moment of truth for you.  Will you turn away from your idol(s) and follow after Christ with everything you have?  If the answer to that question is yes and you have decided to follow Jesus without turning back, now is the time to repent.  Confess your sin to God, and seek Him for how you can functionally turn over the parts of your life which you’ve held back to Him.  Evaluate why you were holding back that area and look for weaknesses in your own character which you can pray further about.  It is often the case that one weakness in you will have several sinful activities or attitudes which accompany it.  Today is a great time to start prayerfully working out those areas of your life.  Do you struggle to know how to make Jesus the Lord of your working life?  Your playing life?  Your finances?  Your relationships?   In case of life, turn over your entire life to Jesus, seek Him, and make Him the master of YOUR universe.  You’ll never regret it.