Sunday – January 4, 2015 1st John 5 verses 18 to 21

Sunday – January 4, 2015 – Read the Word on Worship

1st John 5 verses 18 to 21 from Sunrise Community Church on Vimeo.

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 1 John 5:21
“Little children, guard yourselves from idols.”

John throws a final fastball right by us in 1 John 5:21. You stand there flat-footed, thinking, “Where did that come from?” He hasn’t been saying anything about idolatry. He hasn’t mentioned it in the entire book. So, at first glance, it seems out of context. But as you think about it, it sums up his entire message. Idolatry is making up your own god as a substitute for the one true God, who has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. The false teachers were doing just that. They were offering a false god of speculation, not the one true God of revelation. So John’s final words are a warning against adopting the errors of man-made religion.

We may think that this warning had a special application in Ephesus, where John sent this letter. The Temple of Diana (or Artemis) was there and the silversmiths made a good living making statues of this pagan goddess (Acts 19:23-41). If you travel today in the Far East or in primitive tribal areas, you see many shrines to idols. But Americans, we say to ourselves, do not have a problem with bowing down before statues of imagined gods. But that is not the case. Our idols may not be of stone, gold or precious stones, but we Americans still bow down to them.

In the most basic sense, an idol is anything that takes the rightful place of God in your life. Paul equated covetousness or greed with idolatry (Eph. 5:5). Your career, your pursuit of money, your possessions, excessive devotion to leisure and recreation, or even putting a human relationship ahead of your relationship with God, may all become idols. Putting your intellect above God’s revelation, just as Nicodemus did in John 3, is idolatry. Watching hours of inane or immoral TV shows each week or spending hours playing computer games, while not having time to spend with God or serve Him, is idolatry.

John tells us to “guard” ourselves from idols, which implies that we have something valuable that the enemy is trying to steal. Charles Spurgeon, a 19th century British preacher, points out that if a man has a box and he’s not sure what’s in it, he won’t be very careful about guarding it. But if he knows that it contains a rare and valuable treasure, he will be diligent to guard it carefully. John is saying that if you know the true God and His Son Jesus Christ, you have a treasure. Guard it so that you don’t drift into one of the many forms of idolatry.

Sunday – March 16, 2014 Judges 17 “The Danites Promised Land Part 1”

Sunday – March 16, 2014 – Read the Word on Worship

Judges 17 “The Danites Promised Land Part 1” from Sunrise Community Church on Vimeo.


Word On Worship – Sunday – March 16, 2014 Download / Print

Judges 17:4-6
“His mother took two hundred pieces of silver and gave them to the silversmith who made them into a graven image and a molten image, and they were in the house of Micah. And the man Micah had a shrine and he made an ephod and household idols and consecrated one of his sons that he might become his priest. In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

We are introduced to a man named Micah from the hill country of Ephraim. Micah was not the model son, but then neither was his mother a “Proverbs 31 kind of woman.” Micah had stolen 1100 pieces of silver from her, and she had pronounced a curse on the thief in his hearing. (One has to wonder if she knew – or at least suspected – that it was her son who was the culprit.) It seems to have been the curse which prompted Micah to confess, and not his conscience. She receives back what her son stole, but then sets a portion of it aside for the creation of false idols to be a blessing to her son. Micah went on to make other “household gods” for his private collection.

Micah is a tragic example of the person who has placed their trust in a false religion. During the good times, they feel as though their religion is the cause of their success and prosperity. And then, suddenly, disaster comes their way which their gods are powerless to prevent. They are left with nothing other than a feeling of emptiness and helplessness. Sadly, for many, this realization comes without any repentance and faith. But there are others whom God graciously brings to the end of themselves so that they will repent and embrace God’s only means of salvation.

Micah and his mother are yet another example of doing what is right in their own eyes. Doing what is right in one’s own eyes is living by one’s own assessment of good and evil, of what is right and what is wrong. Doing what is right in God’s eyes is living in obedience to God’s revealed Word. The Israelites, much like men and women today, were “doing their own thing.” If one reads our text in Judges with God’s law (as revealed in the Pentateuch) in mind, it is obvious what evils are being committed – by Micah, by Jonathan, by the Danites, and by virtually all of the Israelites.

All too often people discern God’s will by what they want. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone practicing adultery or any other form of immorality looking to justify their sin with the statement, “I know that God wants me to be happy.” Thus, even though the Bible explicitly forbids their behavior some practice it anyway, convinced that God looks on them with favor because their personal satisfaction supersedes God’s clear revelation. God’s Word is the basis for discerning God’s will. When favorable circumstances accompany clear biblical approval, then we can rejoice. But when circumstances are favorable and the Scriptures are not, we must go with what the Scriptures say, not what circumstances permit.