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SAN ANTONIO?Idolatry may be the obstacle to Holy Spirit power in the lives of Southern Baptist Christians, North Carolina pastor J.D. Greear told the SBC Pastors’ Conference in its closing session June 11.
The pastor at Summit Church in Durham, N.C. preached from James 4:1-10, a passage that warns of asking God for blessings from selfish motives.
Like those James was writing to, believers often ask wrongly because “you want to spend it on your passions.”
Taking it further, Greear added, “Maybe what hinders some of our cries for revival is idolatry,” not the “bowing-down” kind of idolatry, but “when we look to something else to make us happy, we become idolators,” Greear explained.
He told how God convicted him of placing the acceptance of people above God, noting that God “was upset at me because I didn’t want to be happy in him.”
“You see, God created the human heart to worship. To worship something means you delight in it. To worship something means that without that one thing there’s no way you could be happy.”
Unfortunately, many believers seek comfort, approval, success, fame, money or pleasure in exchange for delighting in God alone.
“You see, from the very beginning, our very first parents, Adam and Eve, we have said, ‘No, I need something more. I need something besides God, his love and his approval, to have a happy and fulfilled life?. Idols for us become functional gods.”
Greear said that for some people, stage one of idolatry would be a hell on earth that usually is portrayed in the mind as our greatest fear?for some people the fear of being unsuccessful, for example.
“Stage two is you turn to a savior to save you from that hell,” he said. If loneliness is your hell, then relationships become your savior.
“If you obsess over being poor, then money becomes your savior.”
Stage three is reached, Greear said, when “obtaining this idol god becomes the driving force in one’s life” and is detectable “when something we should be finding in God we are finding in something or someone else.”
Greear said such idolatry is apparent as “the reason I am devastated when I preach a bad message.”
“Because, you see, the ministry is a great place for guys with the idol of success to hide.”
Furthermore, some people get mad when someone cuts them off in traffic not because they are fearful of losing time but because someone has disrespected them?a sign of idolatrous pride.
“Are what point in your life are you the happiest?” Greear asked. “What do you worry about the most? What troubles you late at night? Or what has made you bitter in life? What got taken away from you that you deserved?”
“Where do you turn for comfort when things aren’t going right? ? The answer is usually your idol.”
Greear said for pastors, “money, power and the praise of men” are subtly seductive snares, noting Karl Marx’s statement that religious zeal and lust for power go hand in hand and John Calvin’s quote that “the human heart is an idol factory.”
“These are the reasons often we want to grow big churches ? There is a fine and but eternally distinct line between ‘thy kingdom come’ and ‘my kingdom come.’ It’s why we are more interested usually in things that grow church attendance and budgets rather than things that grow disciples. It might be why we rarely do anything about church discipline.”
Greear said the acid test of a pure heart is one that can rejoice when the church of a friend across town is the one God makes more prominent and visible.
“For many of us it’s not about the kingdom of God?it’s about us.”
Chuck Colson
Christians are facing two major threats to their belief system?Islam in the East and Western society’s abandonment of a belief in absolute truth, Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship, told the conference.
“I can’t imagine any time in history when you would look around as a Christian and see a world that is filled with more danger than the world in which we live today.”
While Colson touched on the threat posed by Islam?a belief system he described as using conquest in advancing its cause?he focused his address on the culture war that American Christians face at home.
Colson cited statistics indicating that two-thirds of Americans believe there is no such thing as moral truth. Such a belief manifests itself in moral decay and anarchy, which Colson said is happening in the United States.
While atheists in years past were content to disbelieve in God privately, Colson said a new breed of intellectual atheists has emerged to promote the lie that Christianity is dangerous to society and should be restrained by the government.
“We’re up against a vicious attack by neo-atheists,” Colson said, citing the immense popularity of such recent books as “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. “This is a virulent strain of atheism that seeks to destroy our belief system.”
To engage the culture and counter the prevailing belief that truth is relative, Colson said Christians must do better at explaining, in a winsome way, what they believe and why they believe it. To start, Christians must understand that Christianity is more than simply a personal relationship with Jesus, Colson argued.
“We have to understand that Christianity is a worldview,” Colson said. “Christianity is a way of seeing all of life and all of reality. It’s the way of understanding ultimate truth.”
Christians’ purpose, therefore, is to restore fallen culture to the glory of God and bring Christianity to bear in every single area of life, Colson said. But beyond understanding Christianity in its entirety, he said Christians must be faithful to pass their beliefs to their children.
“What is wrong with us when kids are being raised to believe there is no such thing as truth?” Colson asked. “That’s the end of the Christian gospel if we can’t make a truth claim in our culture today.”
Too many young evangelicals think the gospel is dull, Colson said, because churches haven’t taught it adequately. He lamented any tendency within the contemporary emerging church movement toward “abandoning a belief in truth” for “conversations in coffee shops” in which people share their various spiritual journeys.
The Christian faith is not dry, dusty doctrine, Colson said, but a compelling story of Jesus Christ, the God-man, coming to the world to redeem sinful people.
Testimonies
Colleyville’s James T. Draper Jr., president emeritus of LifeWay Christian Resources, R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and O.S. Hawkins, president of GuideStone Financial Resources in Dallas, shared personal testimonies about Christ’s victory in different challenges of their lives.
Al Mohler
Mohler told how on multiple occasions he has faced live-threatening health crises and come out of them with an “assurance of God’s sovereignty and his providential love.”
Noting that others suffer daily on a more acute level, Mohler said his message was one applicable to all people.
Despite questions about pain and God’s loving nature, Mohler said it is imperative people understand that in a fallen world pain has a purpose in God’s plan.
“Pain is absolutely necessary to health because pain is often an early warning system” for serious health issues, Mohler said, quoting the late Christian physician and author Paul Brand.
“The main issue in our lives is not how to avoid but what to learn from it,” Mohler said.
Despite suffering a life-threatening blood clot last winter, Mohler said he emerged from the illness?what he described as “intense, unspeakable, unprecedented pain”?thankful for it.
Through pain, Mohler said God teaches:
?His sovereign
