Take a Minute -- Tuesday, 5/11/10 -- TEARING DOWN ALTARS -- Deuteronomy 12:2-3
J.R. & Bonnie Ricks
Dogwood Ministries, Inc.
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TEARING DOWN ALTARS -- Deuteronomy 12:2-3 NIV
Destroy completely all the places on the high mountains and on the hills and under every spreading tree where the nations you are dispossessing worship their gods. Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and burn their Asherah poles in the fire; cut down the idols of their gods and wipe out their names from those places.
Pretty ruthless, isn’t it? But God had a reason for telling the Israelites to wipe out everything that had anything to do with the pagan religions. He knew the weakness of His people. He knew how easy it would be for them to fall into temptation, to slip into the worship of the pagan idols. So He told them to remove every trace of other religions from their land. He wanted His people to concentrate on Him and Him alone, so they were to remove all distractions.
The same applies to you and me today. When we have other idols in our lives, they get in the way of our worship of God. Our activities, attitudes, relationships, and habits - even our churches - can become the center of our lives rather than God. And we, just like the Israelites, mistakenly believe that we're strong enough to withstand the temptation. So we, like the Israelites, need to be ruthless in our destruction of other idols in our lives.
Do you participate in activities that come between you and God? I knew a woman once who made five or six trips to Las Vegas every year with her husband. She loved Las Vegas, the shows, the gambling, the lights. When she was home, she was the picture of Christian perfection, but from her own description, she had a total personality change the moment she climbed on the plane to head west. Her comment was, "Well, I just hope the Lord doesn't come back while I'm in Vegas!" (As if He didn’t know what she was doing now!) It took her some years to realize that those trips were idols in her life - for five or six weeks out of the year, she worshiped a lifestyle that was far from what she knew she should be doing. Only when she removed those trips from her life… when she destroyed that altar of idol worship… was she able to fully follow the Lord throughout the year.
Examine your life today. Look for altars of worship that come between you and the Lord. Look for areas that are causing you to fail. And then be ruthless in destroying them. With God's help, you will be successful.
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