Counterfeit Gods: American Idols

Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, has written a new book entitled "Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters".

There is a good interview with Tim concerning the book here. Some excerpts of the interview.

Do Christians have blind spots when it comes to false gods?

An idol is something you rely on instead of God for your salvation. One of the religious idols is your moral record: "God accepts me because I'm living a good life." I'm a Presbyterian, so I'm all for right doctrine. But you can start to feel very superior to everyone else and think, God is pleased with me because I'm so true to the right doctrine. The right doctrine and one's moral record are forms of power. Another is ministry success, similar to the idol of achievement. There are religious versions of sex, money, and power, and they are pretty subtle.

How does someone identify their idols?

Look at your daydreams. When you don't have to think about something, like when you are waiting for the bus, where does your mind love to rest? Or, look at where you spend your money most effortlessly. Also, if you take your most uncontrolled emotions or the guilt that you can't get rid of, you'll find your idols at the bottom. Whenever I hear someone say, "I know God forgives me, but I can't forgive myself," it means that person has something that is more important than God, because God forgives them. If you look at your greatest nightmare—if something were to happen that would make you feel you had no reason to live—that's a god.

How do we get rid of idols?

I confess that I don't say much about that. Practicing spiritual disciplines is another book. I do say that analyzing and recognizing an idol is a step away from its power over you. You also have to have a heck of a prayer life. That prayer life can't just be petitioning. There has to be encounter, experience, and genuine joy. You have to have Jesus Christ increasingly capture your affections.

Is it necessary to suffer disappointment before seeing that idols don't satisfy?

I fear you may be right. I don't want that to be true. Very often it's much stronger than disappointment. It's hard for me to look at a young person and know what their idols are, because usually something has to happen in their life to frustrate them for them to see that something has inordinate power over them. No one learned about their idols by being told about them.

Here is a brief video introduction to the book by Keller himself.



Read the whole interview, and then buy and read the book. Keller is one of our best American writers right now, and is very thoughtful and compelling. I am a fan. [SDG - JS]

Deep Church

"Because we want glory for ourselves, we seek to find fault in others. Contentious people are always looking for something to argue about, some way to start controversy and disrupt the peace." from "Deep Church", by Jim Belcher.

Wow, this is deeply convicting for me, as I am prone to criticism and fault finding, and uttering things about "if I were king of the world, I wouldn't be so stupid/ignorant/arrogant/etc." Yikes!

A good review of this book is here, and I am just in the midst of reading it. As APC discusses the worship times and worship formats, this is a helpful guide about the issues involved.

[SDG - JS]

The Way of Simplicity

Came across this at a great blog I just discovered, called The Gospel Coalition.

If we would find God amid all the religious externals, we must first determine to find him, and then proceed in the way of simplicity. Now as always God discovers himself to ‘babes’ and hides himself in thick darkness from the wise and the prudent. We must simplify our approach to him. We must strip down to essentials, and they will be found to be blessedly few. We must put away all effort to impress and come with the guileless candor of childhood. If we do this, without doubt God will quickly respond.-- A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God, page 18.

Some good stuff.

[SDG - JS]

Mark Roberts on the Power of the Internet

Mark Roberts has a great post on the power of the internet here. Entitled "The Office, the Wedding, and the Power of the Internet", Mark reflects on the relationship between the recent episode of the hugely popular "The Office" and a real life wedding in St. Paul, MN.

In both weddings, the traditional processional music is replaced by Chris Brown's "Forever", with the wedding party joyfully dancing up the aisle. The original video just makes you want to smile! Really.

Mark's point, though, is this:

The video went immediately viral. A week after being posted, it had 6.6 million views on YouTube. As of a few days ago, it has over 26,000,000 views on YouTube, not counting the large number of views on copies of the video. My guess is that, after last weeks’s episode of The Office, the original video will get millions of new viewers.

So here’s what impresses me about the power of the Internet. Think about it. Less than three months ago, somebody put up a video of a small wedding featuring two ordinary and relatively unknown people. Last week, one of the most popular television programs imitated the opening moments of the wedding, and millions upon millions of viewers got the joke. Never before in the history of the world could something like this have happened. It’s rather stunning, if you stop and think about it.

Good news travels fast, doesn't it? Are we using all the tools the Lord has given us to reach people with the Good News? [SDG-JS]

The Bells Are RInging

The bells are ringing again at APC. Thanks to the vision and initiative of our new receptionist, Carol Shaw, the bells are now ringing again.

Carol loves the sound of the bells, and researched how they might be brought back to life at APC. She discovered a computer and amplifier setup that was fairly inexpensive. The purchased was proposed and approved, and ordered. It arrived this week.

The system was installed this week by our tech man, Jonathan Kofahl, and the bells are chiming today on the hour. It is beautiful, sweet music.

Did you know the science of bell ringing is called "campanology"? No wonder the bell tower of my alma mater is called Sather Tower, or in common reference, the Campanile.

A church bell is a bell which is rung in a (especially Christian) church either to signify the hour or the time for worshippers to go to church, perhaps to attend a wedding, funeral, or other service. Before mass communication they were the only way to gather a village together, so they served for secular functions also. (wikipedia)

When I was the pastor at Faith United Presbyterian Church in Highland Park, we tried to resurrect our bell ringing. We had an old tape system with an endless loop. We tinkered with it one day, and got it to work. And all day, the bells rang on the hour.

The next morning, we got to church and discovered that the bells were ringing. And ringing. And ringing. evidently, they had been ringing all night long. We got into the office to discover our voicemail machine full of increasingly angry comments.

"Hi. Please turn your bells off, my kids are trying to sleep."

"Hi again, we'd really like your bells to stop ringing, it is now past midnight."

"Hey, if you don't turn those bells off, we are calling to cops."

"%@%$@#%@$#! I am going to get my gun and shoot someone if you don't turn those ^!@%%#! bells off right now!"

We shut off the bells, and eventually patched things up with our neighbors.

We are hoping this new system at APC will be a pleasant blessing to the community, and draw people to think about God on a regular basis. [SDG - JS]

The Dark Side of Bible Reading

An interesting blog post by Jeremy Berg at "Jesus Creed" here, called "The Dark Side of Bible Reading."

In it, he infers that many of the youth he works with, and many adults as well, read the Bible as if THEY were the central figure in the story. And their overwhelming concern was how the Bible applies "to me." Evidently, if the Bible passage does not apply "to me", it must mean nothing, and I can safely discard it as irrelevant to my own life.

Ouch!

Berg's conclusion/challenge:

Instead, I would like to offer a different posture toward God's Word. In fact, it's the very opposite approach.

1. First, let's humbly approach God's Word as we would approach God himself. Let's reverently bow in awe and listen intently to what he is actually saying to us.
2. Instead of "applying the Bible to our lives" (which again assumes we are the fixed center point and the Word is just a holy ointment to be applied to our souls) let's instead try to "apply ourselves to the Bible." Put narratively, let's not let give God a convenient place within our own story; but rather find ourselves swept up in God's much larger Story!
3. Instead of bringing all of our concerns to the text and forcing it to speak to them, let's instead let God's concerns invite us out of our (relatively) petty preoccupations and into the realm of heavenly realities. "Set your mind on things above, not on earthly things" (Col 3:2). Or, as The Message Bible puts it: "Don't shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ--that's where the action is. See things from his perspective." When we get a glimpse of "God reality" all of our own earthly concerns are seen in a new light.
4. Finally, personal application must come only AFTER one has given God's Word a fair hearing. Let God lead the conversation where He so desires. When we're done letting God's Word speak then we can ask the Spirit to give us a personal assignment in response to God's challenge.

I'm sure there is a better way to say all of this. But I hope you see my point. Now I wonder what you all think.

I really like these suggestions. What do you think? [SDG- JS]