Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

One theme has continued to emerge repeatedly in our series on 1 John, and that is, we can know where we stand with God. 

In chapter 5, he says 4 times in 3 verses: “we know, we know, we know…” (1 John 5:18 – 20). The primary purpose of 1 John is to help us live in the reality that we can know where we stand with God, we can be sure that we are in Christ, and we can be assured that we are safe and loved by the Father. 

What John does throughout the letter is not only show us what that life looks like as it relates to our relationship with God, ourselves, and others, but he also writes about what battles we will face in experiencing and living in that life and love. 

At the very end of the letter, he says: Guard yourselves from idols. 

One translation says: Dear children, keep away from anything that might take God’s place in your hearts.

At first glance, this is an unusual way to conclude the letter. Idols? After all the talk of light and dark, eternity, love, etc., he chooses idols to end with. And end abruptly. 

Yet, the idols of our hearts are sneaky and keep us from the life God has for us. 

What is an idol? Tim Keller has been helpful to me in this area. He says, “Idols are often good things that we make great. An idol is anything we look to for what only Jesus can give us.”

Idols are often good things that we make great. An idol is anything we look to for what only Jesus can give us. -Tim Keller
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I’m not sure where I first heard this list of questions, but they were questions to help you discern the idols of your heart (I shared more detail about these in my sermon on this passage): 

9 questions to help you discern your idols of the heart.
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• What do you worry about?
• What do you use to comfort yourself when life gets tough or things don’t go your way?
• What, if you lost it, would make you think life wasn’t worth living?
• What do you daydream about?
• What makes you feel the most self-worth? 
• Early on, what would you like people to know about you? What do you lead with in conversations?
• What prayer, unanswered, would seriously make you consider walking away from God?
• What do you really want and expect out of life?
• What is your hope for the future? What will complete you?

9 questions to figure out what is holding you back in your relationship with Jesus.
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One aspect that is often overlooked is the origin of these idols. 

According to Adam Young in his book, Make Sense of Your Story: Why Engaging Your Past with Kindness Changes Everything, says, “When your heart is wounded – when something breaks inside of you – you begin living in a way that promises to relieve the wound and assures you that you will never be hurt in that particular way again. And this way of living enslaves you. You become captive to it.” He goes on to discuss how there is a connection between our hurt, our heart being broken, and the idols we pursue. 

Our idols are found in the soil of our pain. -Adam Young
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Let me share something from my life that might help you apply this. 

When I meet someone, I want them to know as quickly as possible that I am working on my doctorate. Why? I want them to be aware of my qualifications. I want them to know that I can do certain things. In fact, when I am in rooms with other pastors, I often struggle to believe that I belong there, that I don’t have what it takes. 

This struggle dates back to middle school and high school because I wasn’t a great student, and I had a guidance counselor who told me he didn’t think I was college material. At the time, he wasn’t wrong, but that stung, and that scar still runs deep. I have often struggled to believe that I am enough in Jesus and that I don’t need letters behind my name to be “someone” in his eyes. 

My guess is, you can find your idol in the soil of your pain. 

The power of your early childhood on who you become as an adult.
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You might look to money for security because you grew up with so little. Maybe you want someone to approve of you or love you because the people who were supposed to love you didn’t. Perhaps you have prayed and prayed for something that hasn’t happened, and that thing has become your salvation.

We don’t always see it. 

That’s why idols are so sneaky. 

That’s why John says to “guard ourselves.” To pick up our shields and swords and guard ourselves. To be alert (1 Peter 5:8). 

The post Idols, Our Stories and Our Longings for Love and Acceptance appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.

I love control.

There I said it.

If you know me well, that isn’t a surprise.

My love for control often pushes me to push others. Push in my own life. Push people to work harder or be better or look better so that I can win and look good.

It isn’t because I care about what others think of me. It is because I like the feeling of control (at least the mirage of it) and winning.

There’s a problem with this. It actually keeps me from experiencing life in God and the freedom that comes from trusting Him.

Two things have proven helpful to me in this area and maybe will be something that is helpful to you.

One, praying about it. I know this seems obvious, but if we are going to rely on God’s power over something, we need to talk to Him about it. This allows us to ask Him for help and power in the areas of our lives that need it. If this is a struggle for you, I’d encourage you to bring that struggle to God. Ask Him for help in the area of your life where you need His power and direction. Give it over to Him. While He is in control and nothing happens without His direction or permission, this is about us confessing our need for Him, reminding ourselves that we will stop controlling something and let go of the wheel. This is about our hearts.

Two, get a trusted friend to walk with you and remind you of the lack of power you have in this area of your life. This is someone who can call you when you need it, challenge you when you need it and help you to let go of things in your life that only God can do and change.

This is truly the way to lasting change and the way to living the life God has called you to live. 

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The post Stop Pushing. Start Relying. appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.

I preached on the need and desire for approval that we all have. Granted, we all feel it to different degrees. In my sermon, I mentioned how my desire to win, to be right, to have power and control always outweighs my desire for approval. It is still there though.

This blog post may feel more like a confession that I’m letting you in on. Hopefully this will be an encouragement to you or you’ll see yourself in it.

For me, I was convicted how out of my desire for power and control, I can very easily make my relationships about my approval of someone else.

I can be good at putting incredibly high standards on people, making them feel guilty so they will ultimately do what I want.

This is how I control things. In the end, it is also how I can easily help people sin by gaining my approval.

It is interesting when we talk about the idols of the heart or the sin in people’s lives, we focus on the person sinning. We should. They are responsible. In doing this, it is easy to let the people off who cause the sinning. Granted, someone seeking my approval is not my fault and they stand before God on that. I stand before God on how I cause someone to sin or stumble.

That is on me.

As I think about legalism, the gospel, the idols of my heart and hopefully as you think about those things, my hope with this blog post is to get you to realize in your quest for approval, control, comfort or power, you cause others to worship their idol by your actions. In your quest for comfort, you might help someone seek even more control so things don’t fall through the cracks because you are so laidback and letting whatever happens happen. In your quest for approval, you cause others to seek power because you are willing to be a doormat to their sin and ego.

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The post Make me Approve of You appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.

I talked this past Sunday about the idols of the heart and what drives us to do what we do. Yesterday after breakfast, Katie pointed something out to me in Isaiah 46.

While our idols drive us and only the gospel can transform our hearts to be driven by Jesus. We also look to our idols to carry us, to give us rest, to complete us.

We look for achievement to give us rest. When we’ve accomplished enough, we’ll have enough. When we have enough school, we’ll be enough. When we’ve taken enough vacations, we’ll have enough experiences.

When we have enough power, we’ll have enough control. We’ll have enough followers, enough employees. We’ll be important and feared because we have power.

When we have enough stuff, we’ll be able to slow down and rest. We’ll be able to sit on our new deck furniture, watch our huge TV from our plush chair.

We’ll finally be able to rest, because our idols will carry us.

Except. We lose employees. This year award becomes next year’s forgotten winner. That degree becomes not enough in 5 years when someone else gets one more degree than you. That vacation next year will be a distant memory when you hear about a new place, a new resort, a new experience. That power will fade as your company gets bought out or a new boss comes in and the game changes. And stuff rots and falls apart and last years most amazing TV becomes next month’s “last season’s model.”

Our idols fail. They do not carry us. They do not give us rest.

Isaiah 46:8-9 says:

Remember this and stand firm, recall it to mind, you transgressors, remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me.

The post How to Find Rest in the Midst of a Busy Life appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.

Pastors, like any person sin. While this may be surprising for some people as they put their pastors and their wife on a pedestal, it is true. Because of the nature of being a pastor and the life they live, their sins are often not obvious and ones that no one will ever know about. In fact, some of the most hurtful and dangerous sins are ones that a church and elders can unknowingly encourage. These sins are not in any particular order, just the order I wrote them in.

So far we’ve covered:

1. Your Bible is for more than just sermon prep.
2. A pastor being untouchable.
3. The pastor’s family. 

The fourth sin that many pastors deal with is the sin of the need to be needed. This directly affects what we talked about yesterday and how the pastor and his family are seen.

Many pastors as they become pastors do so out of a sense of wanting to help people. This can be seen in counseling, in discipling people or walking alongside of them. They want to help people.

This can hide for a time any way, the need to be needed. This shows up when a pastor:

1. Must be at every meeting or party for the church.
2. Visit every person in the hospital.
3. Follow up with every guest or new Christian.
4. Baptize everyone.
5. Always preach.
6. Never take a vacation.
7. Respond to every email and call.

Now, I’m not calling for pastors to be lazy. In fact, the last sin we’ll talk about is how lazy many pastors are.

Pastor, take a minute and ask yourself some of these questions:

• How much do I need to be needed?
• Do I need to check every alert on Facebook, twitter or email?
• Do I keep my phone on during dinner with my family and answer it when it rings?
• Do you check your email or answer your phone on your day off?
• Do you take a day off every week?
• Do you take all your vacation days?
• Do you miss any Sundays?
• Do you take any Sundays off from preaching?

You may fall prey to the desire to be needed and that may be driving you and your ministry more than Jesus. If so, take a day off, turn your phone off and take a break from preaching.

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The post The Sins of a Pastor || Need to be Needed appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.

I had a conversation recently with some friends and they asked how you discern the idols of your heart. We talk about this quite a bit at Revolution and what the gospel truth is. While there are some questions that others have developed that are very helpful, they pointed out that for them it seems to be a moving target.

One thing I pointed out that has helped me is discerning idols of the heart is what you doubt about God first or most.

For me, with a Reformed lens, I love the sovereignty of God. I rest in it, trust in it, believe in it wholeheartedly. It makes sense, I see it all over Scripture. It answers the deepest questions I ask. It is one of the easiest things for me to believe about God. When life does not go as I planned, seems out of my control, the sovereignty of God is the first thing I doubt.

Think about the approval idol. Someone who wrestles with this has a hard time believing they are loved by God. When they sin, the have doubts about God’s grace, forgiveness, that he will accept them in spite of their sin. They need to grow in God’s grace.

When it comes to comfort, in the moments of doubt and sin, those who struggle with this don’t believe God is good. They believe there is something else that is better than God in that moment.

The post What I Doubt about God appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.

Tonight in my sermon we worked through some of the questions that can help you discern the idols of your heart. Each person has a default idol of their heart, what pushes them to make the decisions they do, both good and bad. Tim Chester points that each of us have an idol that is either for power, control, comfort or approval. They overlap and we might have all 4 at different times, but these 4 things push us to sin, succeed and live our lives.

The hope we have is that they will bring us the fulfillment we long for.

For example, when a man works a ton of hours to provide for his family, he is doing a good thing to provide for them. But he might be doing it so that his family will approve of him or that he will have the comfort he longs for.

Or, when one tries to control a situation through organizing every detail, keeping things in order. They might say they are organized or a detailed person, which might be true. It might also mean that it comes from a place of insecurity where they need to control everything instead of trusting in God.

Here are some questions we worked through tonight to discern what the idols of your heart are:

1. What do I worry about?
2. What do I use to comfort myself when life gets tough or things don’t go my way?
3. What, if I lost would make me think life wasn’t worth living?
4. What do I daydream about?
5. What makes me feel the most self-worth?
6. What do I lead with in conversations?
7. Early on, what do I want to make sure people know about me?
8. What prayer, unanswered would seriously make me consider walking away from God?
9. What do I really want and expect out of life?
10. What is my hope for the future? What will complete me?

The post Discerning the Idols of Your Heart appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.

Before we can eliminate the idols in our life, we must first realize what (who) they are.

We all have idols. We are all idolaters to one degree or another. We all are in need of repentance and restoration. We all are in desperate need to undergo serious spiritual alignment so that our passions are proportionally directed at God and not at a god or gods.

So, how then do we discern what are our idols? How can we become increasingly clear-sighted rather than remaining in their power?

Here are twenty questions that we need to transparently answer in order for our idols to be revealed to us:

1.What do we fear the most?

2.What, if we lost it, would make life not worth living?

3.What controls our mood?

4.What do I respond to with explosive anger or deep despair?

5.What dominates our relationships?

6.What do we dream about when our mind is on idle-mode?

7.To what do our thoughts effortlessly drift towards?

8.What do we enjoy day-dreaming about?

9.What am I preoccupied with?

10. What is the first thing on my mind in the morning and the last thing on my mind at night?

11. Where or in whom do I put my trust?

12. What occupies my mind when we have nothing else to think about?

13. Do we day-dream about purchasing material goods that you (we) don’t need, with money you (we) don’t have to impress the people you (we) do not like?

14. What do you habitually, systematically and undoubtedly drift towards in order to obtain peace, joy and happiness in the privacy of your heart?

15. How do we spend our (God’s) money?

• Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there is your heart also” (Matt. 6:21).
• Your money flows most effortlessly toward your heart’s greatest love. In fact, the mark of an idol is that you spend too much money on it, and you must try to exercise self-control constantly. Our patterns of spending reveal our idols.

16. What is my real, daily functional savior?

17. What is my real – not my [professed] – god?

18. How do I respond to unanswered prayers?

19. When a certain desire is not met, do I feel frustration, anxiety, resentment, bitterness, anger, or depression?

20. Is there something I desire so much that I am willing to disappoint or hurt others in order to have it?

When we ask ourselves these penetrating questions, there yields a continuity of our idolatry. The answers to these questions uncover the following:

• Whether we serve God or idols
• Whether we look for salvation from Christ or from false saviors
• Whether we rely on our Deliverer or other pseudo-messiahs.

The post 20 Ways to Tell What Your Idols Are appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.

Over the last week, I blogged about my journey of losing weight and keeping it off. It has been awesome getting messages from people about how this series has challenged and encouraged them. I hope it spurs you to being healthy.

You can read the posts here:

1. How I got to where I am 
2. The idol of food (the spiritual side of weight loss)
3. Have a plan
4. It’s for the rest of your life
5. The effects
6. Do your homework
7. The idol of exercise & staying in shape

The post My Journey of Losing Weight appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.

I’ve been chronicling my journey of losing weight this week. It is by far the thing I get questions about the most. You can read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6 here to get some background on this post. I talked in part 2 about the idol of food, one thing I want to end on is the idol of being in shape.

In the same way that it is easy for us to make an idol out of food. It is just as easy to make an idol out of exercise, being in shape, looking fit. This hits a different idol. While food can often be for comfort, the idol of being in shape often hits approval.

When I got assessed for Acts 29, they asked about my weight loss. The reason is because most church planters put on a ton of weight. The stress of church planting, the meetings at restaurants and coffee shops, the long hours, sleepless nights lead a lot of guys to put weight on. I was the opposite. I think that is one of the reasons we were able to make it through the hard start up months of Revolution.

As I described my journey, which you’ve read this week and talked about the idol of food one of the guys asked me at the end of the story, “Has exercise become your idol?” I think at first, as I was losing weight it did. If I missed a workout I would get angry, like I used to if I was hungry. It is natural for this to happen. When you lose 100 pounds, 12 inches off your waist, you want to keep it off. This makes sense. But it doesn’t make it right to make it an idol. It is easy to trade one idol (food) for another idol (being in shape or working out).

Now, I am not as tough on calories or working out as I used to. Our church has grown significantly, so has our family. It is harder and harder to make time to workout, so I’ve created a plan that fits my life. In fact, I went 10 days without working out to see if my food plan would allow me to not gain weight, and it did. If you have lost a bunch of weight and are working out, go a week without working out. If you just gasped, you may have an idol of working out that you need to deal with.

Don’t mishear me, there is nothing wrong with working out, being in shape, wanting to be healthy. Only when we elevate it to a high status in our lives. When we find our identity in working out or being in shape.

The post Losing Weight Part 7: The Idol of Being in Shape appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.