You may be a preacher with your spiritual pride,
You may be a city councilman taking bribes on the side.
You may be workin’ in a barbershop, you may know how to cut hair,
You may be somebody’s mistress, may be somebody’s heir.
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed,
You’re gonna have to serve somebody.
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord,
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody. —Bob Dylan
This song challenges us to think deeply about who or what we’re going to serve. Who or what we choose to worship or center our lives around. Because only one God is worthy of the weight of our worship. Every and any other “god” is a cheap substitute that will ultimately crumble under that weight.
Back to Psalm 115. It describes the consequences of worshipping the wrong person or thing. Check out Verses 2-8.
2 Why should the nations say, “Where is their God?” 3 Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases. 4 Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. 5 They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. 6 They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. 7 They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat. 8 Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them. —Ps 115:2-8 ESV
Psalm 115:8 is one of the most important verses in the Bible. It’s so important that it gets repeated in Psalm135:8. It describes the repercussions of worshipping inferior things. Of giving ultimate value to people and things that can’t hold up under the weight of our worship. Check out Verse 8 again.
Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them.
—Ps 115:8 ESV
BOOM! Mark it down. We become like the God or gods we worship.
Two-hundred years ago, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said it like this: “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.”
Jesus said it like this, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:21).
This is reality. We start to resemble — we actually begin to look like and reflect — the object of our worship, and that resemblance will either restore us or destroy us.
When we worship, we’re determining our values. When we worship, we’re declaring our priorities. Whenever we worship, we’re saying, “This is WORTH MORE. Everything else is worth less. This is what gets first place in my life.” According to Psalm 115, our entire life gets shaped by those kinds of decisions!
For instance, if we worship power, we’ll be shaped by arrogance.
If we worship comfort, we’re going to be shaped by apathy.
If we worship the approval of people, we’ll end up becoming a “people pleaser”.
If we worship achievement, we’ll use and abuse people to accomplish our objectives.
If we worship money, we’ll be shaped by insatiable greed.
If we worship our body, we will be shaped by “selfies” or staring at ourselves in mirrors.
We become like the God or gods we worship.
This is necessary truth. The world isn’t divided into people who worship and people who don’t.
It’s not a question of whether you’re a worshipper or not. EVERYONE WORSHIPS — atheists, agnostics, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists — and everyone in between. EVERYONE WORSHIPS. Period.
The world isn’t divided into people who worship and people who don’t. It’s divided into people who worship inferior things that will never be able to hold the weight of their worship, and people who worship the only person who is actually WORTHY of all our attention, affection and devotion.
Our most intense passion and deepest devotion was intended to be reserved for God and God alone. Nothing else works in that spot. Nothing.
Unfortunately, we are so prone to fill that spot with cheap and inferior substitutes. Romans 1:21-23 describes our tendency like this.
Yes, they knew God, but they wouldn’t worship him as God or even give him thanks. And they began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. As a result, their minds became dark and confused. 22 Claiming to be wise, they instead became utter fools. 23 And instead of worshiping the glorious, ever-living God, they worshiped idols made to look like mere people and birds and animals and reptiles.
—Rom 1:21-23 NLT
Did you notice the decline that gets mentioned in Verse 23? Whenever we turn away from worshipping “the glorious, ever-living God” to worship idols we begin with people, then move to birds, then lower ourselves to animals, until finally we worship reptiles. We’re doing the same thing in 2021.
How, you might ask? We’re so much more sophisticated and educated. I don’t recall seeing anyone worship an idol made of gold or bronze?
Really? We still worship people. Think entertainers or superstars in the music, movie, sports or political arenas. As for birds, animals and reptiles. Some of us worship nature on a regular basis. But we also worship other things like, sex and sexuality, appetites or desires, money and possessions, houses, cars and investments. The list of idols we regularly submit and surrender to is endless in 2021.
Anything that occupies FIRST PLACE in our lives other than God, has become an idol that will always leave
us disappointed.
Tim Keller described idolatry like this in his excellent book, Counterfeit Gods.
“Idolatry is not just a failure to obey God, it is a setting of the whole heart on something besides God.” — Tim Keller [1]
There are at least four ways we can identify the idols/substitutes that have started to dominate our life…[2]
- Look at how you spend your MONEY.
- Ask yourself, what is my real, DAILY “FUNCTIONAL SAVIOR”?
A “functional savior” is anything we look to fulfill us or satisfy us other than God. It’s what we go to for comfort during times of stress. Sometimes our “functional saviors” are good things that we’ve somehow turned into ultimate things.
- Look at your most UNCONTROLLABLE EMOTIONS.
Keller writes, “…if you’re constantly angry, you need to ask yourself, what’s driving that anger? Is there something too important to me? Is there something I’ve got to have at all costs?”
He says we ought to do the same thing with emotions like fear, despair or guilt. We need to ask ourselves, “Am I so scared because something in my life is being threatened that I think is a necessity, when it’s really not?”
Keller then wrote these words that I’ve never forgotten: “…when you ‘pull your emotions up by the roots,’ as it were, you will often find your idols clinging to them.”[3]
Finally,
- Look at your IMAGINATION or what your THOUGHTS EFFORTLESSLY GO TO when there is nothing else demanding your attention.
What do you enjoy daydreaming about? What occupies your mind when you have nothing else to think about? What websites do you go to repeatedly, without even thinking?
Looking at these four areas can help you identity anything — even a good thing that you’ve turned into an ultimate thing — anything that has become an idol in your life.
David Foster Wallace on Worship
Now, before you tune me out as just another pastor on his hobby horse, let me share a quote that rocked my world a few years ago.
Before his death in 2008, a decidedly non-Christian, but highly respected author, David Foster Wallace, gave the commencement address at Kenyon College. The address was profound for several reasons, including some statements made by Wallace about worship. Here are just a few sentences from that speech.
“There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
There is no such thing as not worshipping
“If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth.
“Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you…
“Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.
“Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out…
“Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day…” —David Foster Wallace, from his Kenyon College Commencement Address, 2005 [4]
Long before David Foster Wallace delivered that commencement address, the writer of Psalm 115:8 wrote and I’ll paraphrase, “We become like the God (gods) we worship. We become what we behold. We resemble and start to reflect or look like what we worship. We are shaped, fashioned and formed by the things we love.”
Here’s my question: What is shaping and forming you?
What or who are you becoming?
What has become the default setting of your life?
What are you giving yourself to that is “eating you alive” because it cannot sustain the weight of your worship?
Perhaps it’s time to re-orient to center? Maybe today is the day when you will determine with the writer of Psalm 115, “The dead can’t sing praise to the Lord… But we can praise the Lord… I can praise the Lord… Both now and forever… And that’s what I’m going spend my life doing.”
We’ll continue the series in the next post with four thoughts about why worship matters.
[1] Tim Keller, Counterfeit Gods, page 171
[2] Tim Keller, Counterfeit Gods, pages 169-170.
[3] Ibid, page 170.
[4] https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf