Skip to main content

Idol Worship

Sermon by Ps Daniel Khong of the Faith Community Baptist Church 11 Oct 2025. Click here to watch the full service on Youtube. 



Background 

Exodus 20 is the chapter on the 10 commandment. The first 2 commandments says that we shall have no other gods and to not make any idols and to worship or bow down to them. 

An idol could be an image or representation of a god, where we pray or bow down to it. It could also be a singer, musician or sportsperson that we admire. Another intangible form of worship could also be the worship of money, a man who we may rely on to bring great help, or even our own wisdom/intellect. Charles Spurgeon wrote that if there is anything you would not give up for God, it is your idol. Anything that we seek with more fervour than our God, then that is our idol.

Scripture: 

Mark 10:17-22 speaks of the man who came to Jesus asking for what to do to get eternal life. Jesus told him to sell everything,  give to the poor and to follow Jesus. He was sad because he was rich. 

Most in church probably has never worshipped another God, but many may have intangible idols in our lives.

How do we deal with idols in our lives?

1. Surrender our Idols

If God is truly Lord, then He must be the Lord of our lives. Paul wrote in Romans 1:25 that people worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator. 

2. Reorder our Love

The things that we love are not inherently bad. However, if we spend more time on it than God, then this is a problem. This include loving money, our parents, our children. We need to reorder or rearrange - that we love them in the correct order. St Augustine defines sin in a positive perspective: "the essence of sin is disordered love."

We have to examine our own lives, if there is disordered love. Do we love something we love more than God and people - success, possessions, career, hobby, money?

How to identify the idols? Most don't quite know. To narrow it down, we ask the following:
  • What is our greatest desire, what we want most? 
  • What is our deepest, darkest fears and nightmare?

King David wrote in Psalm 51 to cast me not away from God's presence and take not the Holy Spirit from him.

For what is idolatry if not this: to worship the gifts in place of the Giver Himself?        - John Calvin 
                                
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Time Management or is it really Project Management?

We have been told since young by others that in order to do something well, we need to have good time management.  As one who leads projects for a living who knows a thing or two about this, I will say that time management is a fallacy.  Purely speaking, time management  (just like managing people) refers to managing time in which we control time, i.e. we can accelerate it (to make it go faster), slow it down, or to stop time. We can do this with a lot of things but we cannot manage time - it continues to chug along, whether we like it or not. If you were to ask me the time and my answer is, say 9:00am, that time is already gone because it is 9:01am when you continue with what you are doing.  Time is like a freight train or a subway that we can only latch on to and hope we can do things within the allotted time. Ask the student who needs to submit the paper at 11:59pm Sunday night or the employee who need to submit the report Mon morning 9:00am.  In truth, what ...
Read more

The Mental You - Reducing Stress part 2

Just like there are always 2 sides to each story (the good and the bad), we can tackle issues in 2 ways - either head on or perhaps we can do something opposite altogether. The previous post is primarily concerned on how to overcome stress by reducing it. Another way is to focus on something totally unrelated to stress. So, rather than looking at fixing the bad, we focus on the good such that there is little room for the bad.  Let's work on this together... Positive Thinking  What do you see if you turn on the news, or start looking at social media? More often than not, aside from the beautiful people and cute cats, the news is mostly gloom and doom. There are wars and rumors of wars, climate change due to global warming causing floods, and other disasters, earthquakes at various parts of the world. So, it's no uncommon for us to no longer see the world in rose-tinted glasses but glasses with murky lenses. And yet, to reduce stress, this is the one thing we must do - to think ...
Read more

Parenting

How did you do it? This question has been asked by many of my friends and colleagues when they found out about my children. We had initially thought that what we went through is typical. But as we talked to more and more people, it is only then we realized that the journey is not so common after all.  Singapore has been ranked amongst the top countries in the world by PISA, short for the Program for International Student Assessment that is under the OECD umbrella. In some years, it is actually ranked number 1. In other words, to be able to get through the Singapore education system is difficult enough as it is.  The Journey to College  By the grace of God, both my kids did well in the system by being selected into the Gifted Education Program (GEP) - for the top 1% of students - and then getting into Raffles Institution (supposedly the number 1 school in Singapore), and achieving straight As in the Singapore-GCE Cambridge "A" levels, and then receiving offers from a few o...
Read more