Assessing Our Idols

Our "Gospel in Life" topic this week is idolatry.  Coincidentally, Ann Voskamp just posted a great list of resources for dealing with the idols in your life.  Follow this link to read her reviews of six books that are worth checking out.

Two Lost Sons and a Missing Older Brother

Passage: Luke 15:11-32

Yesterday we dealt very briefly with the "Parable of the Prodigal Son" as part of our "Gospel in Life" study series.  Where we barely scratched the surface, Tim Keller has taught extensively on the parable.  If you have time, follow the links below and listen to each sermon in his series:

"Give me Mine"

"He Came to Himself"

"To Be Called Your Son"

"And Kissed Him"

"We Had to Celebrate"

"The True Older Brother"

Work and Pray for the City

Passage: Jeremiah 29:4-7

I’m reading Mohsin Hamid’s, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.  It’s a novel disguised as a self-help book, with each chapter devoted to a different step of the process of dragging oneself out of poverty in a developing country.  I just finished a chapter entitled “Work for Yourself”.  In it the author points out that a successful entrepreneur must realize that he or she is not in business for his or her clients.  If you really want to be successful, he says, you work for yourself.

This week our church began the series “Gospel in Life”, by Timothy Keller.  The first lesson opens with a study of Jeremiah’s “Letter to the Exiles”.  In this prophetic word, God tells his displaced people to make a hostile foreign city their new home.  And God adds this imperative:

…seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.

God gives his people the exact opposite instruction of that of Mohsin Hamid’s fictional narrator: “If you want to prosper, work for others.”

God’s command is radical – as radical for us as it was for the exiles.  God’s purposes for us – to “prosper us and not to harm us” – are integrally linked to God’s purposes through us – to restore peace and prosperity and so reveal himself to an unbelieving world.  As God’s people we have to fight the instinct to look after ourselves first.  And instead devote ourselves – in service and in prayer – to a world that is foreign; hostile; and in desperate need of restoration.