Jesus

Last week pulled the curtain back a little bit more, at least as much as we can, in our human understanding to realize that the problem is bigger than our own bad choices. And it's not just simply the idols in and of themselves, but that there are powers behind the idols, cosmic forces that have been feeding the exchange and receiving the worship that belongs to God alone. And they have no intention of letting us go without a fight.

So that's the story we've seen so far, the story we're living in. And it's the story that creates this tension and this ache. Each week I've referenced a verse from Paul. I want to read it again this morning. I want you to try to hear it like you're hearing it for the first time.

18 And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

We are being transformed. This is a process word in the Greek. It's the word μεταμορφόομαι — metamorphoomai. See our word is metamorphosis. Think butterfly. Think transformation. It is a process. And when Paul writes this, he writes it in a present passive tense. So it is ongoing continuous, happening right now reality and it's passive. Something is being done to us. Doesn't say we transform ourselves. It says on the basis of something that we do, we are being transformed.

Boy, this is the heart of the problem for us because we're a fast food people. We're a convenience and comfort people. We're being conditioned like we can get information instantaneously. I can order almost anything I want on my phone and Amazon will have it on my door sometimes the same day. And that feels good. It does, right?

We order something and Amazon's like, "Yeah, that can't be there for two weeks." I'm like, "Two weeks?" So we're being conformed by our culture. Are you with me? And there's no way that we don't bring that then into our relationship with Jesus, into our understanding of spiritual formation, into our expectation and desire.

So we come to Jesus like, "Well, Jesus, I believed in you. Jesus, I prayed. Jesus, I did this and that and yet I'm still struggling" because we want an instant fix. That's not what's offered in the gospel. A genuine fix, absolutely. A guaranteed fix, 100%. But we're being transformed.

The first time you mess with an idol, something begins to change, but you're not immediately conformed to the image of that idol. And you do that enough time. You worship money for a long period of time, you're going to be shaped by that. And you come to Jesus, you're going to have to figure out how do I worship Jesus more than I worship that money? Because I got habits now about my relationship with money.

And we can substitute money for sex, for significance, for identity. Like all these things we build these patterns, these habits, these identities, these realities over time. Doesn't it make sense that as we turn our gaze back to Jesus, as we begin to behold his glory, that that process of transformation is going to be similar? It's going to be progressive. That's what the text lays out. From one degree of glory to another.

I'm like, "I want 90 degrees now." And God and the Spirit begin to slowly reorient, redirect and shape us into the image of Jesus. It's a process that culturally is very difficult for us. So we get impatient. We get irritated. At our worst, we blame God. We begin to doubt the gospel. We begin to doubt ourselves. And we give up far too early on the process that God has invited us into.

I also want to point that last week's sermon on the powers plays into this reality probably more than we'd like to acknowledge. There's another passage in Paul, 2 Corinthians 4:4. Paul says something very important and profound. He says:

4 In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

Part of why transformation is so slow and so difficult is it's not simply that we have weaknesses, which we do. It's not simply that sometimes we don't have good discipline patterns, which sometimes we don't. It's that there is a very real enemy seeking intentionally to disrupt the process.

Paul uses this phrase, "the god of this age." There are powers behind the idols and he reveals that they have a very specific strategy. It says "has blinded the minds of the unbelievers." I want you to feel the weight of that word "blinded." It's an aorist verb in the Greek which means it describes a decisive completed action. So it's not like a gradual dimming. It's not a slow drift into poor spiritual vision. When the enemy attacks, he blinds. It's deliberate. It's brutal.

And notice what it's targeting. Blinding their minds to what? From seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. Do you see how specific this is? The powers are fine if you're religious. The powers love it if you're spiritual. That's Romans 1. Here's what the powers don't want in any way, shape, or form. They don't want you looking at Jesus. That's what their attack is. They're intentionally, willfully, purposefully, consistently doing everything that they can, and they can do a lot to blind you from seeing just who Jesus is.

Are you with me this morning? Do you understand what this is saying? This explains so much of our experience. There's so many patterns in our lives, so many sins that we struggle with that we just can't seem to break, can't seem to make any headway on. And sometimes churches make the problem worse, right? Just, "Oh, just believe. If you just believe, should be no problem." We platform somebody that says, "Oh, yeah. Well, I was this and then just magically transformed." And then you're like, "Well, why didn't that happen to me?"

Are you with me this morning? There's this inexplicable pull to the very thing that we hate and that we don't want to do. And it's more than just personal weakness. There are real powers attacking us and distracting us from looking to Jesus.

It says "the god of the world has blinded the minds of unbelievers." I want to address that for a second. Some of you in this room even may not be sure what you believe. Some of you have been around church long enough that you look the part, but maybe nothing's really happened. Gospel's always felt a little distant, a little implausible, a little hard to grab on to. Maybe you've wondered if you're just not the kind of person it works for.

Paul would say that distance that you feel is not just simply an intellectual problem. It's not evidence that the gospel is false or that Jesus is not for you. It's actually a diagnosis of a spiritual reality that is doing everything that it can to stop you from seeing the beauty of the one that gave himself for you. There's something that's covering your eyes and we are by definition blind to our blind spots.

Most of us in this room though claim to be believers. So we read Paul say, "Oh, he's blinded the mind of unbelievers." And there's kind of two mistakes we can make with this. One is we can say, "Well, that's not my problem then because I'm a believer. So, he's blinding the eyes of the unbelievers, but I'm okay." And I'm like, I don't know about you, but I pray this prayer from the Gospels probably every day: "Lord, I believe, help my unbelief" (Mark 9:24). There are areas in all of our hearts and minds and lives and spirits that are not trusting God the way we were designed to trust him.

These are the ways that the image is still bent and broken. Those are the ways that Jesus is calling us to be transformed from one degree of glory to another. Every single one of us in this room has an unbelief problem. And that means that we've got a spiritual problem.

So whether you've made a commitment to Jesus or not, you live in the midst of a cosmic conflict with an enemy that has a singular goal and purpose of blinding you to who Jesus truly is. Now, the other mistake that we can make with this is to go, "Oh, well, I guess the devil just made me do it then. I guess it's not my fault." Paul's not giving you this as an excuse. Naming the enemy does not remove our responsibility. He's not giving you an out. He's trying to give you an accurate map of the territory you're actually in.

I said it last week: You cannot fight what you don't know is there. You can't name what you've written off as superstition. A church full of people who think their struggle with idolatry is simply a personal discipline problem will be stuck in idolatry forever because we're trying to apply personal discipline solutions to spiritual problems that are so much bigger. Are you hearing me this morning? I'm not saying you don't have a role to play. I'm not saying our actions, our choices—we have a responsibility for what we do with them. I'm just saying if we ignore the larger picture, we'll never make it anywhere.

So idolatry corrupts us. It enslaves us to the powers behind the idols. The powers are doing everything they can to blind us to Jesus. That's the reality we find ourselves in. I want you to know that's actually good news. May not seem like it, but it's good news because the same verse that tells us the God of this age has blinded minds tells us what he's trying to blind us from (2 Corinthians 4:4). So it shows us the solution in the understanding and definition of the problem. He's trying to keep us from seeing Jesus who is the image of God.

Once again, he uses that Greek word eikōn. There is something so glorious, so good, so beautiful about Jesus that the enemy has staked his entire strategy on making sure you don't see him clearly. Which means the most important thing we can do this morning or any morning is actually look for Jesus.

So I want to try to do that this morning in a couple of different ways. First, we're going to start with Colossians again. Colossians 1:15-20 has been the foundation, the landing point of this sermon. And I'm doing that on purpose because I believe that repetition is the mother of learning. I believe that we've got to keep coming back and looking from different perspectives. Colossians 1:15-20 is one of those texts you can read a hundred times. You're not going to tap that. It's not going to run dry. There's so much there.

So let me read it to you again this morning:

15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

You've heard this text, but I want to pull out a couple of really important words that Paul uses in this passage. So we see in verse 15 again that word Eikōn — εἰκών - icon—image. The ancient world, every nation in the ancient world built their culture around their temple. Every temple had an idol, an icon, an image. The entire religious architecture of the ancient near east was organized around this question: How do we make the invisible God visible? How do we make our way to God? The answer universally in the ancient areas is we make one. We make him come to us. We construct it. We create it. How do we bring the divine within reach? Well, we do it through idols.

Paul takes that word, the word for idol, and applies it to Jesus. He is the idol. He is the image. This is not accidental. It's deliberate. It's polemical. Paul is writing to people in Colossae who every day all around them see people prostrating themselves, making offerings, gifts, serving these idols made of wood and stone made by human hands. And he goes, "Oh, you want an idol? Oh, I got an idol for you. I got an image for you. There's an image that's above every image."

See, you want to know what the invisible God looks like? You look at Jesus. Jesus is God's answer to the question, how do you make the invisible God visible? The idols are humanity reaching up, trying to pull the divine down into something manageable. Jesus is God reaching down, stepping into history, taking on flesh, moving into the neighborhood. What humanity spent millennia trying to manufacture, God did himself. He became the image.

Now, we've said that before in this series, but I want to look a little deeper at verse 19 because it tells us some more about that imaging that Jesus does. It says:

19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,

That word there, fullness, in the Greek is πλήρωμα — plērōma. It means totality. It means completeness. It's the state of being utterly, entirely full. It's a Thanksgiving dinner word. When you've filled yourself and you feel like—in him all the fullness of God, all the totality, all the completeness, all the way to the top and overflowing is pleased to dwell. Not some of God, not most of God, not a significant portion of God, not God distributed...

The fullness of God dwells in Jesus. See in Colossae that is the exact opposite of what everybody in that city believed. Because you got a temple to this goddess with an image there, and you got a temple to this god with this image there, and another one there, and another one there, and they all have their distinct purpose. Oh, your crops are getting ready to come and you need some rain, go over here. Oh, your wife isn't getting pregnant and you want some divine help to get pregnant, go over to this temple. You understand what I'm saying?

They have this idea that the fullness of God is distributed across a hierarchy of spiritual powers and intermediaries. So you go to one for wisdom, one for healing, another for protection, a different one for access to the divine. The fullness was parceled out, divided up and then you had to go through the steps. You had to learn the right names. You had to find the right incantations. You had to gift the right priest or priestess. You had to work the system to get what you needed.

Does that sound familiar to you? Because I think that's actually how we function with our idols. I doubt there's anybody in this room that just has a singular idol problem. Might be, but I doubt it. Most of us have a bunch of different things besides God that we look to that we should only look to God to satisfy.

So our financial portfolio offers us that little piece of security that we're longing for. Our image, our platform, our reputation offers you that little piece of significance that you desire. Your relationships offer you that little piece of love that you need to feel good. Your control over your schedule, over your health, over your environment - it's giving you a little bit of peace. Each one is a fragment, a shard of the fullness you were made for.

And we keep collecting shards hoping that enough pieces will eventually add up to wholeness. But they never do. The idol never says enough because a fragment can never satisfy a hunger for the whole. In fact, they leave us hungrier, thirstier, more wanting, more longing, more hurting than when we first go to them.

Paul says the whole is a person. The entire fullness. Everything you've been searching for in your entire life, every idol you've ever looked to to provide you something, that something is found in totality in Jesus. Not distributed, not fragmented, whole, complete, visible.

And what he comes to do as the fullness. Dan already talked about this at the beginning of the service. In verse 20, we read this:

20 And through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

The two English words we have there, "making peace" in the Greek is this really long compound word - eirēnopoieō. Eirēnē - peace, poieō - to make. In fact, Paul might have made this word up by combining those two. It's the only time it's used in the scriptures. He takes this idea of peace, eirēnē, it means the absence of conflict, the cessation of hostility. And then he takes the verb poieō - to make, to construct, to develop. And he says Jesus did that. He made peace.

And how does he do it? He makes peace by the blood of his cross. It's interesting. I was thinking about this week. What are his last words on the cross? He doesn't say "it started," right? It doesn't say "it's initiated." It's Τετέλεσται, - tetelestai. "It is finished." It's paid in full. It's complete. It's done. He made peace.

Man, I don't know if I can really wrap my brain around that honestly. Can you even imagine peace? A world without conflict. Not managed conflict, not negotiated mediation where everybody's equally dissatisfied, no conflict, no hostility, no factions, no more us and them.

On one level, I think I know what that means. On another level, I have no clue because I've never experienced that an instant in my life. We've all been born into a fractured, bent, corrupted, warped world that is us versus them. Us versus God. I can barely imagine because we've never lived it. Conflict is so woven into our experience. I'm not sure we could really even understand or believe what life could look like without it.

And this is what Jesus came to make. This is what Paul says he made in the cross. Not approximate, not gesture towards, not inspire us to work for peace. Jesus made it. He produced it. He brought it into existence by the blood of his cross.

Think about your idols one more time. Every single one of them underneath the specific desire for money or approval or control or comfort is a desire actually for this. We want the conflict to stop. The conflict with the person who hurt us. The conflict between who we are and who we think we should be. The conflict between what we have and what we're afraid of losing. The conflict inside our own chest at 2 in the morning when everything is quiet and nothing feels okay.

We have a deep and abiding desire for peace. Our idols have been promising it and failing to deliver it our entire life. Every idol we've ever built was a failed attempt to manufacture what only one person has ever actually made. It's not one place in the entire universe where peace is not promised, not offered, not approximated, but made and was made by the blood of his cross. It was brought into existence by the one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

What grips me every time I think about this text? It's the one who had the fullness. The one in whom everything holds together. The one before whom every power and principality is a creature. The one that made peace. He didn't do it by a decree from a throne. He didn't do it by display of cosmic power. He bled. He wept. He died. The crucified one made peace. No idol's ever done that. No other power will die for its worshippers. They take, they consume, they demand. Jesus gives. He gave. Only Jesus. Only Jesus gives. Only Jesus makes what he promises. You see then why the enemy will do everything that he can to keep you from looking at Jesus for seeing a fuller, clearer picture of him. Because they know. They know that when you really and genuinely, consistently, persistently look at Jesus, you're going to find in him the things that you were made by God to hunger for. And the idols don't stand a chance.

So, how do we look at Jesus? One of the most obvious ways is to look at him in the word. And we've got in one sense, every word in the scripture is pointing us towards him. We got four gospels that are specifically written to tell us about his life. We got a bunch of New Testament letters explaining the reality to unpack, but we need to look at Jesus in the scriptures.

I want to look at a really well-known moment in the life of Jesus. We find it at the end of Matthew 3 and the beginning of Matthew 4. Sometimes the chapter and verses drive me crazy because they're not original and sometimes they just mess up a really good story. And that's actually what's happening here.

At the end of Matthew 3, Jesus is baptized and something amazing happens. You remember this story? It says:

16 And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; 17 and behold, a voice from heaven said, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased."

I wish you all would let me preach for four hours this morning because there's so much here. Oh, there's so much here you guys. But just let me point out symbolically that what's happening is a creation event. There's a creation motif. What do we have? Water, spirit descending like a dove hovering over. It's supposed to take you back to Genesis, the opening words of Genesis. So we have this idea being formed in the baptism description of a replay of creation.

And then it says this: "behold, a voice from the heavens said, 'This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased.'" Awesome. Those three phrases and they're all hyperlinked to the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures. "This is my son" - it's a reference to Psalm 2, Jesus as the Davidic king. "This is my beloved one" - it's a reference to Genesis 22 and Isaac, the son of Abraham. Jesus is the seed of Abraham in whom all the nations will be blessed. "With whom I am well pleased" - this is a reference to the suffering servant song in Isaiah 42. Jesus is not only the son of David, he's not only the son of Abraham, he is the son of God come to set things right. Like in one sentence, we get the whole Old Testament. Just whoop, there he is. The fullness in Jesus.

Okay, that's cool. That's awesome. Now, what happens next? It's so strange because what would we expect? If Hollywood's writing this? If this is a Marvel movie or something, right? Like, so he's announced and he comes up and God's like, "THAT'S HIM." And then Jesus just starts going right preaching and healing and casting out demons. And the very next verse it says:

1 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

Well of course he was. No really, of course he was. We have this new creation reality. See what Adam failed to do, Jesus is going to succeed in. In the same way that the dove and the spirit hovered over the waters and brought order out of chaos, brought life out of death, brought beauty out of all the broken, now God is going to do in Jesus. The question is, will Jesus make the same mistake that Adam did?

So, the spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And then look at the nature of the first temptation. I'm only going to look at the first one very briefly. Okay, my briefly.

2 And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.

Come on now. Forty days and forty nights. A lot of us, we can't go four hours. Forty days. This is one of the great understatements in the Bible. He didn't eat anything for forty days and forty nights and he was hungry. Well, duh.

Okay, but that's not - just think about what's going on. The first temptation Jesus is going to encounter when tempted by the devil is centered around food. Ringing any bells here? It's supposed to. You see where it's going. The temptation that Adam and Eve failed in Genesis 3 is going to be replayed by Jesus. But there are significant differences.

Where were Adam and Eve when they first were tempted? They were in a garden, right? What do you got in the garden? An abundance of food.

16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."

It's one of my favorite sentences in the Hebrew. It literally says, "You may eat, eat, eating, you may eat. Out of any tree." So, Adam and Eve find themselves in abundance, right? Food is not an issue. They've got all that they could want. It says, "But of this one tree you can't eat or you will die, die, die." The Hebrew is so beautiful on this because it grabs your attention - eat out of all of it, right? But if you do eat of this one you will die, die, die.

Okay, Adam and Eve are tested in the garden where they had plenty to eat. They were tested in abundance. Jesus is tested in the wilderness where he had nothing to eat and he chose to eat nothing. So when the tempter comes...

When the tempter comes to Jesus, what does he say? The tempter came to him and said:

3 If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.

If you are the new Adam, if you are the new human, if you are the true imager, this shouldn't be a problem for you. You're in the wilderness. There's nothing around you but stones. Make them turn into bread.

And Jesus says something so interesting:

4 Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Which is interesting because I need to eat to live, right? You need to eat to live, don't you? Jesus is saying something very interesting here. Yes, you have to eat bread to live, but guess what happens to everybody that eats bread? They die. Get a little bloated first, but then they die.

So what Jesus is saying is that yes, there is a type of life that comes from eating bread, but at the end of the day, it still leads to death. But there's a type of life that doesn't know death. There's a type of life that defeats death. And it only comes not from stuffing your face with what you can grab, but by receiving what God gives you. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

See, Jesus is getting to the heart of it, and he's doing what Adam and Eve didn't do. The devil comes to Eve in the garden. He says, "Well, did God really say this?" And he twists the abundance thing and does all this sort of stuff. Eve looks at the fruit and she looks at the tree and it's good. It's desirable and it begins to have a purpose to her. The enemy convinces her that you don't find life by doing what God tells you to do. You don't find life in the word of God. You find life by taking it for yourself.

So she saw it and she took it. If you were here a few years ago when we walked through Genesis, this is one of the major themes through Genesis. She saw it and she took it. This is how the falls happen over and over again. She saw it and she took it.

I don't want to miss the reality. The problem was not the tree and the problem was not the fruit. The tree was good. The tree was beautiful. The problem was the mistaken belief that that tree could offer her something better than what God was offering. That was the problem. The problem was the taking, the seizing, the pride that says I know better. I know what I need more than the one who made me. So I'll take it for myself.

And what does Jesus see? Well, he doesn't see a beautiful tree. He doesn't see the abundance of the garden. He just sees stones. Nothing but stones. "Turn them into bread," the tempter whispers. "Choose what you can see. God's holding out on you. You know what's best for you, Jesus." But Jesus doesn't bite. Pun intended.

Jesus chose to trust God. Life doesn't just come from bread. Yeah, he's hungry. He's hungry, but he's going to trust that God is going to be his source of life. Eve chose the fruit because she thought it would give her life when only God gives life. Ultimately, it gave what God said it would give: death.

But I want to connect this even more. I want you to see something that I didn't see till this week, and I've studied Genesis a lot. What's the first thing Adam and Eve did after eating the fruit?

7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they made loincloths for themselves.

What have I been saying throughout this series? We become what we behold. What did Eve and Adam choose to worship and trust? Give their allegiance and their faith to? A tree. And what's the first thing that they do? They dress up like a tree. Really, there's something here. We go to the golden calf in Exodus - they make a bull and then they begin to act like one. This is what happens. This is not a clever little idea. We become what we behold. This is spiritual and physical reality.

God in his grace covers them. God in his grace doesn't give up on them. God in his grace doesn't leave it there and he brings Jesus. See, when we worship an idol, any idol, anything other than the God whose image we bear, we are bent by it, we are corrupted and contorted into that lesser image. And what Jesus does is break the mold by refusing to bend.

What Jesus does in that wilderness temptation - that's just one of the temptations. He knocks all of them out of the park. He is the spotless lamb of God. The one who never sinned. The one who never broke faith. The one who never saw and took. And he does it not in a garden where obedience costs nothing. He does it in the wilderness where trust costs everything. Hungry, depleted, tested at the level of his identity and his body simultaneously. And he holds true. He receives from God rather than seizing for himself. He lives by the word rather than by taking the bread.

Jesus in this moment is the human being God means for all of us to be. It's what God had in mind in Genesis 1 when he said, "Let us make man in our image" (Genesis 1:26). Not a being who performs obedience from a position of comfort and abundance. A being who trusts the father so completely, who has received his identity so fully from the father's declaration that even in the wilderness, even in genuine deprivation, even when everything in his body is screaming, "Take it," he can say, "Man does not live by bread alone."

Jesus is the new and true and better human, the new and better Adam. Paul describes it this way in 1 Corinthians 15:

45 Thus it is written, "The first man Adam became a living being"; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.

It's an interesting play and contrast that he's doing. The first Adam was a taker. The second Adam, Jesus, is a giver. He's a giver.

Thus it is written, 'The first man Adam became a living being'; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit... The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven... Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.

This is the heart of Jesus as the image, as the idol, is that he doesn't just come to be that idol. He comes to be that idol, that image, that imager so that you and I in him can be remade and restored to bearing the image we were made to bear in the first place. Paul says we will bear the image of the man of heaven. But it's in the future tense. It's a first person plural. We will do it. But we're not there yet. Why? Because we're in this process of beholding the glory of the Lord. We are transformed from one degree of glory to another (2 Corinthians 3:18). This is not a work that we do in and of ourselves. This is done by the spirit of God.

If we don't see the beauty, if we don't see the glory, if we don't see the distinctness of Jesus, we don't behold it, we can't become it. So the good news of Jesus is that the bent mirror that we have become is not our permanent condition. There is a last Adam and he is making a new humanity. Image bearers who degree by degree, glory by glory are being conformed to the image of the one who made us for himself.

Paul doesn't say we should bear his image. He doesn't say we must try to bear his image. He says we will bear his image. It's the spirit's work, not ours. Our job is not to perform what Jesus has already performed. Our job is to behold the one who has performed it and trust the same spirit who led him into the wilderness and sustained him is the same spirit that is at work right now in us.

We become what we behold. I want you to feel that this morning. It's not just a diagnosis. It's not just a warning. It's not just the bad news about idolatry. It's the good news about the gospel. The same mechanism that makes idolatry so destructive makes beholding Jesus so transformative. The same principle that bent the mirror is the principle that straightens it.

I've said this multiple times in the series. If beholding a lesser thing makes you lesser, then beholding the truest, fullest, most magnificent person who has ever existed does the exact opposite. It restores. Idols dehumanize. Jesus rehumanizes. He straightens what was bent degree by degree, glory by glory.

Which means the most important question you will answer today or any day God gives you life and breath is not which idol do I need to give up. That's a good question but it's not the most important one. The most important question is what am I choosing to behold? What am I looking at? What am I looking to? Because you can't stop beholding. You're made to behold. It's not optional for image bearers. It's the mechanism by which you become. The question is not whether you will behold something. The question is only and always what.

Part of the reason that the idols still have such a grip on us, the reason the patterns run so deep and the desires change so slowly, it's not primarily that you haven't tried hard enough to stop beholding the idols. It's that you haven't seen Jesus clearly enough to want to behold him more and not need to behold them at all anymore. The God of this age strikes us blind, tries to shatter our belief, specifically aimed at stopping us from seeing the glory of Christ because the idols cannot compete with him.

I started in 2 Corinthians 4. I want to finish there because Paul has a little bit more to say. He says:

4 In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 5 For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. 6 For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Do you see what I'm saying? The God of this age is trying to blind you from seeing. But God, the God who says, "Let there be light," He speaks that to our hearts. Let there be light. He lets us see Jesus. Paul's quoting Genesis 1:3 (Genesis 1:3), that the act of creation, which means that the act of beholding Jesus is an act of creation.

The moment when God looked at a dark and formless void and simply spoke and light came, not because the darkness cooperated, not because the conditions were favorable, not because the void had prepared itself to receive the light. God spoke and the darkness had no answer for it. Light came because God said so. That's what our hearts need. Let there be light.

And notice where the light lands. It's not in a general spiritual illumination. It's not a vague sense of religious ideals or warmth. It's the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus the King. God speaks light into human hearts for a specific purpose to show them a specific face. The invisible God has given himself a face. The fullness has a countenance. The one who makes peace by blood has offered you something to see.

God himself, the same God who made the cosmos by speaking, is speaking that face into visibility in your heart right now. Which means this, your inability or lack of desire to behold Jesus more consistently is not the final word on your life. It's not evidence that you're beyond transformation. It's not proof that the gospel doesn't work for you. It just means that the enemy has struck you blind. But the enemy doesn't have the last word because our God does and our God's word. Our God is still speaking. Let there be light.

So here's the invitation. Not a program, not a resolution, not a list of things that you've got to do to try harder at.

Disciplines have their place. Don't get me wrong. In some sense, this is a discipline in and of itself. It's simply this: turn and aim your heart towards God. Turn and aim.

See, we're all aiming at something. We're all beholding something. The image I've been using in this series is that of a mirror. You're a mirror. You're made to receive the glory of God and reflect it out. Idolatry, the fall, willful sin bends, distorts, and corrupts the mirror. We try to fix it with idolatry. We just make it worse.

Can't fix a mirror by staring at the distortion, right? Can't fix it by staring at the distortion. You fix it by turning it towards the right source of light. The gospel invites us to turn our lives, our hearts, our minds, our everything to the sun, to the one we're made to reflect.

The sun doesn't need your help to shine. The light doesn't need your assistance to illuminate. The glory of God in the face of Jesus doesn't need you to manufacture anything. It just needs you to look, to turn, to behold.

And then this is the promise: The same spirit who led Jesus into the wilderness, the same one that sustained him, the same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is the spirit who takes up residence in every person who turns towards the sun and begins the work of straightening that which was bent. We don't fix ourselves. We behold the one and only one who fixes us.

The bent mirror is not your permanent condition. Behold him. Keep beholding him. Turn every distraction, every idol, every lesser image back into what it is—a fragment, a shard, a counterfeit of the one thing your heart has always been searching for. And turn your face towards the sun.

We become what we behold. Let us behold Jesus together. Amen