The Exchange

So I want us to think for a moment about the revelatory nature of worship. Worship, when we examine what it is that we worship, it reveals something so significant about who we are and who we're becoming. It reveals what our heart actually loves. Not what we say we love, not what we think we should love. Those are often very different things if we're honest. But when we take the time to look at what we actually love, things begin to become clear.

And the way that we do that is to look and to think about what is it we run to when things get hard. It's easy to give a Sunday school answer. "Oh, I run to God." But do we? Or do we run to our friends? Do we run to entertainment? Do we run to alcohol? Do we run to pleasure? Do we run to distraction? What is it that we actually do when life is hard? What do you fear losing when life around you seems fragile? What do you consider worthy of your time, your money? What's worth sacrificing for? That's a revelation about what actually holds our heart. Because the things that we will sacrifice for, the things that we will spend for, the things that we will submit to, that's what we worship.

Who or what you ultimately choose to follow and obey when it costs you something, that's your functional God. And here's again the reality and the implication: worship is not optional. You don't get to opt out of worship. You've been made a worshiping being. You don't get to decide whether you worship. You only get to decide what or who you worship. And that's just the reality of our nature, our contingent nature. We're made. We don't make ourselves. And so we find ourselves in a reality where we need to orient ourselves around something. We need to guide ourselves to something.

There's something about the human heart. There's something about the reality of what it means to be human is that we're not made for self-sufficiency. And I think that's so blatantly obviously true. Just look at life. Look at yourself. Look at people around you. We're hungering creatures, creatures of desire, creatures that lack and are looking to find meaning and significance in something outside of ourselves.

Every life is organized around some center of gravity, some thing or person or idea that functions as the answer to the question, what do I need most to be okay? What do I need most to feel satisfied? What do I need most to feel complete? That's your God. That's your altar. And whatever it is, it has your heart. And whatever has your heart has your life.

I've always described and defined worship as defining reality. Worship is reality alignment. Here's what I mean. If God is the creator and sustainer of everything that exists, and spoilers, he is, if God is the creator and sustainer of all things, then he is ultimate reality. He's not one option among many. He's not the religious version of reality. God is reality. He's the ground of all existence, the source of all life, and we were made by him for him.

Augustine said it so beautifully: "Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee." The restlessness that we feel, that low-grade sense that something is always slightly off, that we haven't quite arrived, that there's always one more thing that we need—it's not a personality quirk. It's a theological condition. You were made for God, and until you rest in him, nothing else will truly or fully satisfy.

So worship at its deepest level is an intentional alignment of our lives to the ultimate reality of God—his character, his nature, his presence, his authority. When we worship, we're choosing to align ourselves to the reality of God. We're essentially agreeing with what is true. We're reminding ourselves and declaring to the world that he is the center, not me. That he's the provider and security, not Bitcoin. That he's the protector, not my politics or nation state. That he is my redeemer, not my resume or my reputation, certainly not my religious performance. Worship is the act of orienting your whole life around that which is actually, ultimately, eternally true.

Think of it like a compass. A compass doesn't create north, right? A compass doesn't create north. It aligns itself to true north. The needle doesn't decide where north is. It's not a vote. It's not up for grabs. It doesn't negotiate. It simply responds to what is already objectively truly there. That's what our heart is to be. Our heart is the compass that needs to align itself to the God that is already objectively truly there. When it's working right, there's a rightness there, a settledness there, a peace that, as Paul says, passes all understanding.

Of course, one of the problems with a compass is that the reading can be distorted by other magnetic fields. There can be those things that interfere, that point us to false north. And that's a problem if you're lost in the woods. That's a problem if you don't know where you're going. In the same way, there are forces, magnetic fields if you will, that draw the attention and affection of our hearts—competing poles, rival centers of gravity, things that promise to orient our lives but can't actually get us there. The Bible has a word for these. It calls them idols.

This is functionally what an idol is: a false north. If true worship is aligning with the reality of God, then false worship, idolatry, is actually a break with reality. It's orienting our lives around something that isn't ultimate, isn't infinite, isn't stable enough to hold the weight of what you're putting on it. It's a kind of spiritual delusion. We take a finite, created, contingent thing and treat it as if it has the weight, the power, and the stability of the creator himself. We ask a career to give us the identity and significance that only God can bestow to us. We want a spouse or a partner to Jerry Maguire us: "You complete me." We look to a bank account to give us the security that only the Father can truly offer.

So as we walk into this series, here's a simple definition of idolatry: Idolatry is anything we look to for what only God can provide. Anything we look to for what only God can provide.

I want us to begin this morning in Romans chapter 1. Romans is probably the most important book that Paul ever wrote and one of the most phenomenal pieces of literature describing the goodness of the gospel, of the glory of God. He begins in chapter 1 not with the solution but with the diagnosis. He wants us to understand the problem that Jesus comes to solve. So let's take a look at what he says. Romans chapter 1, beginning in verse 18. Here's the problem:

They choose to live in unreality rather than run in the reality of God. It says:

We live in a time and a culture and a worldview that loves to doubt everything. This reality—we don't know that there's a God. We don't know with certainty. We don't know. And I love that Paul is writing this a couple thousand years ago. He's like, listen, there's no excuses here. And he gives one of the simplest arguments for the existence of God, and simple works. We look around ourselves at the complexity and intricacy of creation and we go, there's a creator. It says there's no excuse for not acknowledging the reality of the one who has made all.

Which, if I was going to write a history of the last hundred years, might be the title of my book: "Claiming to Be Wise, They Became Fools."

Catch that word exchanged. This is the problem with idolatry. It's at its core a really, really bad deal. They exchange the glory of the immortal God for images. I want you to hold on to that word because Paul's going to come back to it over and over again in Romans chapter 1. It's the drumbeat of this whole passage because it's showing us that this isn't the language of an innocent mistake or a gradual drift. Exchange is intentional. It's the language of a transaction, a deliberate swap.

We looked at the infinite eternal all-satisfying glory of God and we said, "I'll take what's behind door number two." We took something lesser, something finite, something created and said, "Yeah, I'll take that instead. I'll build my life around that instead. I'll make that my north instead." It's an exchange. It's intentional. And it comes with a price. Paul says, "Their thinking becomes futile. Their hearts are darkened. They claim to be wise but become fools."

What Paul's laying out here is a trajectory of idolatry. It doesn't just leave you empty. It doesn't just disappoint you. It diminishes you. Idolatry makes us less than what we were. See, we're going to talk deeply about this next week, but you were made to reflect the glory of God. And so when you stop beholding that glory and start beholding something smaller, you start to shrink. It diminishes you. It hollows you out.

A phrase claiming to be wise, they became fools. Let me spend a minute here. It's easy to read that and think of the low-hanging fruit, the obvious cultural realities that we encounter on a daily basis. Claiming to be wise, they become fools. Doctors and Supreme Court justices that can't define what a woman is. Right? I can go on and on and on, the idea that sexual liberation has brought about joy and happiness and freedom. Like we can go down the road and it might make us feel really good to think about them.

This is not a sermon for people out there. This is a sermon that I wrote for myself and I'm letting you listen to. This is a sermon for us. And the foolishness that is hardest to see is always the foolishness that's closest to home. So, let me name a few things that might hit a little closer.

How about the foolishness of security? The quiet, respectable belief that if I can just get to a certain number, my bank account, my portfolio, my retirement fund, then I'll be okay. Then I can breathe. Then I'll be safe. Hear me this morning. That's not wisdom. That's an idol wearing a suit.

How about the foolishness of control? Any control freaks in the room? If you didn't put your hand up, nobody did, then you're a liar. No, like we are by sin, by definition, is the desire to control that which only God controlled. Like we are, this is a real idol. The exhausting anxiety-producing conviction that if I can just manage enough variables, the right school, the right neighborhood, the right plan, the right precautions, if I can just manage it, I can keep chaos at bay. It's not prudence, that's worship.

How about the foolishness of reputation? The way we curate and protect and perform for the approval of people whose opinions really don't matter in eternity. We're sacrificing our peace, our authenticity, the freedom to be who we truly are for our idea of what other people think about us. That's a sacrifice on the altar of other people's opinions. Claiming to be wise, we become fools. It's not just out there. It's in here.

See, as I've said already, worship is not only revelatory, it's formative. We don't just seek after what we love, we're shaped by what we love. And this is the part that should stop us cold. It's not just that idolatry disappoints us. It's that idolatry deforms us. It changes us. It makes us into something.

Listen to how Paul continues his thought in Romans 1. He says:

There it is again. Exchange. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie. Paul won't let us miss it. It's the word he keeps reaching to and for because it captures something essential about what idolatry is. It's not just weakness. It's not just temptation. It's a conscious trade. Like every bad trade, you give up something of infinite value and walk away with something that can't deliver what it's promised.

Paul says something there that should really capture our attention. God gave them up. He says, "Because of this, God gave them up." That's what you want. Okay, you can have it. I want to be careful here because it's easy to read that and think, "Well, this is God's lightning bolt." But it's actually not that. Divine punishment from a distance is not what this is about.

God's judgment in Romans 1 is not a lightning bolt from the sky. It's something far more sobering. God says, "As you wish. You want the idol, you can have it and everything that comes with it." He hands us over to the very thing we've chosen to worship. He allows the transaction to complete and the consequences, the darkened hearts, the futile thinking, the slow unraveling of our humanity. Those aren't arbitrary punishments. They're the natural inevitable result of building your life on something that was never designed to hold it. Because worship is formative. We're shaped by what we love.

One of my favorite authors says it this way: We become what we behold. We become what we behold. Whatever you're orienting your life around, whatever you're trusting, whatever you're sacrificing for, whatever you choose to obey, it is quietly, steadily, relentlessly shaping you into its image.

It's slyly making you into something. The question is, what is it making you into? Here's the thing: Paul doesn't invent this idea. Paul is drawing on a tradition that goes back centuries. The Hebrew scriptures are replete with this point over and over and over and over again.

Psalm 115 is maybe the most straightforward and blatant expression of this truth. I want you to listen to it. Psalm 115, I'm going to read verses 1 to 8.

Here's the key in verse eight: those who make them become like them. Listen to what you just said. They got mouths but they don't speak. They got ears but they don't hear. They got eyes but they don't see. You think about the times in the Hebrew scriptures when Israel is faithless, when they break covenant, when they're under judgment. And how often does God describe them this way? "You'll see and you don't see. You'll hear and you don't hear." This is the natural consequence of idolatry. Those who make them become like them.

These idols are blind to reality, deaf to the voice of God, incapable and unable of satisfying. And so because of that, the idol doesn't just disappoint you. It doesn't just fail you, it hollows you out. The idol makes you into its image. We become what we behold.

And I know some of you are thinking, "Well, this really isn't a sermon for me. I don't have an idol of wood or silver or stone in my house. That's an ancient thing. That's “another people” thing. I don't do that.” “You do that." I mean, I pulled out the pointing finger in everything. We do that. An idol is not primarily a physical object. A physical object is just the most obvious version of something that is far more pervasive and far more subtle.

An idol is anything—any person, any idea, any experience, any power, any dream—that we elevate to the place that only God deserves. We make people the object of our worship. We make political parties the center of our hope. We make experiences—comfort, pleasure, achievement, adventure, all good things, by the way, but terrible things when we make them our master. We make our own image, our own reputation, our body, our brand, the thing that we sacrifice everything to protect and maintain.

John Calvin said this in his Institutes: "The human mind is a perpetual factory of idols." That's one of the most simple and succinct statements about the reality of human nature that I've ever read. The human mind is a perpetual factory of idols. And here's what I want you to notice: he didn't say the pagan mind. He didn't say the secular mind. He said the human mind—yours, mine, the mind that chose to be here this morning and sing worship songs to God that will then choose later to scroll anxiously through a portfolio or doom scroll yourself in entertainment tonight. The mind that prays on Sunday and then white knuckles it for control on Monday.

We are all, every one of us, in the business of manufacturing gods—things that we can manage, things that we can see, things that make us feel more immediate and more in control. They're more tangible than the invisible God who made us. We all make our idols.

And that's why we need things like Lent. We need things to reorient us. It's one of the beautiful things about this season. The 40 days of Lent is not about religious performance. It's not about giving up chocolate or caffeine to prove something to God. Like, "Hey God, look at me. Look at me. Look what I did." It's a diagnostic. It's the intentional creation of space—space to get quiet enough to hear what our heart is actually saying.

In our culture, that's not easy. We're a busy culture. We're a loud culture. I read something a while ago. I tried to find it this week. I couldn't find it. It was this article about how 90% of the people that they surveyed admitted that they were afraid of silence. And I thought, "Yeah, I can see that." We fill our days. We fill every available moment with a podcast, with music, with television, with this, with that. And we've lost the ability to sit and be with ourselves. And maybe we do that for a reason. Maybe we do that because we're afraid of what we find in the silence.

Lent—practices like Lent—give us the space to ask the questions that we normally drown out with noise and busyness and consumption. Questions like: What do I truly trust in? Not what do I say I trust in—what do I actually run to? What do I hope for? What do I long for? What do I sacrifice for? What would devastate me if I lost it? Answers to those questions will tell you more about what you worship than anything you do on a Sunday morning here.

We pray and we fast. We create space in a season like Lent because we need God to show us what we can't see by ourselves. You are by definition blind to your blind spots. We need God to reveal, to show us, right? This is one of my favorite prayers of David in Psalm 139:

I don't know if you've thought about how much courage it takes to pray that. This is one of the most vulnerable, dangerous prayers in the Bible, but it is the posture that we need. It's the posture of Lent. It's not "God, look at how well I'm doing," but "God, look at what I can't see. Show me what has my heart. Show me where I've wandered. Show me the idols I've made."

This is critical. That prayer is only half of the equation. See, identification of our idols is not the destination. If all we do is identify and stare at our idols, examine them, name them, feel guilty about them, we're still not free of them. We'll just be more aware of them. And awareness alone does not produce transformation.

Here's what we need. I love alliteration. Let me give you three Rs. One, we reject it. You've got to call it what it is. You've got to name it, identify it. The Spirit shows you, Lord, that has my heart. We must make a conscious decision to reject it. And then we repent. We reject. We repent. We turn away from it. We confess it. We ask God for cleansing and forgiveness and for help.

But rejection and repentance by themselves are not enough. You cannot simply stop worshiping because you're a worshiper. You've got to reject it. You've got to repent. And then you must replace it. It must be replaced with something better, something truer, something more worthy, something more real. Now Jesus himself said that a house swept clean and left empty doesn't stay empty for long. We reject, we repent, we replace—all three in that order. And the replacement is everything.

The question is not just what do I need to repent of? The question is what will I replace it with? We don't drive out a love by fighting it. Be nice if we could do that. I'm just going to stop loving that thing. Doesn't work that way. I'm just going to stop desiring that thing. Doesn't work that way. We drive it out by finding something more beautiful, more real, more worthy of our worship.

The idol loses its grip not when we stare at it harder, but when we stop staring at it altogether and turn our eyes towards something greater. What the 19th century Scottish preacher Thomas Chalmers called the expulsive power of a new affection. Your heart loves something that might be wicked and evil. Your heart loves something that might in and of itself be good, but when you make that good your ultimate, it becomes bad. The only way we break the power of that idol, the only way those desires are transformed, is when they're replaced with something better, something truer. You don't empty the heart by force. You fill it with something better.

That something better, shocker, is going to be Jesus. Listen to what Paul says:

Again, such a simple statement, so deeply profound. This in a nutshell describes the power of sanctification, the power of transformation that is found in Jesus and the gospel. And at its core is beholding the glory of the Lord. Don't rush past that. Paul said that as we behold the glory of the Lord, as we fix our eyes on Him, as we make Him our true north, we orient our lives around Him and align ourselves with the reality of who He is, we are transformed. We're transformed by exposure, by beholding.

See, the same principle that makes idolatry so destructive is the very principle that makes the gospel so powerful. We become what we behold. If beholding an idol—something deaf, blind, finite, and hollow—makes us deaf, blind, finite, and hollow, then beholding Jesus does the very opposite. It restores us. It opens our eyes. It fills what the idol emptied. It rebuilds what the idol broke.

Notice Paul says this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. This isn't a self-improvement program. The Spirit is the one who does the transforming. Our job is to behold. His job is to transform. If worshiping idols dehumanizes us, and it does, then worshiping Jesus rehumanizes us. It's not just a clever turn of phrase. It's the logic of the gospel.

We were made in the image of God, made to reflect His glory, bear His character, and live in His reality. And when we exchanged that glory for the glory of idols, we didn't just sin against God. We lost something of ourselves. We became less than what we were made to be. But Jesus, He's the true image, the perfect human, the one in whom the fullness of God dwells. He comes to bring it back. Not just to forgive, to restore, to make us again what we were always meant to be.

Which brings us to Paul again in Colossians chapter 1. And I'm going to use this as kind of the bedrock text through the rest of this Lent series:

He, Jesus, is the image of the invisible God. The Greek word here is eikon. It's where we get the English word icon—image, idol. He is the icon. He is the image of the invisible God. Paul is saying when you look at Jesus, you're seeing exactly what God looks like. Not an approximation, not a religious idea, not a theological concept. The reality, the reality that makes all reality, is expressed and revealed in history in a life that you can read about, in a person that you can come to know.

Here's what I want you to see. This is where it gets beautiful and personal. Jesus is not only the perfect image of God—because He's the perfect image of God, He's also the perfect image of humanity. We look at Jesus to see what we were always meant to look like. He's the template, the original, the fullest, truest, most complete expression of what it means to be a human being made in the image of God.

age of God. When you want to know what a fully worshiping, fully alive, fully human life looks like, you look at Jesus. The way He loved people, the way He handled power, the way He faced suffering, the way He spoke to man, and the way He spoke to God, the way He dealt with temptation and the enemy, the way He prayed, the way He served. This is not just God on display. This is humanity on display. Humanity the way that God intended it.

Look at what Paul says. In Him, all things hold together. All things, not just some things, not just the spiritual things. All things—your marriage, your finances, your identity, your future, your fear, the good things that we turn into ultimate things. God puts them in their right place. And in their right place, they are then once again what they're supposed to be, blessings of God, good gifts that we are to enjoy and receive when they're in the right alignment.

See, every idol you've ever built was an attempt to find something that could hold your life together. Paul is saying there's only one thing that can do that and that's Jesus. He's the one in whom all things hold together. The one who doesn't just promise stability, He is stability. He doesn't just offer peace. He makes peace by the blood of His cross. He's the true image and the true imager. He's the reality that every idol, every false north is the counterfeit of. And Jesus is what your heart has been so restlessly longing for all your life.

So we look to Him. We behold His glory not as a religious obligation, not as one more thing to add to the list. We look to Him because He's the only one worth beholding. Because beholding Him is the only thing that will actually transform us. Because He is, as Paul says, the one in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. And He is more than enough.

I love how the writer of Hebrews frames this in practice. Hebrews chapter 12, verses 1-2:

How do we do it? How do we cast away our sin? How do we lay down the burdens? How do we live the life that we were meant to live? We do it by looking to Jesus, the founder and perfector of our faith.

This Lent is an invitation. The next six weeks leading up to the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus is an opportunity to turn our eyes away from the false norths and fix them on true north, on Jesus.

So let me end with a question that I've brought up over and over and over again this morning. A question I want you to take with you and wrestle with. What do you think about when you don't have anything to think about? Where does your mind go when things get quiet? When the meeting ends? When the kids go to bed? When the noise stops? What does your mind run to? What does your heart reach for? Because that thing, that person, that number, that scenario you keep hoping for, that is your functional savior. That's what you're offering your worship to.

And I'm not asking you to ask that so that you feel guilty. It's not an activity of condemnation. I'm not asking so you can feel guilty and try harder. I want you to reflect on that and ask that question because most of us have never actually named it. We've never looked at the thing that has our heart and called it what it is. This thing that might be evil. This thing that might be inherently good but when we make it into the ultimate thing becomes an evil. It needs to be named because until we name it, we can't bring it to God. Until we own it, we can't replace it.

So this week and throughout the Lenten season, pray, fast, earnestly. Seek the wisdom and discernment of the Spirit of God who alone brings true transformation. Ask Him to show you the idols that have invaded your heart. And when He shows you that idol, don't run from it. Name it. You can't lay down what you haven't picked up.

Here's what I really need you to hear. I really need you to hear. You're not going to white knuckle your way out of idolatry. You're not going to outdiscipline your desires. You're not going to win this battle by trying harder. Willpower alone is not the answer. The answer is a better beholding. You don't drive out a love by fighting it. It's like squeezing Jell-O. The harder you squeeze, the less you hold. You drive it out by finding something more beautiful, more real, more worthy, more true, more satisfying, more fulfilling, more dependable, more accessible and beholding.

As we behold the glory of the Lord, as we fix our eyes on the true image, we're transformed. Not by effort, but by exposure. The idol loses its grip not when we stare at it, but when we stop staring at it and turn our eyes to Jesus. Friends, we become what we behold.

So these next 40 days, don't just fast from something. Fast toward someone. Fast to the one who holds all things together. Every time you feel the pull of the idol, every time your anxiety spikes, every time you reach for the thing that numbs you, let that be a signal. Not simply a signal of your failure, but a signal to look up. A signal to pull out your compass. A signal to behold the one who is the image of the invisible God. The one in whom all things hold together. The one who's more real than your fear, more stable than your portfolio, more satisfying than anything this world will ever offer you.

We become what we behold. So church, let's behold Jesus. And I just want to say, if you've never done that before, if your heart has never actually named Jesus as the one that you are looking to, this sermon, this series is an invitation for you to consider the reality of who you are, the reality of what you're made for, and the reality of what is offered to all of us.