Consider that as Christians whenever we become angry, covetous, and proud or break any of God’s commands it is because, at that moment, we fear and worship something else more than we do God. As an example: a woman grows in bitterness toward her husband who is not spending enough time with his young boy. She fears that her son will grow up receiving bad influences and go down the wrong road. She follows Christ but says the one thing she would not endure is if her son went down a bad path in life. If something like this happened, she might lose her faith in God. While it is right to have good intentions for our children, this woman is letting her son become an idol that replaces the true God. This person cannot be helped with mere psychological counseling. Her real problem is a "worship disorder". She must see that her justification comes from Christ and that He alone can fill that gap she has been filling with false gods.
The work of God in the Christian is to grow them in grace by the ongoing process of eliminating these gospel replacements. He does this by shining his light in the dark corners of our hearts, in places we hardly knew were dens of iniquity. Painful though it may be at the time, he does this for our good and our eternal felicity. Sin arises in our hearts when we replace fear of God with the fear of some created thing. In their book How People Change, Timothy Lane and Paul David Tripp write,
“While external conditions can be very influential in our lives and should not be ignored, the Bible says that they are only the occasion for sin, not the cause. Difficulties in life do not cause sin. Our background, relationships, situation, and physical condition only provide the opportunity for the thoughts, words, and actions to reveal whatever is already in our hearts. Our hearts are the ultimate cause of our responses, and where the true spiritual battle is fought … [while] we must never minimize our suffering - ours or anyone else’s … we must make the important distinction between the occasion for sin and the ultimate cause of sin. This will determine what you think the solution to the problem will be …The bible says that my real problem is not psychological (low self-esteem or unmet needs), social (bad relationships and influences), historical (my past), or physiological (my body). They are significant influences, but my real problem is spiritual (my straying heart and my need for Christ). I have replaced Christ with something else, and as a consequence, my hearts is hopeless and powerless. Its responses reflect its bondage to whatever it is serving instead of Christ. Ultimately my real problem is a worship disorder.”It is when we set our hopes on something other than God to add meaning, hope and justification to our life that we fall into sin. So our growth in Christ is essentially the ongoing removal of deeply buried idols. Christ has redeemed us, is redeeming us and one day will consummate our redemption. Idols often begin as good things in an of themselves like work, leisure, marriage and children but become sin when we make them the highest good in our lives. According to Paul in the Epistle to the Romans it is when we take these good things of creation and let them take the place of God (Rom 1:23). Sinfulness is the inevitable result. Good things like respect, material goods and family become the object of worship and so we conclude that the true God cannot help and we must be in control. When our desires are not met we will use sinful ways to meet them … and understanding this opens up the opportunity to apply the gospel to every situation. Consider this; both hardship and blessings both help us to see the idols of our heart, our God replacements. Our responses to hardship and blessing show what we most value and give weight to. Our sin revels what we fear. But union and identity with Christ will override whatever struggle you may be going through at the moment. We are not merely to follow Christ’s example, which by itself would lead only to despair, but we must daily come to Him for the mercy and grace if we are to become like him.
“He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.” (1 Thessalonians 5:24)
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