Thursday 6 May 2004

You Might Be An Idolater If:

Idolotry is having a perfectly good God, who is a person, not only a figure, to worship and have a relationship with, but instead, you choose to make up extra crap to focus upon instead of Him (rules, a lifestyle etc). If you are an idoloter, you have chosen to block God out of your life with something else. He hates that worse than a wife who finds a blowup doll in her husband's closet.

You might be an idoloter if:

  • You think it’s something akin to blasphemy for anyone but you and people you respect to criticize the church you are associated with. Everybody else is an infidel-unbeliever who can’t understand.
  • You attend church so people will know you are spiritually ‘Ok’ and if you don’t, you assume you aren’t (you attend church not as a natural part of your spirituality, but to try to get or maintain some spirituality by the act of dutiful, regular attendance).
  • You collectively come together to worship your collectively coming together to worship.
  • You feel unsafe without a human-built structure within which to approach God. You ‘worship the church’, rather than ‘worship in the church.’
  • You are willing to alter many parts of your life, habits, dress and time on a daily basis for no other reason other than to accommodate the expectations of people in your church.
  • Your solution to ‘different’ people is to ‘feel they’d be happier somewhere else’ because they ‘don’t fit’ and you don’t feel inclined to accommodate them. (Rather than make the structure accommodate people who could be helped by it, you treat with suspicion any people who aren't helped by it in its current form)
  • Someone’s non-attendance at church means you think, feel and act almost as if they were dead or some kind of traitor/deserter.
  • You aren’t willing to seek out your own God-given answers to your own God-given problems, but badly want to be told what to do by others, either in person or in writing.
  • You’ve built a lovely castle of ‘should’s’ that you will neither stop feeling guilty about not achieving, nor achieve. Contemplating this castle you’ve built makes you much happier than the thought of looking at anything real.
  • You don’t know how to feel good about your lifestyle choices unless people at your church feel good about them.
  • You care more about your church and events related to it than about God Himself.
  • You hope that God will bless you, based upon what you put into the church, and what you sacrifice for it. When you don’t benefit from church, don’t learn anything at church, or are actually hurt by your church, you assume that the problem must somehow lie with you on some level.

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