Idol Worship

When the book of Haggai was written, the Israelites were in this cycle of: Turn from God, go into captivity, repent, come home and rebuild... restart. And they were in the rebuilding stage. These people were lucky like nothing else! The guy that had captured them, King Darius, this guy would let his prisoners practice their own religion and beliefs. And then, when they were out of captivity, he gave them money and resources to build their temple. But they didn't, they starting building their houses and neglecting God, and God was tired of it. Because they did that for 10 years.
Now, fast forward to us: God's temple is us, we are His church. Are we building our own houses spiritually? Think about the things that take your time: TV, Video Games, Internet, what ever it may be. But do we neglect God? Leave Him out of our lives?? God should have a place in us.

Let's put it this way, imagine a cabinet with several shelves, and each shelf has a certain amount of compartments. Now put a word in each compartment to represent what you devote your time to. TV, Computer, Family, Friends, Phone, Video Games, hey! Let's even put God in one of those. And whatever else you may spend your time on. What do you see wrong with that?

Well, God should not be in a compartment, He should be the entire shelf! Whatever you do in life, should be judged by God's standard, if it does not line up, is it worth it?

Don't get me wrong, I do believe that every Christian should spend time with God. Just them and God, studying God's word. Not just reading, studying. I am not perfect at this. But I have a method to keep me in line. This Blog. I have made a promise to whoever reads this, that I will do my best to have something every week... at least. My deadline is Thursday. I absolutely have to have something up by then, it keeps my accountable. This is why I write this, so that I must read my Bible, because if I don't, then I would probably have an extremely hard time to read consistently. I still do. I don't expect anyone to be perfect in this. But all throughout the Bible it is clear that time spent with God is essential for a Relationship with Him. Read through the Gospels, Jesus went into the Wilderness several times. And when He was tempted, He used verses to fight Satan, do you have a way better than what our Savor used? There are a few others who did the same, I cannot remember who though.

Read Philippians 1:9, it backs me up. That our love may abound more in knowledge and discernment. Our love in and of Christ, may abound more in knowledge and discernment of the word.

So give God some time, and build upon your relationship with God.

We degrade God a lot. We are given Scripture so often, that it has gotten "casual" to us. I hope you don't put something before God. You can correlate that video to so much more than Football.

Well, next week, I am going to start a study in Ephesians.

Thanks for reading,

John Mark,