Little children, keep yourselves from idols. – 1 John 5:21
Yesterday I was struggling to find peace. I was torn up in my heart about something and the anxiety was building and with that, shame and anger.
As I usually do when things feel overwhelming, I took my journal and started to write about it.
Journaling helps bring clarity.
This time I couldn’t get clarity on why I felt so torn up in my heart, though. Of course, that just added to my frustration. I wanted the stress and anxiety to go away!
I stopped for a moment and asked myself, “What’s REALLY going on here?”
Then I wrote down…
“I don’t trust God. I don’t believe he can be trusted with this.”
Then I begin to write out a prayer about how wrong that was and that God was sovereign and good and loving and kind and that he would always do what was best for his glory and my good.
I repented for my sinful thoughts about him and confessed his goodness and grace.
And all my anxiety vanished. There was peace.
My circumstances have not changed at all. I am still exactly where I was. But my heart is different. The real issue was not my circumstances, it was my lack of faith and trust.
It was my idolatry.
We all want a god we can control, one that bows to our whims, our own personal genie that behaves exactly the way we want. And we build up that god in our minds and hearts and give that idol God’s name.
Then, when that idol let’s us down, and it ALWAYS will, we think we cannot trust the one true God.
And that brings anger and frustration and fear. But God is not the problem. It’s our wrong understanding of who he is. It is our idolatry that is the real issue.
And until we confess that and repent, we cannot know peace.
Thankfully, God is kind and his kindness and his patience lead us to repentance (Romans 2:4).
In his love, God also reproves and disciplines us to bring us to repentance as well (Revelation 3:19) but the goal is always to bring us back to himself.
It is an invitation to come home to him and to know him as he truly is, which is infinitely better than our self-made idols.
Joseph McBee 