What's your treasure?

Martin Luther said, "Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God." This quote made me think deeply about what my heart clings to. I started to think about who and what I turn to in my moments of need. Of course, I'd love to say that I automatically thought, " I cling to nothing but God. I always seek Him first for my every need." If I had thought that, I would have had to correct myself quickly if I wanted to be honest with myself. As I have started to truly pursue God, He has shown me just how little I had been relying on Him.

It's pretty easy to have things sneak into your life and take over your heart. God wants all of us though. He is never satisfied with anything less. In Matthew 6:21 Jesus warns believers, "Where your treasure lies, there also your heart will be." God wants 100% of our devotion. Anything that we value above our relationship with God is an idol. Idols are sneaky little buggers. They wiggle into our hearts and minds and conquer us with stealth. And you know, the funniest thing about idols is that they often have a tendency to stem from what was once a blessing.

A relationship that was once a blessing becomes the focus of our heart and pushes God off His throne. A promotion at work forces us to work longer hours during the week and pick up Sunday shifts. We upgrade our home and vehicle and downgrade our tithes and offerings. We get accepted to graduate school and sacrifice studying the Bible to study for our MBA. We rush out of church service so that we can make it home in time to see the kickoff of the football game. It is easy to allow a gift from above to form an idol in our lives. None of those things are inherently evil, as we tend to think of idolatry. They aren't a statue to a pagan god, so we don't easily identify them as an idol until our mismanagement of God's gifts starts yielding consequences.

We also have a tendency to straight up try and create our own God. We still call him God, but we try and form Him to fit our needs. We want Him to be who we'd like to see Him be, instead to being who He really is. That minimizes Him from God to a god.I read a quote from the book Finding the Heart to Go On by Lynn Anderson that really opened my eyes to the human tendency to construct and worship our own version of God (an idol).

"Human beings are worshippers. We will give our devotion to something.Unfortunately, in our day we seem to want a God who is answerable to us. Sometimes we treat Him as if He were a giant bubble-gum machine: insert coin and collect goodies. We will not allow God to do things we do not understand. He must explain Himself to our satisfaction or we are not sure we want to believe in Him. After all, we do not want a God who might ask of us the difficult, unreasonable or painful. In short, we want God to be a good luck charm that we carry into tough times of life to give us what we want without any regard to what He wants."

I wonder how many little treasures I try and hold back from God. I think back to how often in my life I have been like Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-10), trying to withhold from God and hoping that He didn't take notice. I'm not talking about finances, though that has happened too, I'm talking about trying to fool God into believing that I have surrendered all of me, when I'm actually hiding bits and pieces that I don't want to give up.

Jesus taught us that we are to love God with all of our heart, soul, and minds (Luke 10:27). When I love God like that, I'll willingly submit to Him. I will surrender anything to Him, because I trust Him with all that is within me. Romans 12:1-2 instructs us that we need to be willing to sacrifice our bodies and minds for God-- that means physically doing things we're not comfortable doing and going places that we may not want to go. It also means yielding our minds. The last part of the verse tells us that after we've sacrificed ourselves, given up our own desires for His, that we then can know His good and perfect will for our lives. God wants all of us. And until we die to ourselves, we can never fully see His plan for our lives. That piece of our life that we don't want to give up, that treasure we've buried deep down in our heart, will blind us spiritually to who God really is. No matter how little or how large our idol, it will always interfere with God's perfect plan.

Honestly assess your life. Pray for the Holy Spirit to show you what idol you might be clinging to. If you pray that, be ready for God to answer. And if you're ready for God to answer, be ready for Him to step in and heal you, because where those idols have been residing in your heart, there will be a hole that He will have to fill.