So Gideon took ten of his servants and did as the Lord told him. But because he was afraid of his family and the townspeople, he did it at night rather than in the daytime. In the morning when the people of the town got up, there was Baal’s altar, demolished, with the Asherah pole beside it cut down and the second bull sacrificed on the newly built altar! They asked each other, “Who did this?” Judges 6:27-29 NIV

Do you have any monsters in your home? Most have one living in their family room with lots of babies finding a residence in different rooms throughout the house. When our children were little I called our TV the “One-Eyed Monster”. This monster uses sight and sound to bind you to a comfortable place on your couch or chair and lull you into a catatonic fixation. He demands to be watched. He demands to be heard. How do you deal with the “elephant in your room”?

Gideon was instructed by the Angel of the Lord that he would be the one to deliver God’s people from the Midianites. His first act of obedience was to destroy the town peoples’ idol to Baal and the Ashtoreth pole. Tearing down idols is nasty business. There will be some grace if you want to tear down your own idol, BUT it is a different story if you try to take down someone else’s thing of worship.

During COVID, many idols have been exposed in our lives. Most of these things are not bad in themselves. We just have a tendency to drift toward worshipping them for our own comfort and joy.

I remember one revival service where the evangelist preached exposingly hard against all of our precious sins that we usually don’t want to deal with. It was very effective, except he skipped over gluttony. He had already made jokes about loving to eat and it showed. His message was short circuited because of his own lack of transparency of not being free from one of his own idols.

Finding your idols to “tear down”

  • Where do you spend the most time?
    • Other than sleep or work, what do you spend the most time doing?
    • When you are stressed, what activity are you drawn to to escape?
  • What do you spend most of your money on?
    • Other than housing, food, clothing, transportation where does your money go?
    • Where you spend your money reveals your priorities of what you think is important. 
  • What consumes your thought life?
    • Allow the Holy Spirit to reveal the meditations of your heart.
    • Do your thoughts flow toward lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh or the pride of life? Or do they move toward the fruit of the Holy spirit?
  • Listen to your words
    • What you talk about reveals the affections of your heart
    • Listen for the “I can’ts”. “i can’t do without this…” or “I can’t live without (fill in the blank)”

Fasting food or anything else can reveal the power that something has upon us. If you are fasting food, you will quickly realize that not only does your body crave food, but you spend time thinking about food. How do you turn off social media?

“I have the right to do anything,” you say–but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”–but I will not be mastered by anything. 1 Corinthians 6:12 NIV.  Food is not bad, and TV is not evil. But being a slave to something is not how our relationship with God exists. Idols love to be placed into the “right to exists” category.

I used to have a sign over our one-eyed monster, the TV. I taped it over the front which would require me to flip it back in order to watch a program. The sign read in bold, “I will set no worthless thing before my eyes…it shall not fasten its grip on me.” Psalm 101:3 NASB 1975,

I am aware that you may have other things that vie for your affections. Let’s choose to be free from those things that so easily entangle us, so that we can be very effective with the short life we have been given.

To be like Gideon, you may have to invite 10 friends (or another person) to get the job done properly. (side note – I am not advocating tearing down any public property.) Idols are rooted first in the heart where people refuse to let God reign supreme. When God is sitting on the throne of your heart you have access to the freedom found in righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

Blessings Love y’all