I Worship My Television

In reading the fourth chapter of The Greener Grass Conspiracy there were several things that stuck out to me.

God should be receiving our whole hearts and most of the time we are just giving Him pieces of it. God wants us to give Him our hearts and to follow Him and to trust Him for everything. A lot of the times, me included, people just give certain areas of their life over to God and try to figure out the rest of it by themselves. We are better off if we give it all to God.

"Discontentment is the result of misplaced worship." Our misplaced worship is anything that we give our heart to that is not God and place our happiness is that thing. Tim Keller says "If anything becomes more funamental than God in your happiness, meaning in life, and identity, then it is an idol." Everyone knows what idolatry is but it's so easy to forget that it incluses anything that we place before God- even the small things in our lives that we value more than God.

We need to take action against all the idols in our lives and this requires us to change our thinking and our behavior. If we try to fix our thinking and behavior and remove the idols from our lives- this will be the first step toward contentment. Instead of demanding the things we "need" from God we need to pray in the right weay in stating what we desire but that God knows what we really need and give it to God to meet them in His own way and in His timing. So many times, we are impatient and demanding things from God. We need to just relax and leave it up to God to work things out the way He sees fit.

This doesn't mean we can not enjoy things as a gift from God, but we have to remember not to let it become an idol in our lives and let it take away the worship away from God. Because when it becomes an idol in our life then it is wrong and not a gift from God.

To sum it up, God gives us gifts to enjoy here on earth but we must remember that they are gifts and not to control our lives and take the place of God. We need to not let them be idols in our lives because then we are placing our trust in those things and ourselves and not where the true trust should lie which is in God alone.