Idolatry: What It Is & How to Root It Out (1 John 5.21)
This sermon was preached on June 15th, 2025.
21 Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.
This morning we’re on the last verse of the book of 1 John. And if you pick up the book of 1 John, there are 2,141 words in Greek. 2 John has 245 words, and 3 John 219. And if you go through and look for the most frequently repeated words, you’ll find: love (35 times). Know/knowing (33 times). God. Children. Life. Light.
If I was John and looking for a way to close out this letter, I’d probably have the last sentence be something like “dear children, love God and know that he loves you.” Yet we get here to the last sentence, and suddenly John uses a word that he hasn’t used at all. Idols.
It can feel a little bit out of nowhere. He’s talked about God’s love for us, about our salvation, about what God’s love does within us, and the call to love others well. He’s talked about sin and its destructive power and the condemnation that comes from sin—and the freedom from condemnation that Jesus brings to those who come to him by faith. But he hasn’t said a word about idolatry. Let me say that a different way. He hasn’t used the word Idolatry. But at the same time, he’s been writing about idolatry the whole time.
What is Idolatry?
Idolatry is a whole lot more than someone making a statue to use for worship or something like that. In fact, the heart of all sin is idolatry—when we are more devoted to something else than we are to God.
Unless God intervenes by his grace, idolatry is what our hearts automatically do. As John Calvin once wrote: “The human heart is a perpetual idol factory.” We’re really good at creating idols. Looking to things other than God to be our ultimate source of worthiness.
Idolatry is the “sin beneath the sin.” The sin that all the other sins that we commit and struggle with lead back to. When we have a struggle with a particular sin, it’s always a helpful exercise to ask “what is the sin beneath this sin? What is the idol that I’m looking to for comfort or security or identity? What is the thing that I’m treating like a god—the thing I’m sacrificing to? The thing that is the most dominant thing in my heart and schedule?
I saw a social media post a few years ago that went like this: “Since the countdown to football is looming , I guess it's time to mention the pre-college football season warnings. None of these are meant to be a personal attack, but each of you have been warned:
I will NOT attend ANYTHING past noon on Saturdays unless you have NCAA football on a television.
Events with Georgia football take priority over all other events.
I WILL be high strung, loud, and obnoxious if you are around me while Georgia is playing.
I will WEAR GEORGIA APPAREL on Saturday. *No exceptions*
Weddings & all other events are planned around GAME TIME!!! It's not my fault you are starting your married life & such proving to everyone you are a horrible planner. I am not saying I won't be there but I will do my best as soon as the game is over.
Thanks for understanding everyone!
GO DAWGS!!!!
I don’t know any other way to describe it—but GA football had become this person’s god. It’s the thing that dominates their life. The thing they make everything else form around. The thing that look to for identity and meaning. They’d risk relationships for GA football. They’d rearrange their lives around it.
We may laugh at that example a bit—it’s college football, right? But this struggle with idolatry is one that we all face. And if our repentance of turning from idols and turning to God is going to be true and deep, we have to be willing to ask about our own idols and walk in step with God’s Spirit as he is rooting them out.
Now I want to make it clear—I’m not saying every struggle you have can be traced back to idolatry. Often our struggles are from wounds, weakness that is not sinful, or spiritual warfare. We are never asked to repent of wounds other people have inflicted on us. You can’t repent for someone else’s sin and idolatry. It’s not your responsibility.
But the point I’m making still stands—in our sins, which we are called to repent of, we can ultimately trace it to something other than God winning our hearts allegiance and our heart’s desires.
The Seriousness of Idolatry
Idolatry, as we’re talking about it, is no small thing. First, because idolatry is profoundly destructive. You may make an idol out of work and sacrifice their families at the altar of career success. You may make an idol out of your family, suffocating your spouse and children because they aren’t perfect—or scheduling your life in such a way that “fun” or “enjoyment” pushes out things like community, friendship, and worship of God. You may make an idol out of your particular, individual church, looking down your nose at everyone else because they aren’t as enlightened and smart and holy as you.
Whatever it is, this idol becomes the thing you sacrifice to, in some way expecting that sacrifice to pay off. It may start off slow. The idol says. “You can be so much more productive. You can hustle and work—block everything else out and focus on this. Just give your sleep. Stay up another hour working on this. You can rest later. You don’t need to worship and rest on Sunday. Give me your rest.”
So you give the idol your sleep and your rest. You feel increasingly tired and exhausted, and the only times your really do stop and rest is when your body can’t take it anymore and you have to sleep because you’re sick. And sure, maybe you do get more work done, but the delight and joy we’re supposed to have in our work isn’t there, because we have looked to our work to give us identity and fulfillment that it was never designed to give. And all those short terms gains become long term wounds in our hearts that never heal.
But then the idol says, “you’ve been productive, but if you’re really going to do this right, I need something else. If you’re going to reach your career goals or your sports goals or whatever it is, I can get you there. But you need to give me your family. Give me your friends. Just a little season—give me your kids. Really work hard right now, they’ll be there later. Give me your kids.”
So you give the idol your family and your friends. And suddenly that connection to community that is crucial to the heart of a healthy human being is gone. You turn around and your kids are grown and have learned to do life without you, so if you ever really do want to re-engage, it’s an uphill battle of trying to get to know a virtual stranger.
I could keep going, and this is just one example. The danger of heart idolatry is that it is profoundly destructive. And the hard thing to realize is that just about anything can turn into an idol. And this is an uncomfortable thing—to ask these questions. Because sometimes those idols aren’t things you can totally push away. If your idol is success, you still have to go to school or go to work. If your idol is family, the answer isn’t to leave your family behind. We have to re-train our hearts surrounded by our idols.
The second reason idolatry is so serious is because idolatry is an offense against God. He is the one who is worthy of our hearts desires, and the one who has shown himself to us in Jesus. The real God, not the false god of our imaginations. Not the false god of our desires. The real God. And interacting him means interacting not with our imaginations or desires, but with the reality of who he is. And we cannot hold onto our idols and hold onto him at the same time. Facing idolatry means letting go of that which is not true and not ultimate and grasping ahold of that which is.
How To Deal with Idolatry
And how can we do that? Cherishing who God has shown himself to be in Jesus Christ.
The biblical way to deal with idols is not simply to reject it. It’s to replace it. Repenting of idolatry means removing that idol from the place it has in my heart, and cherishing God instead.
It happens as we purposefully treasure and cherish God and what he has done and who he has said we are in our hearts. When we revel in the gospel and what it says of God and what it says of us. When we allow the gospel to fill our hearts with its truth and beauty and goodness—it drives out the pull of idols on our hearts.
Years ago the author Max Lucado released a children’s book called You Are Special. It’s about a marionette named Punchinello. Punchinello lives in a village filled with other marionettes and everyone in the village spends their days communicating to each other either approval by giving each other gold stars, or disapproval by giving each other black dots. And these stick. Punchinello only seems to receive black dots. He doesn’t seem to be special in anyone’s eyes, and he only receives their disapproval.
One day he meets another Marionette who, unlike everyone else, doesn’t have any stickers sticking to her. People try to give her black dots, they don’t stick. People try to give her gold stars, they don’t stick. He asks her the secret, and she tells him that he has to go talk to Eli, the marionette-maker, to discover why.
What Punchinello learns is that only Eli’s opinion, as their creator, really matters. And as Punchinello learns this, suddenly the black dots that have stuck to him start to fall off. They’ve lost their power. Eli invites Punchinello to come visit him every day, so that Eli can remind him of this truth. There’s no other qualification needed.
This is what I’m talking about. Our idols are like Punchinello looking to something else to give him the approval he craved. We’re looking for something and we’re getting gold stars or black dots or whatever, but we keep trying to work it. We keep trying to work the systems of looking for value and worth.
I don’t mean to make that easier than it seems. It’s not easy.
I remember hearing years ago, the pastor Tim Keller talking about walking with a young woman in his congregation through a season of fighting with a deep desire to be wanted and accepted by others. She wanted men to like her and desire her. It had led her to make some poor decisions, thinking she needed to take short cuts and even demean herself to make the men like her.
She had heard Tim preach about finding our identity in God and what the gospel says about us. That she didn’t need a romantic relationship with a man to make her complete. That by faith she was a daughter of God and that God’s love for her isn’t dependent on her making him like her.
But she told Tim that sometimes just felt like audio. Just words she could hear. But that what these men offered her was audio and video. It was the difference between hearing something on the radio and watching it on television. The boys around me show me some attention, it’s audio and video. It’s words and action. They will say whatever they need to say, but at least I can feel it in their actions, if only for a moment. God just has audio for me. That’s all the Bible is. Just words. I need more. I need something physical. I need audio and video.
I get it. The difficulty of fighting idolatry in our hearts is that our idols, these false gods who make false promises, can seem to have such an immediate benefit. If we sacrifice something to them, the payoff can be right away and seem so much more…tangible.
But that is like trying to sail the ocean in a jon boat—it won’t be able to handle the waves and storms and you’ll sink and drown. Or it’s like trying to climb Mt Everest in a wind-breaker—it won’t be able to handle the cold and you’ll freeze. It just won’t work.
In a world where it may feel like what the Bible has is just words, just audio—the community of the church is meant to be the video. Not just words spoken and heard, but realities felt and seen.
So that’s our calling, and our takeaway from this. To put away our heart idols, to lean in on the hard work of taking the gospel seriously. And then to turn to one another and be the ones who prove the gospel true to each other in words and actions.
My dear friends, keep yourselves from idols.