Idol Worship

In my recent Old Testament reading in the Bible I have noticed that the subject of "idolatry" gets a lot of coverage. It seems that idolatry was a continual threat to a pure relationship with God. Most of the time we tend to think of "idolatry" as an old forgotten sin that doesn't really manifest among followers of Jesus today. Is that true? I ran across an interesting definition of idolatry today. Eugene Peterson defined idolatry as "using God instead of worshiping God".
Does Peterson's definition change your mind about the importance of guarding against idolatry today? When was the last time you worshiped God, really worshiped God, without trying to "get" something from Him? Is that kind of worship a regular, consistent, non-negotiable part of your life everyday?

Leviticus

Leviticus isn't easy to read. Some of you may love it. It may be your favorite book in the Bible. But, I doubt that it is. I just finished reading through the book. As is so often the case, God breathed fresh life into passages. Unexpected blessings began to encourage me from a book that I did not look forward to reading. For example, Leviticus 26:12-13 declares "I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt so that you would no longer be slaves to the Egyptians; I broke the bars of your yoke and enabled you to walk with heads held high". It's so easy to read through Leviticus and got bogged down in the sacrificial system and the requirements of the law and question the relevance of the rules that God gave His people at Mt. Sinai. It's easy to do that because that is so closely akin to our perspective of Christianity today. "Holiness" is becoming an old-fashioned word (Holy is word that is repeated often in Leviticus). But, you can't appreciate the beauty of Leviticus 26 without the journey that leads to it. God did not give rules because He wanted to burden the people. God gave the law in order to allow them to walk in freedom that could only come through a living relationship with Him. It's hard for us to grasp because we (especially in America) have come to associate freedom with individualism rather than a relationship with a holy God. Now, I'm not advocating a return to the Levitical Law. Jesus became our sacrifice and the sacrifices required in Leviticus are not longer necessary. But, the holiness of God has not changed. The character of the freedom that God provides has not changed. We hold our heads up - not in pride, but to look to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.

Answers in Acts

Reading through Acts is an adventure. It seems like the church grows with every turn of the page. Living in the midst of North American Christianity in the 21st century it may be easy to become a little detached from the reality of the miraculous work of God in the early church. It's too easy to have a "that was then, this is now" view of Acts. That's a sad way to read Acts. It misses the mark in a couple of ways. First, it tends to lead to a diminished view of God's activity in the church today. Second, we forget that Peter, John, Paul and Barnabas were real people. One of my reasons for studying Acts is to highlight the answers that Acts provides to real questions. As I read the first couple of chapters with fresh eyes, I have recognized that the questions that people in the first century were asking are not all that different from the questions we wrestle with today. Likewise, the answers provided through the dramatic story of the early church contain valuable insights for us today.