1 - Introduction - Living like a real Christian Heart - Three Ways to Live | Page 7

Read: 1 John 5 v 21
The last verse of 1 John is, “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.” John has not
mentioned idolatry by name once in the entire letter, so we have to conclude one of
two things. Either he is now, in the very last sentence, changing the whole subject, or
he is summarizing all he has been saying in the epistle about living in the light
(holiness), love, and truth. The latter seems more reasonable—and these implications
are also significant. John, in one brief statement, is expressing in negative terms what
he had spent the whole letter putting in the positive. This must mean that the only way
to walk in holiness, love, and truth is to keep free from idols. They are mutually
exclusive. Underlying any failure to walk in holiness is some form of idolatry.

Wednesday
Romans 1 v 18 – 25
Why do we lie, or fail to love, or break our promises, or live selfishly? Of course,the
general answer is “Because we are weak and sinful,” but the specificanswer is that
there is something besides Jesus Christ that we feel we musthave to be happy,
something that is more important to our heart than God,something that is enslaving our
heart through inordinate desires. The key tochange (and even to self-understanding) is
therefore to identify the idols of theheart Theologian and author Thomas Oden writes:
theheart.
“Every self exists in relation to values perceived as making life worth living. A valueis

anything good in the created order—any idea, relation, object, or person inwhich one
has an interest, from which one derives significance… These valuescompete… In time
one is prone to choose a centre of value by which other valuesare judged. When a
finite value has been elevated to centrality and imagined as a final source of meaning,
then one has chosen…a god… One has a god when afinite value is…viewed as that
without which one cannot receive life joyfully.”
We often don’t go deeply enough to analyse our idol-structures. For example,“money”
is of course an idol; yet, in another sense, money can be sought tosatisfy other very