LAW HOMILY: The Christ You've Crafted

Some may argue that it's a violation of love of your neighbor, but I would disagree. Every week we go through the law of God, because we want to understand what

God says to his people. We want to know how it is that we can obey this God. When Jesus says, your sins are forgiven, he doesn't end there, does he?

He says, now go and sin no more. So we want to know, how do we live a life of going and sinning no more?

Today we're going to be on the second commandment of 10, and this is what it says, verses 4 through 5.

You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above, or in earth beneath, or in the water under the earth.

You shall not worship them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me.

Now, it's one of the greatest ironies of the Christian year that the season most devoted to celebrating the birth of the invisible

God made visible has also become the season where we break the second commandment most frequently.

We walk through December in America, and it becomes obvious no other month generates so many unauthorized images of Jesus than this one.

Images of little sweet baby Jesus in the manger. Paintings, figurines, greeting cards, nativity scenes, movie portrayals, cartoon specials, porcelain collectibles,

Pinterest boards, Instagram reels. Christmas, second only maybe to Easter, is the time when

Christians flood their lives with visual representations of the one who explicitly commanded us not to.

The entire season becomes a kind of cultural permission slip to do the very thing that God forbade.

And the carved nativity is not even our sharpest violation of this commandment.

The real danger underneath all of that is not the image that's sitting on your mantle.

It's the image that you have crafted and concocted that all of us have in our mind.

Because the far more subtle, and I think therefore far more dangerous and destructive idolatry, is the quiet way in which we violate the second commandment in our hearts.

It's easy to spot the figurine on the coffee table. It's easy for your child to bring the new book that we bought and say, second commandment violation, dad!

It's happened. But it's harder to spot the counterfeit

Christ that we've assembled in the dark recesses of our heart and the corners of our imagination.

We remake him internally long and externally wrong.

We soften his holiness to soothe our guilt, don't we? We shrink his sovereignty in order to calm our anxiety.

We blunt his authority so that he will not confront our patterns of sin. We picture a

Jesus who exists to stabilize our December instead of sanctifies our lives.

And this is the kind of violation that almost no one names because it happens deep within the emotional machinery where no one can see.

It happens deep within where fear and longing and disappointment and nostalgia and self -preservation do their work.

And the second commandment insists that this kind of hidden form of idolatry also provokes our

God to jealousy. For some, the counterfeit Jesus appears in a comforting relic.

They imagine him as the custodian of their memories, not the king who claims their obedience.

Maybe he's the one that they sought when they were a child, that we went to church because that was what we did. That's what the

Catholic thing to do is, right? Maybe it's the sweet baby

Jesus that's not authoritative and kingly but more cartoonish.

Maybe it's that I need to keep up with other Christians and I need to do and do and do and do so that I can appear a certain way.

That's a kind of Jesus of performance. Maybe it's the

Jesus that you look at your life when you're by yourself and you're alone and you say,

I can't live with the shame that I have in my heart from what I've done. Maybe it was 10 years ago, maybe it was last year, maybe it was yesterday.

And you know what we do when we do that? We say, Jesus, I know that you forgive sins but you're not powerful enough to forgive mine.

We've recrafted Jesus in our own image and we've made our sin God instead of him. And we all do it, all the time.

We remake Jesus into something that is more palatable and more acceptable to our carnal flesh, don't we?

So before we grab the baseball bat and we go to war with nativity scenes, perhaps, just maybe, we should go to war with the false

Jesus that we've made in our hearts that's okay with our sin and okay with our not reconciling with our wife or husband or telling that lie because it didn't really hurt anybody.

Maybe we get rid of that false Jesus in our heart first because that breaks the second commandment violently as well.

So whatever that is for you, let's pray. Let's lay down the idols. Let's lay down the false images of God and let's accept together in this worship service the

God who portrays himself perfectly and righteously and truthfully in Scripture and let that God rule our life and not the image that we like to cling to.

Amen? Let's pray. Lord, I'm just reflecting how it's so easy during this time of year to be busy and I remember

Martin Luther saying that he was so busy he had to pray four hours every morning because if he didn't, he couldn't accomplish what he had that he needed to do.

Lord, it's so easy for us to have the very opposite response. Our busyness, the parties, the get -togethers, the everything that we have in this season tends to choke out that relationship that we have with you and in a sense, we're creating a false

Jesus. We're creating a Jesus in our heart who's not jealous. A Jesus in our heart who is okay with us pandering and meandering all over everywhere but worshiping him.

There's so many ways that this can be applied but Lord, I pray that we would lay down the idols that we've crafted in our heart even if they look nice and even if they're really close.

Lord, help us to have a picture of our triune God that is in Scripture alone and for our good alone and for our worship alone.

It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Listen, this one, what we just talked about, you probably broke it while I was talking.

There's no one in here who doesn't deserve a guilty sentence for this one. All of them are true but I mean, think about it.

Your mind, the ways that we every second of the day roll through lies and we don't even know why we do it?

There's two options here. You can sit in the mud and say, this is just reality or you can look to the

Christ who forgave all your sins, who washed them white as snow and we come here every week to confess our sins not because His blood and His power weren't efficacious last week.

We do it every week because we're reminding ourselves that in the covenant between us and God there is one who's utterly faithful and there's one who's utterly not and we repent because He is the faithful one and we have not been this past week and we repent and accept

His forgiveness so that we can go serve Him this week. So if you will stand with me as we receive that pardon together through the word of God and as we confess our faith together through the creeds and confessions.

Our assurance of pardon this morning is from Matthew 1, verse 21. She will bear a son and you shall call

His name Jesus for He shall save His people from their sins.

Right there in a single line you have the glorious gospel that Jesus Christ...