Kill Your God While You Can — E.A. Johnston

Idolatrous Devotion to a Wooden Jesus

There is a certain cliff in Mexico where you can stand and gaze down at a certain village of Mexican workers. These people work down in the riverbed in their corn patch, and there they grow their corn.

When the corn is ready to harvest, they shuck it, and after it dries out, they'll take it and grind it. They'll grind it into cornmeal and make tortillas, and then take those tortillas down to the open market and sell the tortillas for a few pesos.

They put the pesos away, come back out to their houses, and there they will live off of lizards. They'll go out among the rocks and catch these huge long lizards, and they eat those lizards. They save that corn money for a special day, a special day when they will start a pilgrimage to a wooden statue of Jesus up in the mountains.

The terrain to that statue is so bad that most of the people have to crawl on their hands and knees a couple of miles, and by the time they get to that statue, they are bleeding all over. Standing beside the statue is a priest, and that priest is saying, Now, if you love God, give to him, because you show your love to God by giving.

And those people reach into their little bags and purses and pull out those pesos stained in their own blood and drop that money into a slit in the top of the head of that wooden Jesus. Then the priest prays a prayer, and when he is finished, the priest will yell, You have not given enough.

Look, Jesus is sad. He is crying. And all the time, there is another priest hidden in that hollow statue with a little hand pump. He will pump water to where it comes out of human-made tear ducts, so that the statue is crying.

And there those people will give all they have, crawl down that mountain, and go back to eating lizards, growing their corn, to make more tortillas, to get more pesos, to go and give to a dead God that cannot move or hear.

The Self-Made God in the Church

I fear many today serve a God that is not the God of the Bible. Many of them sit in churches. They have carved out for themselves a little God they can live with. Many today want to sit in church on the throne of their lives and rule there.

They don't want a God who they have to obey. They want to live their life their way. They want to live it on their terms, and they say with the crowd in the Bible, we will not have this man reign over us.

The Lordship of Christ is a hated doctrine, more hated by church people, more than other doctrines, because the God of my Bible is a God who must punish sin, and the Christ of my Bible is a reigning Lord.

And if you want Him, friend, then you must bow your knee to Him. We serve a risen Lord, as seen in Colossians 3, 1 through 3, which declares, If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.

Set your affections on things above, not on things of the earth, for ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ and God. What that means, friend, is that a follower of Christ Jesus must bow to His Lordship.

Total Surrender and the Destruction of Idols

Your body is not your own. Your time is not your own. Your money is not your own. Christ must be a complete master. You better get out your shotgun, friend, and go kill that little God you serve while you have the time.

The idol that you cling to and worship and pet is nothing but a wooden Jesus, one that you carved out for your own enjoyment. Kill your God, friend, while you can, and turn your life over to the one true God.

Surrendering to Christ's Throne Rights

Then throw down your shotgun rebellion at the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ, and surrender to Him and to His throne rights on your life, for you were bought with a price, and that price was His precious blood.