LAW HOMILY: Before His Face: Exposing Our Christmas Idols

I was once told that we are the most standing church in the

CREC. We stand a lot, but it helps keep us at attention. You know, you've never seen military soldiers seated at attention, they're at attention.

So anyway, every week we go through the law of God because we wanna know what God says to his people.

We wanna know how to obey him. As people who love this God, we don't take for granted that there are things that we can do to show our love to him, show our gratitude to him through obedience.

We don't believe that Christ just saved us unto a life of libertine sin, or a life of recklessness, or a life of apathy, or a life of any of those things.

We believe that he saved us for the good works that he predestined us to do before the foundation of the world.

We learn those good works from the law of God. Today, we're back in the first commandment.

We start our 10 -week cycle again with the first commandment in Exodus 20, verse one through three, this is the word of the

Lord. Then God spoke all these things, saying, I am the

Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of slavery, and you shall have no other gods before me.

The first commandment is this thunderous insistence that nothing, absolutely nothing, may trespass into the realm of God's glory.

This command is the divine eviction notice that's served to every rival deity that tries to squat and take root in the human heart.

And few seasons reveal the depth of our idolatry more embarrassingly so than the

American Christmas season, which has become an annual carnival of sanctified distractions, spiritual counterfeits, and glitter -glued idolatry.

Our problem is not that we bow to statues. Our problem is that we bow to illusions.

We built an entire winter liturgy around false hopes, swollen expectations, and manufactured enchantments.

We crown holiday cheer as if it's some kind of functional savior. We sentimentalize this season instead of looking at it through the lens of Scripture.

We make nostalgia the high priest of our affections, and we treat consumption as if it were our communion.

We behave as though December itself possesses some kind of sacramental power capable of healing our anxieties, and then we call that Christmas spirit.

This is why this commandment hits with such precise severity.

The Hebrew phrase, Alpanai, before my face, is not metaphorical here.

It is a courtroom declaration that every idol that we tolerate stands directly,

Coram Deo, before the face of God. Every time we bow our knee to some kind of affection other than Christ, we are doing it before the face of God.

And during this season, the list of squatters is legion. Some of us worship the idol of an idealized family and then are disappointed when things don't look so perfect.

Others bow to the idol of performance, convinced that the right decorations, the perfect meals, or the most curated moments will sanctify us in some way.

Many treat retail therapy like it's a sacrament, trusting that the packages will be delivered.

And still others enthrone comfort, warm atmospheres, more than a warm heart toward the living

God. Each of these idol comforts becomes a kind of counterfeit

Christ. They promise what only He can give. They demand what only He deserves.

They collapse under the weight of devotion that's supposed to be offered to Him. And they leave behind spiritual debris like exhaustion, disappointment, bitterness, resentment, hollow hearts, and a peculiar post -holiday melancholy that sometimes we call seasonal affective disorder.

The first commandment exposes that these failures are not just emotional miscues, but they're theological betrayals.

We have diverted worship. We have transferred our trust. We have relocated our hope.

And the terrifying truth about it all is that we are more punctual for Christmas parties than we are for prayer.

We're more fervent for watching movies in pajamas than we are watching for the things of God.

We're more disciplined in holiday schedules than we are in the means of grace. We're more alert to online deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Speaking to myself here. Toward family traditions than actually to the family that God has given us,

His people, His bride, the church. We're more eager for peppermint flavored comforts than the presence of the living

Christ. And that tells us something about how we worship. It tells us something about the orientation of our soul, the knowledge, the trust, the hope, the love, the fear, the delight, and the allegiance.

It tells us where our allegiances are. We have to face the ugly truth that there are many things in this world that captivate our hearts more than Christ.

There are many things in this world that glitter our affections and twinkle our eyes more than Jesus Christ.

And may it be with a command like this that we should have no other gods before Him.

May it be that we examine our hearts once more and we put away all of the cheap, tacky, glitter idols.

Let's pray. If you'll pray where you're sitting and I will pray for us as we close.

Lord, it's not surprising to me that hell works overtime in seasons like Christmas and Easter.

That in this season, that wasn't inaugurated with light spectacles and all sorts of lavish luxury, but it was welcome to the earth in a manger, in a feeding trough made for pigs, in a barn, in a backwoodsy, backwater part of the country that no one in the places of power even dared to notice.

Our world has turned this day into a spectacle, but yet it's only a millimeter thick.

Lord, would you help us to reorient our affections back to you? Would you help us?

Lord, it's not sinful to participate in the season, but it is sinful for those things in this season to have us, to have our hearts, to captivate us more than Christ.

Lord, help us. Help us to repent of spoiled affections.

Help us to repent of having many gods before you, before your face. Help us to repent, knowing that you are faithful and just to forgive us of our sins, and you're also gracious to give us your spirit who will help us in our time of need.

It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. All throughout the Bible, we hear these incredible declarations that we're forgiven.

I mean, if you sit in your sin and think about your sin long enough, you will feel hopeless, because to the degree that you understand how wretched you are, and I am too, you start to get to a place where you can't even begin to imagine that God could forgive you, and yet the glory of the gospel is that it shines brightest against the darkness of our depravity, just as you can't go outside right now and see the stars, because there's too much light outside, but against the pitch -black dark of midnight, you can see them in their beauty, and against the pitch -black darkness of our sin, we see the beauty and the glory of the gospel of Jesus Christ all throughout the scripture that we are forgiven in him.

Look at what it says in Acts 2 .38. Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak kindly to Jerusalem, and out of her.

Oh yeah, that's not Acts, that's Isaiah, sorry. And call out to her, and her warfare has ended, that her iniquity has been removed, that she has received of the

Lord's hand double for all her sins. Do you notice that phrase right in the middle of that?

Her iniquity has been removed? 700 years before the coming of Christ, Isaiah was looking through the corridors of centuries, seeing that God was gonna make a sacrifice to end all sacrifices, a blood ransom for people who deserve to have their blood shed for their own sins.

In Christ, Isaiah is letting us know that our sins have been forgiven.

So brother and sister, as deep and dark as your sins are, the grace of God is deeper and brighter, so stand with me as Christians who've been forgiven, and let us confess our faith together.