Exodus 20:3 (NKJV)
3 “You shall have no other gods
before Me.
We are all religious beings. As creatures made in the
image of God, we cannot help but be religious. We all worship or obey someone
or something. Some voice is ultimate – and it is this voice, this voice that
governs and directs our life, that is our god. And the most popular deity today
is the sovereign self. Eugene Peterson explains:
“Here’s how it
works. It is important to observe that in the formulation of this new
[religion] that defines the self as the sovereign text [or voice] for living,
the Bible is neither ignored nor banned; it holds, in fact, an honored place.
But the three-personal Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is replaced by a very
individualized personal Trinity of my Holy Wants, my Holy Needs, and my Holy
Feelings….
The new Holy
Trinity. The sovereign self expresses itself in Holy Needs, Holy Wants, and
Holy Feelings. The time and intelligence that our ancestors spent on
understanding the sovereignty revealed in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are
directed by our contemporaries in affirming and validating the sovereignty of
our needs, wants, and feelings.
My needs are
non-negotiable… My need for fulfillment, for expression, for affirmation, for
sexual satisfaction, for respect, my need to get my own way – all these provide
a foundation to the centrality of me and fortify my self against [all threats].
My wants are
evidence of my expanding sense of kingdom. I train myself to think big because
I am big, important, significant. I am larger than life and so require more and
more goods and services, more things and more power. Consumption and
acquisition are the new fruits of the spirit.
My feelings are the
truth of who I am. Any thing or person who can provide me with ecstasy, with
excitement, with joy, with stimulus, with spiritual connection validates my
sovereignty. This, of course, involves employing quite a large cast of
therapists, travel agents, gadgets and machines, recreations and entertainments
to cast out the devils of boredom or loss or discontent – all the feelings that
undermine or challenge my self-sovereignty.
In the last two
hundered years a huge literature…has developed around this new Holy Trinity of
Needs, Wants, and Feelings that make up the sovereign self… The new spiritual
masters assure us that all our spiritual needs are included in the new Trinity:
our need for meaning and transcendence, our wanting a larger life, our feelings
of spiritual significance – and, of course, there is plenty of room for God, as
much or as little as you like. The new Trinity doesn’t get rid of God or the Bible,
it merely puts them to the service of needs, wants, and feelings. Which is fine
with us, for we’ve been trained all our lives to treat everyone and everything
that way. It goes with the territory. It’s the prerogative of sovereignty, [the
sovereignty of self].
What has become
devastatingly clear in our day is that the core reality of the Christian
[faith], the sovereignty of God revealing himself in [Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit], is contested and undermined by virtually everything we learn in our schooling,
everything presented to us in the media, every social, workplace, and political
expectation directed our way as the experts assure us of the sovereignty of
self. These voices seem so perfectly tuned to us, so authoritatively expressed
and custom-designed to show us how to live out our sovereign selves, that we
are hardly aware that we have traded in our Holy Bibles for this new text, the
Holy Self.”
[Eugene Peterson, Eat this Book, pp.
31-34]
So what of you? Are you here today to worship the Holy Trinity
of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? To listen to His voice and be shaped by His
Word? Or are you here to worship the unholy trinity of your needs, wants, and
feelings? The first commandment strikes our ears, You shall have no other gods before me. Reminded that God is the
center of all reality and that we often act as though we are the center
instead, let us kneel and confess our sin to the Lord.
0 comments:
Post a Comment