Discontentment and Idols

“Who can I run to,

To share this empty space?

Who can I run to,

When I need love?

Who can I run to, to fill this empty space with laughter?

Who can I run to, when I need love?”

Alright, you caught me... What’s written above is neither Scripture nor a personal, heartfelt poem. It’s just the lyrics to one of my favorite 90’s R&B throwbacks, courtesy of the famous girl-group Xscape.

As the words in the song allude to, however, we all have this internal desire to have someone or something we can rely on and find happiness with. While this is a natural and earnest desire, we often fall into relying on things that can’t actually satisfy us, and they instead lead us to even more disenchantment. Many times, they cause us to unknowingly erect idols in our hearts.

What exactly is an “idol?”

An idol is any created thing that we base our happiness and satisfaction in life upon. It doesn’t have to be golden, shiny, or an inanimate object, and in fact, it typically isn’t any of those things! Instead, it’s usually a blessing or asset that God our Creator has allowed us to have, that we then choose to give excessive value to. It becomes something we believe we need to have in order to feel loved, and valued, ourselves.

From doing a quick search using an online Bible, we can find nearly 160 different warnings about the word “idol” throughout the span of the Scriptures. One of these such warnings is placed in Deuteronomy 4:16-18. It reads: “So do not corrupt yourselves by making an idol in any form… whether of a man or a woman, an animal on the ground, a bird in the sky, a small animal that scurries along the ground, or a fish in the deepest sea.” Based on this command and the multitude of other similar warnings in Scripture, we can ascertain that idols must be pretty important — and somehow, fairly dangerous.

How does an idol work?

An idol’s job is simple. All it really has to do is exactly what we want it to do, in pretty much every circumstance that gets presented in our life ever, and when it does we find ourselves happy. If, though, for some strange reason, things do not go the way we hope/expect with our idol, we’re left with a lingering sense of unhappiness or discontentment.

How can we tell if we have an idol?

Idols can be tricky to identify at first, because there are many ordinary things — and often, good things — in our lives that we make idols without ever realizing. To help illustrate, I’ll fess up and give you an example of two of mine: my job, and my hair. When the Holy Spirit revealed this to me, I honestly found it hard to believe! I’d never felt particularly “in love” with either of them — how in the world could they be idols? The Holy Spirit helped me begin to see, however, that there’s an undeniable correlation between how those two things are going, and my overall mood. When things are going smoothly at work and my hair looks how I want it to, I feel relatively blissful and relaxed. However, when things become stressful at work, and/or I cannot get my hair to behave how I expect it to? BOOM: war. Atomic bombs everywhere I turn. It seems like nothing is going right in any area of my life. Just endless doom and gloom.

In all seriousness — I’ve often found myself needing things to go the way I desire for them to go at work, and needing my hair to look how I expect it to look. When that doesn’t happen, I am left feeling disappointed, frustrated with my portion, and even resentful towards God for “not caring enough” to allow things to go the way He knew I desired for them to go.

Bearing this in mind, I urge you to take a moment and ponder the things in your life that seem to have the greatest influence over your mood. If there is something or someone that you most frequently find yourself upset over, that’s a good indication that you may be allowing the situation to have lordship over how you behave and feel, making it an idol.

Considering that, can you see anything that you personally may have made an idol? If so, perhaps you’re left wondering what I’ve, too, wondered before…

What’s the problem with said “idols,” as long as they’re good for us and make us happy?

The biggest issue with allowing idols to remain in our heart is that they will inevitably direct our time, attention, energy, and resources — our worship — to something/someone other than God. He is the Creator of all things and it is only through Him that we have our breath and our being, thus He is worthy of our total praise and loyalty.

A less-realized issue, though, is that maintaining idols actually makes it impossible for us to achieve the very thing we turned to them for in the first place: true happiness.

In Philippians 4, Paul speaks about how he was able to be content in all circumstances. Whether he had little or he had plenty, Paul was able to endure each day with joy simply based on knowing Jesus and embracing the sacrifice our Savior made for us. When we are serving an idol, however, we will be faced with a constantly-fluctuating joy, and persistent feelings of dissatisfaction. If we receive only a little of what we want from our idol, we never feel fully satiated, and instead find ourselves questioning if we have been cheated by life and by God. Conversely, if we receive plenty of what we want from our idol, we may feel happy temporarily yet still internally be left grumbling, “Why can’t this happen more often?” or “I wonder how long it’ll last…” or “Why couldn’t all this have come sooner like I was hoping?”

As long as we look to an idol for our satisfaction, we will manage to be content only in very few circumstances, if any at all.

If our “idols” can’t do the job, then who can?

The Lord calls us to find our contentment in Him and His Word. Why does He wants us to do this? Not because He is self-centered, but because He knows He is the only well that will never run dry on us — the sole Source of living water. Jesus is the only Being in existence we can rely on to always be there, because He is all-powerful AND will never change, as He is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 3:8). How many other things in our lives can we truly say this about? Our appearances, our relationships with others and ourselves, our careers, and even the physical world around us will all undoubtedly change, often in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways... This is why any source of happiness outside of the Lord will never be able to sustain us.

Our God cares about us enough to want us to build our house on the solid Rock — Jesus — because He wants us to have joy no matter how the circumstances in our lives look. Let’s think about that principle as if we were talking about a romantic relationship, since being the church, we are indeed the bride of Christ: we mean so much to Him that He wants to ensure we are always happy with Him.

How, exactly, does our God work to accomplish this? By actually allowing our life circumstances to change, even in ways that do not feel good. He allows relationships to end, He lets us be shifted from one challenging situation on our job to another, He allows us to gain a few pounds, He even allows our hairstyles to not come out as expected — you name it. Though it may sometimes feel like it, His reasoning for allowing uncomfortable change and disappointment to occur in our life is not to frustrate us. It’s to give us opportunities to choose not to rely on the temporary things or human beings in our life for our happiness. He is giving us the chance to, instead, turn towards the only One capable of sustaining us for our lifetime and beyond: Himself. When the Lord asks us to surrender and hand our idols over to Him, therefore, He’s not acting in His own best interest — He is acting in ours.

Friends, we can be free from the idolatry of allowing the things we love to dictate our happiness, and instead rely on the Lord to help us be content in all circumstances… even the uncomfortable, undesired ones. When the things that matter most to us fail to go our way, or seem to just evade us all together, we can implore God to remind us of His heart for us. Indeed, He wants us to understand that His love for us goes beyond any of the things we may or may not currently see happening in our lives.

Let us entreat the Holy Spirit, then, to reveal anything we may be idolizing in our lives, and to help us instead live in the knowledge that because we have Jesus, we already have everything we need. Let us invite Him to keep on teaching us that we don’t need to look to anything for our contentment besides the never-ending love our Lord displayed when He died on the cross for us.