"Little Children, Keep Yourselves from Idols." 1 John 5:21 Part 1

This is the first segment of my sermon on 1 John 5:21, "Little children, keep yourselves from idols," delivered to Friendship Baptist Church in Mondovi, WI, on 8/9/09.

I. What does John mean by the term, "idols"?

A. A strange last word for John, or is it?

1. The book doesn't even mention idolatry, until here.

-Very rarely does anybody write a book, or a letter, and then add a completely new topic to the discussion at the very last sentence. It's just not good writing practice to do that. If you wrote an essay on love and at the very last sentence you talk about helicopters. You would get that paper back and your professor would have marked up that last sentence. You just don't do that. That would be like me talking about idols during this whole sermon, and then in my closing thought saying, but you know my favorite type of a dog is a rottweiler; flowers can be very pretty. It just doesn't relate.

2. The NT rarely talks about open idol worship.

-As Jesus interacts with people in the gospels, he never runs into anyone who's got a little statuette in their house. None of the Pharisees comes to him and asks him, "Rabbi, is it lawful for a Jew to worship Molech, or Baal, or Asherah in addition to Yahweh?" There were times in Israel's history where clear and open idolatry was prominent. This is not much the case in Jesus' time. When Paul, goes to the pagans we here about some idols. But idols are not mentioned very often in the NT.

3. Do we even have to worry about idols as American Christians living in 2009?

-This brings the question to bear even more for us. We don't have big idols that we go and worship; I mean we've got American Idol, but that's not really the same thing... How does the issue of idolatry relate to us? We live in a cultured secularist culture. We're not superstitious; we don't believe in all these gods running around, making the crops grow, or the rain fall, or keeping disease away.