“Then followed the worship of idols fashioned after the likeness of men and birds and beasts and creeping things. But this series of degrading acts began in the mind. Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.” (A.W. Tozer)
Tozer points out that idolatry starts in the mind and this leads to a series of degrading acts that continue to a lower and lower degree the longer the wrong ideas of God are held. Some would hold to the concept that the acts are sinful in and of themselves and the acts alone are idolatrous. But Tozer says that the acts flow from wrong ideas and the ideas themselves are idolatrous. This is a tremendous insight into the way sin and idolatry work into the lives of people. The thoughts are idolatrous themselves and then lead to idolatrous actions. The thoughts that a person has of God, then, are of immense importance. Let me try to explain this.
“God is Spirit and has not a body like men” is what the children’s catechism tells us. The only way we can know God is through ideas of Him. If our thoughts of God are wrong, then we have an idol that we worship and serve. This is why we must be given over to the study and pursuit of the truth of God. This is why we must wrestle with Scripture and seek the answer how that Scripture displays God. The reason for Scripture is not just to make people more moral, but to make people more like God. There is a sense in which morality is not the same thing as holiness. Man is commanded to be holy as He is holy, not be moral as He is moral. Man can only be holy as He is holy to the degree that man knows how holy God is. Men can only grow in holiness to the degree that they grow in their understanding of God and His holiness.
With the contrast of man being holy as God is holy in mind, we can see that man always lives in a way that conforms to his idea of God. The unbelieving person does the same thing. The unbelieving person might not always recognize or admit that his concept of morality is based on his idea of God, but it is. Men always function or operate according to some idea that they have. Men will always have some concept of God in their mind though they might refuse to recognize it as such. In other words, all men have a concept of God that they operate by. Those with idolatrous concepts of God in reality worship a god that has come from their own desires and so in living according to a standard they are living according to their own desires. But it all begins with the thoughts of the mind and how a person conceives what he thinks is God.
In this sense we can see that a person simply imagines things about God and then lives as if those things were true. In reality, everyone does that. Man can strive for nothing higher or lower than the goal that he is striving for. Man can live for nothing higher than his concept of God and in another sense no one can live any lower than his view that he has of what he pretends to be God. The concept of God is what governs the actions and lives of men each moment. Each moment man is commanded to love God with all of his being and man certainly loves something as his primary love each moment of his existence.
Each church needs to be awakened to see this basic truth. Each church is striving to a goal according to what it conceives to be God. While a church may have a Bible that it gives a nod to as its authority, in reality it is bowing to what it conceives of as God. “Do not eat the bread of a selfish man, Or desire his delicacies; 7 For as he thinks within himself, so he is. He says to you, “Eat and drink!” But his heart is not with you” (Prov 23:6-7). Notice the principle here. A man may invite you to eat and drink in order to be nice, but his heart is not there. What a man really is, then, is as he thinks. So man is in worship and so each church is. A church is really no more than what it thinks about God. “Watch over your heart with all diligence, For from it flow the springs of life” (Prov 4:23). As each person must watch over the heart with all diligence, so the church must watch over itself with all diligence. What is in the core of the thinking of a person guides his behavior and his worship. The same thing is true concerning what the core thinking of the church really is. Each church has a true concept of God that it is pursuing or it has a false concept of God that it is pursuing. In other words, each church is either growing toward God or is growing away from God. It is not the numbers and programs that show this, but rather if the people really desire and love the true God and His glory more than numbers and programs. The concept of God is not something on the peripheral edges; it is at the core and center of all that people do. Whether a person is idolatrous depends on the concept of God that is certainly there, not if it is there. The same thing is true of each church.
God Loves... Himself 
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