We Become Who We Worship
By Jessica Brodie
Have you heard the phrase, “You are what you eat?”
I heard it a lot growing up as a warning to avoid junk food lest I become like junk myself. I can tell when I’m consuming toxins and “bad” food—a diet of sugary sweets and processed, salty, chemical-filled treats leaves my skin a wreck, my mind and body sluggish, and my insides in a knot. But when I eat clean, pure, nutritious food, I feel good and look good.
Reading the Bible today, I stumbled upon a sentence that hit hard.
It comes in 2 Kings 17, after God’s people, the Israelites, had spent generations under kings who veered from God’s way. Instead of heeding God’s commands and walking God’s path like King David and other godly leaders, these kings worshipped other gods, building pagan shrines, pillars, and poles and offering sacrifices that honored evil, not God’s goodness. They turned to fortune-tellers and sorcerers and “sold themselves to evil” (v. 17), earning God’s wrath.
As the Bible says, “They rejected his decrees and the covenant he had made with their ancestors, and they despised all his warnings. They worshiped worthless idols, so they became worthless themselves” (2 Kings 17:15 NLT).
Worthless—what a word! The original Hebrew here is habal, meaning empty, meaningless, vain, and without worth or value.
They worshipped what was worthless and so became worthless.
In essence, they became what they practiced, consumed, hungered after—they were what they ate.
We probably know the rest of the story—the Israelites turned from God and eventually lost their Promised Land. Even though they eventually returned after their exile to Babylon and rebuilt much of what had been lost, they lived under oppression, later bending the knee to the Roman Empire and ultimately dispersing across the globe. They went astray and suffered for it.
The message is clear: Follow God and live well. Don’t follow God and, well … face the consequences.
This applies to us today, as well.
In Matthew 6:24, Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money.”
Yet look at our lives, and our lifestyles. Many of us have massive houses, fancy cars, toys and electronics and gadgets and riches galore, yet we are in debt, whether to a bank or other debtor or to the items themselves. We give our time and attention to worldly concerns and worldly pleasures and convince ourselves we don’t have time or energy to go to church, read the Bible, volunteer in Jesus’s name, pray with other believers, or help that charity with funds they need.
What are we doing as a nation, as a people?
Who do we serve, really?
The self? The altar of material items and flesh and parties?
Or the altar of the Lord, God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth?
Certainly, it is not a bad thing to have an enjoy nice things and celebrations. But when we look around at the sum total of our lives and it all adds up to a bank account or calendar steeped in self or the world instead of God, then we need to ask ourselves a hard question.
Are we worshipping worthless idols and, therefore, becoming worthless ourselves?
Often we think “worship” means bowing before or praying to something, but worship also involves other things: our time, our energy, our passion. It involves what we mimic and run after, what we follow and imitate.
Chasing the world, at the end of the day, means we’re not chasing after Jesus.
Today, let’s rein all of our passions in and assess: Am I serving two masters? Three? Do my hungers and passions revolve around basic, self-oriented things, or the things that matter, the things of eternity?
None of us is perfect, but when we set our minds on track and strive to follow what is right, we have a better chance of staying on course.
Let’s worship the Lord, not the world.
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