Image: Frank Wesley (1923-2002), The Hand of God Is My Refuge. Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt University Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. Used by permission.
Humor me in a little thought experiment. Consider everything you have spent money on in the past six months: every necessity, every frivolity, every gift, every investment. If a stranger were to look at those transactions, what would they conclude about what you value? Or who you care about?
Or this one. Consider your schedule. If a stranger were to look at your calendar or the amount of time you spend on smartphone apps or watching television, what would they think is most important to you?
Questions like these can be unsettling because they point to possible uncomfortable truths. We know, of course, that we ought to love God with all we are and our neighbors as ourselves, but we have trouble with that because our hearts are often rooted elsewhere.
In his Large Catechism, Luther wrote about this problem:
A “god” is the term for that to which we are to look for all good and in which we are to find refuge in all need. Therefore, to have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe in that one with your whole heart. As I have often said, it is the trust and faith of the heart alone that make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true one. Conversely, where your trust is false and wrong, there you do not have the true God. For these two belong together, faith and God. Anything on which your heart relies and depends, I say, that is really your God.[1]
The implications of this are stunning. Everybody, perhaps even the staunchest atheist, has a god. Unless you’re that exceedingly rare soul that does not rely or depend upon anything or anyone, you have a god. We all have a god or, quite often, several gods. Luther goes on to describe mammon—money and property—as the most common idol on earth, which has been the case from the beginning of human history. But today, it has truly taken on a life of its own. Markets are often described as almost-thinking entities, bestowing blessings and hurling curses on particular corporations or industries at will. We Americans are often encouraged to buy, buy, buy, with dire warnings of market implosion if we don’t. Many of you will remember in the days after 9/11, we were encouraged to go out and buy to help the American economy. Consumerism as patriotism. Luther also talks about other idols: learning, wisdom, power, prestige, family, and honor. Now, none of these things are bad in themselves. But it isn’t the thing itself that makes an idol, but the heart’s attachment to it. The heart believes that these things will keep us safe; that they contain our identity and reason for being. We tend to fear, love, and trust these above all things.
And it’s understandable why we do this. Like the ancient Israelites, we can believe that God is not accessible or does not care when we go through the troubles of this life. God often doesn’t answer prayers in the way we would like! When that happened in ancient Israel, the people would make a golden calf or an idol of wood or stone to do what they thought God would not. While we don’t usually make literal idols today, we can easily lose faith when God doesn’t do what we would like. We search for the deepest desires of our hearts in other things.
But God does love us and has made himself eternally accessible to us in the man Jesus. As Colossians chapter 1 says, Jesus is the image of the invisible God. We may not know Jesus in the way the disciples knew him. But we do know him when we meet him in word, sacrament, and fellow Christian. Every time we read or listen to the words of Scripture, Jesus is there. Every time we call upon the name of Father, Son, and Spirit in prayer, Jesus is there. Every time God’s good news for our bad situation is preached, Jesus is there. Every time we gather around this table, Jesus is there just as fully and completely as he was by the Galilean lake. And in fact, he is more present. Unlike the time of his earthly life and ministry, he is no longer limited by the constraints of time and space. That’s part of the meaning of those strange resurrection stories where Jesus walks through solid doors and appears suddenly on a mountain or by the lake. Jesus is now present wherever and whenever the faithful call on his name. He may not be present exactly in the way we would like. But then again, we often don’t know what’s good for us. Jesus is present fully to meet our needs of life, light, and salvation.
And because Jesus is always with us, we don’t need to look for those things in these idols of our hearts. We are freed from looking for love in all the wrong places. We are freed from being captive to these things we mistakenly expect to provide happiness. We are freed from the false promises of those who claim they can help us find our authentic selves, usually at the cost of $29.99 per month! We are freed from our self-worth consisting in what we do, buy, or earn. And we are freed to belong completely to God, who, as Luther says, “…gives us body, life, food, drink, nourishment, health, protection, peace, and all necessary temporal and eternal blessings.”[2] God makes us. God saves us. And God sustains us for this world and the world to come.
So, if you take nothing else today from this sermon, take this: Trust God, the giver of all good things. Everything else our heart clings too will one day pass from this world. And everything that harms and afflicts us is also temporary. Only God is eternal. And the love of God will be with us to the end of time. Amen.
© 2026, David M. Fleener. Permission granted to copy and adapt original material herein for non-commercial purposes.
[1] Robert Kolb, Timothy J. Wengert, and Charles P. Arand, The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 386.
[2] Ibid, 389.
