‘I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live yet not I, but Christ liveth in me and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

The words of the Apostle Paul. The testimony of the Apostle Paul, his statement of how he came from a life of darkness and spiritual death to a life of life and light through Christ Jesus. So our subject this evening is ‘everyone’s chief idol.’

But that is what the Apostle is speaking about primarily in this verse. We are all idolaters. Not necessarily idolaters in the sense of worshipping manmade images. But we are all idolaters. Human beings are creatures of worship. And if we will not worship the high and everlasting God, then we worship earthly things, little things, pathetic things. Because we’re creatures of worship, we cannot help ourselves worshipping. We reject the one to be worshipped.

Then our minds are switched straightaway to the trivial and even the awful and the puny and the dreadful. We are creatures of worship, but there is a chief idol in this world. Always has been one in ancient times, far more worshipped than all the manmade images, literal idols and images. Just think of them for a moment as the word the Bible says so often. They have no faculties. They have no life in them. They have no voice.

They cannot speak. They cannot really hear the people who worship them. They’re hopeless, useless idols to which people in superstitious foolishness attach all kinds of powers and influences, thinking they represent gods who will hear them and take account of them a note of them and so on. But of course, these idols had no power. They could not facilitate anything. They could not change the lives of the people who worship them and made offerings to them. There was no spiritual reality about them, but it is the same with all idols. All idols are really dumb and dead and hopeless things.