There is a great deal of misdirected boasting taking place in our world. From Heaven’s perspective, this boasting resembles a form of idol worship. Any boasting and the false confidence it offers will always fail. Only God is worthy of our boasting.
We can too easily become confident in the works of our hands and the presumptions we have about the future. Like it was in the time of Jeremiah, we can begin to worship those interpretations erecting ways of thinking that resemble the idols the people of God worshipped as they abandoned Him to worship idols. Not all idols are carved images. The most dangerous kinds of idols are ways of thinking that have been formed apart from God. That misdirected worship displaces a singular worship of God.
The Lord spoke into this misdirected thinking, “This is what the Lord says: ‘Don’t let the wise boast in their wisdom, or the powerful boast in their power, or the rich boast in their riches. But those who wish to boast should boast in this alone’” (Jeremiah 9:23).
The Lord then defined what a right kind of boasting would look like, “That they truly know me and understand that I am the Lord who demonstrates unfailing love and who brings justice and righteousness to the earth and that I delight in these things” (vs. 24). It is a boasting that allows us to rest while the Lord works out His justice and righteous in the culture and within the Church.
True worship creates a dependence on God, not on a false confidence in our accomplishments or wealth, or in any promise that directs our worship to a person or thing apart from God. Turning from that singular dependence on God will make us vulnerable to the enemy’s wiles.
The Lord demonstrates His unfailing love most clearly when life is descending into increasing levels of upheaval, uncertainty, and disarray. In that descent, the Lord will bring his justice and righteousness from a place outside our best attempts to make this life work. No idol of self-promotion or self-confidence can do that.
A great humbling is coming to the Church. In that humbling, the idols of our self-confidence, self-assurance, and its resulting boasting, will fail. That humbling will be our preparation to navigate wisely our path into the future. The Lord will reveal to us what truly delights Him. What delights the Lord is the only thing we are safe to pursue. Pursuing what delights the Lord will define the object of our worship. All the rest is the worship of idols that will lead us to places of confusion and disappointment.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on Garris Elkins
Featured Image by AzamKamolov from Pixabay
