Know Your Idols

For The Church

By Laura Campbell - Posted at For The Church:

Engaging with cultures different from our own is good for us. Such engagements tend to happen through friendships with people of different demographics, intentional variations in media consumption, and travel. Those who have had the privilege of visiting other countries (or even other parts of their own country) know the value of such experiences. Similar to the sensation of looking up into a starry night sky, witnessing a different culture makes us feel our smallness. We realize that the world is much, much bigger than the fleeting life we know.

When we’re taken out of our own culture – perhaps in the form of a conversation, a different vein of Twitter, or a mission trip – it becomes easy to romanticize and demonize aspects of the culture we are exploring. As Christians, we can be very quick to identify the sins and idols of others. Sometimes this speck-identifying can be helpful in forming a realistic understanding of a culture, but it becomes a serious problem when we refuse to see the planks in our own culture.

Consider with me, brothers and sisters – do we really see the idols of our culture? Can we call them by name? For people who talk a whole lot about knowing ourselves, I’m just not sure how well we do.

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