A TESTIMONY: Facing Idolatry

Please read the following excerpt from one of my journals. This will give you an idea of where I was at one point when it came to the sin of idolatry:

When I was finally ready to surrender my heart, God was ready to set me free!
But first I had to take a hard look at the following idols that ruled my life. It was time to give them up forever, or stay in bondage forever. It was my decision.

Idol of Food

I had to admit to myself that food was not just an innocent “problem” or a bad habit. Food was my god, my idol and the thing I loved more than my family, my friends, even my own life.

Idol of Busyness

This idol totally alienated me from God.
The enemy kept me busy all the time. I fell for his lie that to keep busy was to be successful and even “spiritual”. But really all it did was keep me from surrendering to God. I was keeping busy every moment of every day and this became an addiction in itself. I couldn’t stop, resting was unthinkable. This addiction was fueled by pride: I felt good about my busy self  in comparison with the “lazy slobs” around me who were in fact taking care of their bodies by pacing themselves.

The truth is that the enemy has blinded us; we do not see how constantly keeping busy robs us from so much. If we are always busy, we can not hear the voice of God. We lose God, we lose relationships with the people we love the most and we also lose ourselves. If you are always busy, you ignore your body’s signal, warning you to recharge through resting.

This is a vicious cycle: We are always busy, we are always tired, we are always irritable, we don’t have time to get to God who is our only source of peace, we don’t get time to rest our tired bodies, so we feel like we are loosing our minds and we turn to dangerous substitutes such as food, sugar, caffeine, diet pills and energy drinks. This gives us a fake boost and keeps us up till late, and the next day we repeat the whole vicious cycle.

We have to stop this cycle on purpose. Nobody can do it for us.

Many mornings when I wake up, I have the urgency of the day pressing upon me. The baby needs to be nursed and bathed, I need to get to an appointment, I need to get a load of laundry in the dryer, I need to get to the gym, etc, etc.
I had to learn to tell my body and mind. “You will sit yourself down body, and you mind, you will keep quiet so that my spirit can worship the Lord” Believe me, my feet always want to start running, and my mind want to keep on racing. I have found that the only way to quiet down my racing mind is by studying the Word of God. So I will go sit this rebellious body down in a chair, turn on some worship music, take out my prayer cards and start praying the Word of God over my mind and my emotions. Then I will get my Bible study out and begin to study the Word.

It is definitely something to get used to if you have been running around forever. This will not feel natural or even comfortable at all, but believe me, when you have done it for a while, your feet will start running to that quiet place with God. Your soul will start to respond to the Holy Spirit immediately.

When this finally became a habit, I would find myself laughing out of sheer relief that I was able to relax in God’s presence. I can not describe to you the sigh that comes out of the depth of your soul when you actually do it. We just don’t know how much our body, soul and spirit needs this time of refreshing.  The laughter would turn to crying. I would be bawling out of an unspeakable gratefulness to God for helping me fall in love with Him, His presence and His Word. I would so often sing that old hymn of Amazing grace, because yes, I was lost indeed, lost in my own running and racing and blinded by believing that to keep busy was to be validated as a person.
Actually, to keep busy is to not live at all!
When I finally started to surrender to Him, I could breathe again, I was indeed found by God and I could see again, I could see His open, loving arms where I could run into anytime I wanted to.

Idol of shopping

There is always something that needs to be bought, like there is always something to do. Hours of time and heaps of sanity can be wasted wandering around the stores. Don’t get me wrong, I love shopping, it is one of my favorite things to do. I am totally a city girl, so my idea of a great vacation is a little time on the beach and tons of time in huge shopping centers.

This was one of the things that the enemy used against me through the years. I spend hours planning on what to buy, thinking about clothes, paging through magazines to find the perfect outfits and then more hours going from store to store to hunt down that perfect outfit.
In the same way I would shop for my house: Hunting down furniture, perfect dishes for the perfect occasion with the perfect table linen and silverware. All of this took so much time and because we never had shiploads full of money, I had to go from store to store for the perfect deal. (I’m sure if we had lots of money I would have done it anyway)
Now add grocery shopping to the list and the result is that I spent almost half of my life in stores. I had to recognize this as a big thief of my time ( and obviously money) and one of the things that kept me from surrendering to God.
For me this was not just shopping, it was most definitely an idol that I didn’t want to give it up. I loved it too much, it was part of me. I didn’t want to just shop in a balanced way, no, I loved how hours of shopping gave meaning to my life and helped me forget about my frustrations and pain. It was my great escape, my way of not dealing with the pain and emptiness in my heart. I was especially avoiding God’s presence because I was afraid that the Holy Spirit would convict me. In my heart I knew that I didn’t really need all that stuff or had to spend all that time on it. And as with all other sin, when I started tuning out the Holy Spirit in this area, I would feel guilty and start tuning Him out in all other areas of my life as well.

So, these three idols were intertwined in my life: If I went on a diet, the only way I could survive the diet was to go shopping or keep as busy as possible. When I kept my weight down with very dangerous methods, I still needed something else to fill the gap in my heart or numb the pain, so I would find something that kept me busy 24/7.

I finally had to decide: ENOUGH.
Nobody could make this decision for me. I had to decide that regardless of how difficult it would be, I had to remove these idols from my life. I wanted to start a life without idols. I was terrified, I couldn’t imagine such a life, but I asked God to help me fall in love with Him, at least as much as I loved food. For me this was a big step.

Even today I have to stay diligent at keeping these idols out of my life, but it is not as hard anymore and loving God makes all the difference.
If you ask me if I am totally free of idol worship today, I will tell you YES, but as with everything else in my life, I can only remain free if I keep up my surrender to God. I learned this the hard way.

I eventually got rid of these idols by committing to 40 days of WARFARE.

Breaking away from these idols were very difficult, because obviously Satan wouldn’t just let me take back my heart without a fight.
During this 40 days, my main focus was to surrender to God, because without Him I knew that I just couldn’t even do one day. (I’ve tried this in my own strength before with no luck) So it came as no surprise to me that the enemy’s number one strategy was to keep me from God’s presence. I had to surrender to God every day, resist the enemy every day, and turn my back on the idols for good.

Why 40 days of Warfare?

I  wanted to really see if it would make a difference to have my main motivation be: Surrender to God.

I wanted to set aside a block of time to untangle my heart from the idol of food (the love affair) and surrender all of my heart to Jesus.(“Surrender to God…” James 4:7 NIV). Then I wanted to get rid of the shame and guilt in my mind which I knew to be the battlefield of Satan (“…resist the enemy and he will flee from you” James 4:7 NIV).

It was hard, as these things usually are, but God was so faithful. He brought me through, he did a new thing in both my heart and mind and in the end also my body. I really felt how all these things were coming together and how I could for the first time actually put some of the head knowledge I had about eating disorders into actions in my life.

I never realized how my past efforts have been thwarted by the enemy. Each time I committed in the past, he would just open up fire to discourage me, and I would fall back; defeated and stripped from all faith that I would ever be free. This time I was ready and armed. I went through the battle with the help of the Holy Spirit and friends and in the end the enemy had to run, because I was out to get back what was rightfully mine.

Only God and I knew, when I was finally ready to give it up. I would finally stretch out my hand to him and say; ” Please take it, I don’t want to love food anymore. I am ready. It’s going to be hard, but I am ready God.”

Don’t stay in denial. Don’t let the enemy trick you like he tricked me to always go look for some other explanation of why you have an eating disorder. I always said to myself  “There must be something you missed. There must be some reason why you are like this. There must be some cure”. This went on for years.

The truth: I really knew all along that my heart was held captive by food and that nothing would change if I still loved this thing too much to let it go. We can not serve two masters at the same time…

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