Ep. 028 - Guarding Against the Idol of Success: A Biblical Perspective

Episode Transcript

Austin
If we were to pull a group of Christians and say, what would draw you away from the Lord, you might hear drugs, alcohol, sex, any sort of vices. But in the West, I don't think what you're going to hear is business success, financial independence.
But the reality is, if we look at Solomon, his life was drawn away from success. And if we look to Jesus, he often challenges our presuppositions that we need to be financially independent and build bigger barns.

Spencer
When we think about success so often in the States, that is the picture of where we want to go and yet we really have to think about that definition of success and really the way that the Lord sees success. You know, I think back to I think it's first Samuel 16, where the Lord tells Samuel very specifically, the Lord sees not as man sees man looks on the outward appearance, the Lord looks on the heart and there are so many, I think, who seem outwardly successful and maybe even have the trappings of success in a way that would be palatable to Christians.
And yet that success, instead of leading them to the Lord, has done the opposite, eroded that really desire for him. And so today we get to talk about how success can lead us to that lack of a felt need of God. It will in some ways and and as kind of grappling with how we counterbalance that maybe with people or with reminders or things that we need to do.
If we if we do see that level of success because we've got to come back and acknowledge him as provider, because if we don't, then that distance from him can lead us increase astray to look for those fleeting pleasures, to have that next validation or that next achievement that gives us that sense of worth, really, if we don't find our complete worth in him.
And then really the saddest thing is that can lead us away to a point where we put our faith in those pieces. And we're going to look at that through the lens of Solomon today. So as we think about that, Austin, where do we see our culture kind of departing from the biblical wisdom that we'll see in this passage?

Austin
We've talked about it before, but it comes back to this idea of independence is maybe one of the key gods that we worship in the United States. We want to be independent. We want to be financially independent. We don't want to have to have needs from our neighbors. You know, I think I think about our city and Knoxville in particular.
And I look at, you know, just some of the suburbs and it's you pull in, you open your garage door and you pull straight into the garage and then you close it. And it's you've almost tried to insulate yourself from other people. You've created a sense of comfort and belonging in your own space that you don't need to be around others.
We've so created these walls that are our ideal life here is an ideal life where I am the center of it, and I don't need other people around me. And I think when that when I become the center, the linchpin and the determining factor of whether I'm living a good life is if I'm successful. And oftentimes that just leads when you look at statistics and it leads to high rates of depression and loneliness.
And you think about what people have lamented over the last few years, and it's that there's a rising rate of feeling isolated and feeling against one another. And I think hand-in-hand success comes with this feeling of I don't need other people and if I don't need other people then I can write off God as well, because if I if I don't need other people then I don't need God, if I don't need God, then it's all about me.
And I think that's a really dangerous place to be. And when we try to continue to pursue that through control or through any sort of other means, then it's just going to continue to draw us away from God and not back towards him because we are meant to be a communal people. We're not meant to be people in silos.

Spencer
For as seemingly clear as the account of Solomon's life is, it seems like it gets short shrift oftentimes in the States. We know about Solomon and his wisdom, his wealth, and yet the end of his life, I think we don't really reflect on enough here in the States at least. But if we look at 1 Kings 11, which is the passage that we'll get into, we really see an account of a man who is at the pinnacle of everything.
People are coming from all over the world to hear him speak his wisdom. The Queen of Sheba coming in, paying tribute, all kinds of different things. He is so well revered and yet a lot of what he does leads to that downfall, that distance from the Lord. So, we dive in in 1 Kings 11, starting with verse one says:
1 Now King Solomon loved many foreign women, along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women, 2 from the nations concerning which the Lord had said to the people of Israel, “You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you, for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods.” Solomon clung to these in love. 3 He had 700 wives, who were princesses, and 300 concubines.
Austin
As we look at this, Spencer. The reality is that success can lead us away from the Lord and it can lead us to a lack of a felt need toward God. It's not only going to pull us away, but it's also going to dull our hearts, too, believing that we need the Lord.
And we've looked at this before, but whether we want to believe it or not, us as humans are vulnerable and needy. We like to insulate ourselves in the West, but the reality is we are needy. We need the Lord to provide. And I think we can get insulated from that when we don't think about all that God has created for us the food and the plants and the air.
Like He has given us so much that when we start to see success, we think that we are the ones that have brought it about. And when we start thinking that we are the ones that have brought it about, then we start to move ourselves and push away God because we don't feel like we need him anymore. And as we think about this, we look at God as provider.
Solomon didn't really do a whole lot to build the wealth of the Kingdom. God did that through David and through Saul and through the Kings before him and all that God had done to bring them into the land. You know, we look back to the exodus and how God plundered Egypt like he has been setting up this nation for a long time before Solomon was born.
And yet Solomon, in his wisdom that we often revere, says, Oh, I know how to continue growing this well. I can grow this wealth by marrying foreign wives, marrying the princesses of foreign kings, so that we can have good diplomacy. He looks to his success and says, I know wisdom, I know success. I'm going to take things into my own hands.
And so what does he do? He goes directly opposed to what God has always said. He's always said, don't intermarry. Not because that's necessarily wrong, but because he knows that by intermarrying, foreign gods of those people will try to draw them away from worshiping him. And so God is warning Solomon, don't do this. And yet he's he thinks he knows more than God, which I think we laugh at.
But we often fall into that temptation of believing that we know better. We know how to be successful. We've read the books, we have followed the mentors, we know what success looks like. But the reality is, the more we get it, the more it draws our hearts away, the more we think we can do what is right and good and discern what is true and beautiful.
We see it in David too, but David turns and repents, and we don't see that with Solomon here.

Spencer
We see David, of course, take the census of the Army and then, as you mentioned, repent of that because he knows that he's kind of starting to edge towards putting his faith in military might. And, you know, David was a warrior.
He was a king who was revered for his battle smarts. So it would be easy to see him gravitate to say how many thousands of soldiers do I have because nobody can invade if I have this many. But he repents of that, and that's that indication, again, that he was a man after God's own heart. We don't see that happening at the end of Solomon's life, sadly enough, even though he had such wisdom.

Austin
So we're gonna keep moving on it. 1 Kings 11:3 says:
And his wives turned away his heart. 4 For when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of David his father. 5 For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites. 6 So Solomon did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and did not wholly follow the Lord, as David his father had done. 7 Then Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Molech the abomination of the Ammonites, on the mountain east of Jerusalem. 8 And so he did for all his foreign wives, who made offerings and sacrificed to their gods.
Spencer
And in that sequence we see a distance from God due to that lack of need of Him and having his heart pulled towards other loves towards all of these different wives. Sometimes in I think the West, we don't really account for how terrible these other gods were.
You know, if you do even just a brief summary of what was going on for the human sacrifice for Moloch and for Chemosh. This is not just you know, some kind of ritual going up to a mountain and performing some right that maybe had was innocuous.
This is child sacrifice. This is a complete departure from what the Lord had said. So it's stunning that his wives were able to turn his heart to make the Lord God just one of many out there for him. It seems that he thought that he could move to a place where if he just pacified a lot of different gods, that he could have success and maybe just with his acumen, he could keep good relationships with all of these different kingdoms because he was intermarried, because he would perform these rights.
He knew perhaps, that at least during his lifetime, they wouldn't invade because they had these relationships that were built up. But that's unsustainable over time. And we see that in the destruction of the kingdom.

Austin
Sin is really deceptive. And you know, you start off with just a little bit of sin and it can really turn tremendously. And I remember I was sitting down with the pastor in Denver. We were having coffee and there was a magazine that had just come out that was talking about a pastor that had had multiple affairs at multiple churches that he had led. And my pastor and I talked about this for just briefly. And then he was like, you know, I have to continue to remember, I'm not more than six steps away from this person.
And it's that reality that if I take a little bit of sin, then I'm going to start getting desensitized to sin and then take on a little bit more sin and then a little bit more. And the next thing I know, I'm so far away from the Lord. It's like that re-anchoring that we talked about. We've got to come back over and over and over again, the Scripture.
And I think it's true with success too, because in success we can start thinking again. I don't have need of the Lord, and when it's just a little bit of success, then a little bit more than a little bit more, that intensity gets turned up to say, It really was me. I did it. Look at what I've done.
Instead of if we come back in that first moment where we start feeling the success and the greed and the pull towards that, I don't really need God to do this. If we repent right then and start turning away, then the trajectory changes. It's like you're going on parallel tracks and but they re-converge at repentance instead of continuing to diverge. If we continue to say success is on me, not on the Lord.

Spencer
We think about the ways that we can protect ourselves from that if we have a way that we're able to separate the trappings of success from the success itself. If we don’t take on maybe some of the financial benefit, some of the power, if we redistribute those, then there are significant ways that we can protect ourselves.
You know, one of those stories that really has impacted us so much of late is watching Allen and Katherine Barnhart's story Barnhart Crane and Rigging based out of Memphis and we'll include this in the show notes but just the way from the very inception of their business, they said we're going to break the link between success in the business and changes in our lifestyle.
So the business can be extraordinarily successful, but we're not going to live like that. The business can be extraordinarily successful, but we're actually not going to throw our weight around and our voice around. We're actually going to redistribute that so that we have a lot of people be able to speak into how we use that wealth, how we use that power, that control, which again, has protected them seemingly from a lot of the trajectory that we see so often in the business world, which is there's a reason that some of that success happened.
You know, the Lord was working to put Solomon in that place, but he probably also worked hard. He probably also was really wise. And so there's reasons that he can justify what's happened, that it was him. But ultimately, if he could have broken that that link, then you know the outcome might have been different for his story.

Austin
You think about Allen and his brother and how they set up their company in the very beginning when they bought it from their parents and they said, we're going to trust the Lord as provider, not the business as provider.
And, you know, when we put our faith in other providers, whether it's our business success, whether it's whatever else it is, it could be families. You know, generational wealth is a thing that a lot of people will begin to put trust in. Oh, I don't need to work hard because when mom or dad die, then I get this inheritance and I can continue to live.
When we put our faith and our trust in other providers, then we're suddenly saying, Well, maybe directly saying we don't need God. And I think, again, going back to Allen in that videos, they don't trust that the business provides for them. God provides for business. And through the business, God provides for their family and they have divorced that success from continuing to grow and gain wealth.
And they have lived a generous life. They've given millions upon millions of dollars away and they have seen a kingdom impact, but they don't trust in the business. And I think that oftentimes, you know, I think about a lot of business leaders, once they see success, then their idol becomes the business. They start worshiping the business. You think about we've talked about tech CEOs before that live, breathe and die by the success of their company.
They have married themselves to their work and it absorbs all of their being. And we don't want that. Like as Christians, we don't want that. We want God to absorb our being and we want to again, we want to work diligently. We think it's a beautiful thing when Christians set their minds to work hard, but not for the idol of the work to serve the living God.

Spencer
We want to go the opposite direction. To be frank, that Steve Jobs went, which is I want to make a dent in the universe. No, God's already made the universe. By His grace, he allows us to play a part in that story. We don't have to worry about making a dent in the universe. Instead, we just look, for our part, our participation piece in his story, which is beautiful.
You know, I think even sometimes we think about those times in our lives that we're most open to the Lord and we see actually the most growth. And rarely is it in the midst of the strongest pieces of success. You know, I think back to my own athletic journey in high school. I wasn't very open to the Lord's leading when I was a sophomore, starting on the varsity team in baseball and basketball.
I broke my leg the summer after that year. I was much more open to the Lord when I was not in sports, when I was at a new school, when I was grappling with all these different pieces, I needed the Lord. Of course, I always needed the Lord, but it was much more visceral. I was much more open to listening to him at that time.
And so again, we come back to success and financial independence. If that takes us to a place where we don't have a felt need for the Lord, that's a dangerous spot. And we really have to acknowledge that. And it's something that we're not great at doing as Americans.

Austin
Because we've idolized independence, we've idolized success. The American dream is go take new land, go make your independence. I mean, the entire westward journey in the US, the Manifest Destiny. Let's go create our own new place like we have so idolized and idealized, making our own way that it has gotten into the language of our entire existence within the US.
We don't know existence without independence here, and I think we need to start breaking that link of independence equals fruitfulness equals sanctification. No, it's dependance on the Lord that brings fruitfulness and sanctification. It's not my independence.

Spencer
We've talked about it before. But you know, I know many pastors in China that pray that they do not receive the level of religious independence ever that we have here because it's led to such great growth spiritually for them in China and other places.
So it's sobering when we think about it in light of that that the Lord can use a lot of different circumstances for our growth. And perhaps the most dangerous place is when we have that independence.

Austin
We really have a great opportunity to live counterculturally. Jesus often critiques the Pharisees for being lovers of money. What would it look like for us not to love money with our whole heart, but to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind.
And you know, Voltaire at one time said, When it comes to money, all men are the same religion. Well, let's not be men of that same religion. Let's break the power of money. Let's trust Jesus with our success. Let's lay our success back at his feet because it's all his. He was the provider. He is the provider, and he will be the provider.
He owns it all. And now we get to live open handed to a God of generosity to say thank you. And let's now move into this place where we trust Jesus, not ourselves.


Spencer
And as we do that, I think we have an opportunity to experience his joy. Because when we connect with people in partnership and seeing his kingdom move and participating with that work, I mean, there's nothing more exciting than seeing slaves freed through IJM and in seeing, you know, micro-finance loans issued through Hope International and seeing people come to faith in Jesus, in our Lord and Savior.
And so as we see success, if we then turn it around and we give it back to the Lord, then we can be the conduits that have even more joy because we were able to give back to him all of that. And so, we don't want to miss that opportunity. We don't want to be those that just cling to something and hold on to it, you know, like moldy cheese, you know, that you stick underneath the mattress.
Instead, we want to know that a feast is coming and we get to partake in it every day, you know, with the Lord.