Let’s conspire together to act together to do some good this Christmas. Not allowing ourselves to become so enamoured with all the stuff we forget the stable. To do that, we have to spend less.
People right now are getting trapped.

Ex 32:1-4
Summary?
‘Come- make us gods…’
So they took off their jewellery and made it into an idol, and said ‘these are our saviours, and worshipped them. They corrupted themselves and invoked the wrath of the real God.

This was
1 Built on wrong inspiration.

It says ‘When the people saw…’
At the same time as Moses was hearing/listening to God.
What do you see? Genesis 3 talks about how Eve was deceived by what she saw sensually and naturally – that closed down the hearing of the supernatural voice of God. We lose the bigger picture. We stop trusting God & fashion our own. Shaped the god they wanted to accommodate them.
They were blinded by their stuff. Obsessed with the calf so they couldn’t see the cloud! God was close, but the calf blocked their view.

They said, ‘We don’t know.’
Ignorance can lead to insecurities & then to the wrong decisions. Teenagers get into drugs
Athletes take steroids
Faith gets robbed from our hearts by fear. We want to spend as much but give less.

Their god was built around a wrong focus.
They wanted comfortable, easy to control gods, convenient. We want convenient church. Scoring the worship and the preaching. We want Jesus to do what we want. But he’s not there to be controlled.
But Paul said, ‘for me to live is Christ and to die is gain.’ We are meant to lay down our lives and say its a good cost.
We choose between control & comfort or the cost of conviction

We have to watch the revelry that they threw themselves into as well! It can have awful consequences after the Christmas party.

Aaron tried to add a bit of empty worship in with that revelry. Watch that in our lives.

Most of us tend to worship our work, work at our play and play at our worship.

Let’s not lose our focus on the real God this Christmas. Destroy false altars, images and worship.

The gods the world presents are so expensive – but the real God gave it all for us! John 3:16

God loves
He loves us
He loves people
He loves to give
He doesn’t want to take your golden earrings!
Jesus paid it all
He’s not a golden calf-
He’s the Lamb who was slain!