You ever get the feeling on Sundays that the pastor is speaking DIRECTLY at you? I haven't experienced it that much, mostly at conferences, but it was especially true for me yesterday. In fact, it felt like a knife piercing my heart.

I went to ECHO yesterday since I will be helping out with the college ministry starting very soon. We had a guest speaker come in, a former staff worker with one of the campus fellowships at Baylor. He spoke on the topic of sin. More specifically, he spoke on the topic of idols. I have heard very powerful messages before on idolatry and sin before and each time the messages have convicted me like no other, but I felt like I was hearing this for the very first time again.

The preacher addressed sin as anything that grabs our worship and affections over God, is essentially idolatry. He made an interesting point about the 10 Commandments described in the book of Exodus. The first two commandments relate to idolatry, and commandments 3 through 10 are all "supplemental" to them. That is, breaking commandments 3 through 10 come about because you break commandment 1 and 2.

The part that really got me was when he was giving examples of idolatry in our present day and time. He was saying that sometimes we think that we're more sophisticated or more mature than old testament people in that we don't have idols. But he said, "but think about this... how often have we thought that we would be satisfied by a particular JOB, or with a RELATIONSHIP, or with SUCCESS in our academic careers????" Bam. Bam. Bam. Ouch. Bullseye on all three of those for me. It became more apparent through out the message that I had been trying to find significance and satisfaction in those things. Smells like Holy Spirit... the speaker also said another thing when it comes to conviction. He said that we are so corrupt and so messed up that we need the Holy Spirit to actually tell us just HOW corrupt we actually are.

Dang.

But the great thing is that at the end, he preached Christ, the cure to our sinful nature. That worship time afterwards was so sweet... you could just feel that there were people crying out to the Savior, needing spiritual intervention in their lives...

No guilt in life, no fear in death
This is the power of Christ in me
From life's first cry to final breath
Jesus commands my destiny
No power of hell, no scheme of man
Can ever pluck me from His hand
'Till He returns or calls me home
Here in the power of Christ I'll stand

Funny how when you think you've come so far in your maturity, really you just see how much farther you have to go.