(upbeat music) - We are joined one last time by Dr. Richard Lentz, who serves as the Vice President for Academic Affairs and the Dean of the main campus of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, which is just north of Boston. Dr. Lentz is also the author of a fascinating book that releases this winter.

It's titled Identity and Idolatry, the Image of God and Its Inversion. I want to turn and close this week, this fruitful week, with the gospel. But you mentioned busyness earlier in the week, and I want to go back to that. How does idolatry breed busyness? - I think busyness is a contemporary idol.

I'm not sure it was an idol in an earlier time. You might say sloth was an idol of an earlier age, although I don't want to deny that there are, there's this curious contradiction in modern life between busyness and sloth called entertainment. And yet the circumstances of our lives in the West, outside of some smaller community, so I don't want to, again, overgeneralize that all communities and all cultural contexts of our time are saturated with busyness.

But I would say it is the dominant motif for most people, that we have a sense of too many things taking place in our lives, and if we could just slow down one sign of this in religious circles of all theological traditions is the move towards what we might call spiritual formation, towards remembering Sabbath, the rest, slowing down, becoming a spiritual discipline.

That kind of movement, if you will, is, it seems to me, just a response, sometimes a good one, sometimes not, a response to being overwhelmingly busy. Now, busyness, again, is both a blessing and a curse. Sometimes when you're busy, you actually accomplish much, and we are called to do, we are called to be creatures who accomplish tasks.

We are not simply called to navel gaze in creation. We are given mandates to be stewards of the created order. So we are called to do, called to be active in that sense. But there's a sense in which busyness is different than accomplishment, and busyness is living, I think, on the surface of life, feeling like we are so far into the weeds of minutiae and small details that we never really tackle the big issues of life.

Sometimes we experience, I shouldn't say, sometimes mostly we experience our schedule as our master rather than vice versa. That itself is just that indicator. A parent of young children has so many things to do in life that probably aren't that important, but they end up feeling like they have to do them.

They have to get them to the sports, they have to get them to the music lessons, they have to get them to, and they're living constantly in the car, they're constantly going from activity A to activity B, and they feel overwhelmed, and yet they can't get out of it.

Again, I wanna be careful to suppose that there's something fundamentally evil about playing sports or engaging in music lessons. But it's that desire to have everything for one's child that leads to this sense of never really having anything of significance. And so we're so busy we can't get under the surface of our lives.

- Yeah, well, our time has been rich, but it comes to a close. As we go out, how does the gospel of the glory of Jesus Christ combat the work of idolatry in our souls and reshape our identity and truly satisfy our souls? How does that work? - Yeah, so the two parts to it.

So we're going from Genesis to Pentecost, if you will, having spent most of our time in the golden calf narrative here in the conversation that is on idolatry, we need to be reminded that we are created by a God who grants significance and safety, that we are created to yearn for it, to look for it, to desire it, and that it's found in our Creator, a God who is deeply good, generous, gracious, just, all that which satisfies us is found in him.

Brokenness, then, is simply the story of looking for that significance and safety somewhere else. The gospel, if you will, then is God's response to our brokenness and our yearning for significance and safety. So the gospel is the storyline that takes us into this, not simply a return to Genesis, not simply a return to the original state, but now runs us through the narrative of forgiveness, of grace, and therein lies the deeply satisfying character of the gospel.

That is to say, it's not simply saying, this is the way to find safety and security, but actually that safety and security are now matters of grace, matters of God's generosity in a broken world. And so it is deeper, it is richer than it was even in Genesis, by virtue of the fact that it overcomes our idolatries.

It doesn't simply break the power of our idols, it does, in part, but the dynamic of forgiveness is itself an experience richer than we would have known had we not been broken and idolatrous. There's something deeply satisfying about forgiveness in the human soul. Most of us know the experience of being forgiven, it being a strange experience that's somehow deeply satisfying.

We don't want to seek it, we're afraid of being ashamed to admitting something wrong. So when we've had a argument with a co-worker or with our spouse, our first intuition is never to admit fault, but somehow, some way, when by God's grace, we ask for forgiveness, and it's actually granted, there is nothing like that experience that satisfies us.

It is just deeply, emotionally healthy. And so here is the gospel, if you will, that God's forgiveness is made known in the midst of our idols, and therefore, out of His grace, the idols become less and less powerful in our lives. - Amen, beautiful. Thank you, Dr. Lentz, our guest on the podcast this week, and the author of a forthcoming book titled "Identity and Idolatry." This has been a wonderful week, and this is the hope that we have in the digital age, that our eyes are so easily lured to idols, yes, but the glory of Jesus Christ is power to transform our hearts and to loosen our hearts from the idol-proneness that we see inside of us.

We've talked a lot about how, as followers of Christ, it is the glory of Jesus that shapes our identity, and we've seen that in passages like 2 Corinthians 3:18, 2 Corinthians 4, verse four, and for more on how this works, see the following episodes in the APJ series. See our episode with Paul Tripp titled "Life is One Big Glory War," episode number 619.

See also "The Transforming Power of Christ's Glory," an episode we recorded with Michael Reeves. It's episode number 379. And maybe right now you feel stuck in sin, and you feel like the idols of your life are looming large right now. See episode number 477 with Pastor John. It's titled "A Prayer for Those Who Are Stuck in Sin." This has been a rich, rich week with Dr.

Lentz, and if you missed any of our five episodes with him, you can catch up on our mobile apps or by going to desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. I'm your host Tony Ranke. I'll see you on Monday. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)