Yesterday I mentioned that living by the Ten Commandments is both the best way to live,

and it's also the safest. Think about it this way. If we are Christians, we know that

we can only live for God's glory with the help of the indwelling Spirit of Jesus Christ.

He gives us the power to do that, but trains need tracks as well as power, don't they?

And in the same way, the commandments of God keep us on the right lines, we might say.

Think about the second commandment, about not making images and not bowing down to them.

We might think that as Christian believers there's no danger of us doing that, but then

we remember that when Moses later came down the mountain, this is exactly what the people

who had experienced dramatic salvation from Egypt were actually doing.

So John Calvin was surely right when he wrote in book one of his Institutes of the Christian

Religion that our hearts are a perpetual factory of idols. True, in the Western world, our

idols don't take the shape of golden calves, but they take other shapes, don't they?

If you're a teenager or a budding sportsman or sportswoman, it's really easy to become

almost obsessed with your idols. If you look back as I'm able to do to the era of Elvis

or the Beatles, or even look at our own time at some of the massive music performances

by the great pop stars, well you turn down the sound and the crowd often looks as though

they're at a charismatic worship service, adoring their idols. And if we're much more

straight-laced, then our idols can be as diverse as our job, our bank balance, our home,

our car, just about anything or anyone. Anything we think about more often than we think

about God, anything that stimulates our affections more than God does.

Why does God warn us about this? Yes, because it's wrong, but there's something else. It's

because it's neither safe nor healthy for us. Idols can never satisfy whether they're

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