My wife and I were doing a Bible study this week and got to James 4.
The point that stuck with me was this. Idolatry is adultery in the eyes of God. Not like adultery. It is the same thing, because you took what belonged to Him and gave it to something else.
“You adulterers! Don’t you realize that friendship with the world makes you an enemy of God? I say it again: If you want to be a friend of the world, you make yourself an enemy of God.”
James 4:4
That is not gentle language, and I do not think it is meant to be.
Both of them are decisions
Here is why the comparison works.
When a man commits adultery, a decision gets made. It is not an accident and it is not a necessity. It is a want.
Same with an idol. Money, success, another woman, another man, a bottle, a phone. Something gets chosen over God, and a decision gets made to choose it.
Except most of the time it does not feel like one decision. Nobody sits down and decides that money matters more than his family. It just gets every minute by default, a hundred small times, and the choice never has to be made out loud.
There is a reason people say a man is married to his job.
The one with the best cover
Work is the sneakiest one, because it comes with a reason nobody questions.
Let me be clear about this part, because I am writing to drivers. Being gone is not the idol. Providing for your family is not the idol. I am out here five or six days a week and that is not me choosing the road over my wife. That is the job that pays for the house she is in.
Necessity is not the same as want. Every man reading this already knows which one he is doing.
The question was never where you are Monday through Friday. The question is what happens with the hours you actually have.
“I’ll talk to you when you get back”
Among the people I talk to, family and drivers both, there is an understanding about this. When a man is home, you leave him alone. “I'll talk to you when you get back, enjoy your home time.” Nobody has to negotiate it and nobody takes it personally. Not everybody does it that way, but close to it.
That understanding only works if I hold up my end of it. So when I am home and somebody calls, I take it quick and I get off. She knows things come up. But I have got five or six days a week out here with nothing but time to be on the phone. That time at home is hers.
The harder one
The phone is easy, because those calls belong to somebody else.
My own work is harder. I have got the business, the app, and more projects going than I should probably admit to. None of it ever tells me it is finished. There is always one more thing, and it is all good work, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous.
A week like this one I drive five and a half, six days. That leaves one day off, and I have got business that has to get done on it.
So I stop. Three o’clock, four, five, earlier when I can, and the rest of that day is hers.
Which means some of the business does not get done that week. That is the whole point. It is not a system where everything fits. It is a decision about what I am willing to leave unfinished.
An idol is the thing you never make wait.
“No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money.”
Matthew 6:24
Read that again. He does not say you should not serve two. He says you cannot. It is not a warning about splitting your loyalty. It is Him telling you that you are already serving one of them, and the way to find out which is to look at where your time actually went.
What happens when it goes
There is another reason this matters, and it is not about time.
Whatever a man leads with is usually what he is standing on. Listen to how somebody introduces himself. The job. The title. The truck. What he benches. What he has built. You can hear it in the first thirty seconds.
The problem is that every one of those can be taken. The job goes. The body gives out. The reputation gets wrecked by somebody else’s story. The money comes and goes, and a man out here has watched all of it happen to somebody he knows.
And if your identity was in it, you go with it.
Jesus is not a thing you can lose. He is not a title or a paycheck or a body that holds up. He is a person, and He is not going anywhere.
You will leave Him before He ever leaves you.
“Don’t love money; be satisfied with what you have. For God has said, ‘I will never fail you. I will never abandon you.’”
Hebrews 13:5
It goes both ways
This is not me handing my wife time like a favor. She has got her own work, grading and everything else that comes with it, and she stops too. It is reciprocal. We both understand that we have to make time for each other, and we both give something up to do it.
She can also tell me when I am getting it wrong, and I listen. Not because I have to. Because she is right and because I love her.
A man who will not listen to it from his own wife is not going to hear it from anybody else.
I do not always get it right
Sometimes time gets away from me. I get into something and look up and the afternoon is gone. I own that.
I am not writing this as a man who has it handled. I am writing it as a man who has to decide the same thing every single week, and who does not always decide it well.
But I am not going to let work of any kind become a false idol and take over my whole life. Not trucking, not the business, not any of it.
So here is the question I had to ask myself, and I would ask you the same one.
What is the thing in your life that never gets told to wait?
That is the one.
If you are out on the road and could use a conversation with another believer, hit reply when you are parked. No pressure and or nothing else to join.