My mother handed me a bag of trinkets I bought 11 years ago when I traveled to Cambodia. It had been in the closet of my room at her house all these years, and she was cleaning it out. One of the items was a shirt with Angkor Wat, a Buddhist temple, printed on it that a girl not much older than my 7 year old daughter was selling for a dollar right outside the temple. It brought back memories of visiting that temple which defies words when trying to describe the scale, the size, and the intricacies of it. If you were to visit it, you would think, “How can human beings conceive of building such a massive structure?” You will come away shaking your head at what it must’ve taken to build such a structure. But what good did it do in the end? How foolish of those Hindi to sacrifice their lives and money in building such a monument dedicated to a god that doesn’t exist!

But we have many such monuments in the U.S. as well. They are called skyscrapers. And there are many worshipers – we call them businessmen – that visit those skyscrapers everyday. Now, of course I’m not saying that all people who work in those building are worshipers of those buildings. But then, the people who built Angkor Wat weren’t worshiping the temple either. They were worshiping the god they believed would be represented by the temple. The temple is simply a monument to the god they believed would reside in it. But isn’t that what those buildings in the major cities of the U.S. represent? They represent the god of achievement, the god of money, and the god of earthly comfort. We put our hopes in them. And as long as we do that, they are our gods and those buildings are our temples….

Where does your hope lie? Is it in what the true God, Jesus Christ, has achieved for you or is it in what you have achieved for yourself?

“Why are you cast down, O my soul,

and why are you in turmoil within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,

my salvation and my God.”

Ps. 42:11

Rest in God by putting your hope in God alone. Stop bowing at the god of achievement – it will only make your soul cast down. But hope in God and His achievement for you on the cross.

PH