What does First B Jackson teach about idols?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At First B Jackson, the teaching on idols starts where God started: the first commandment. Deborah pointed out that if God led with "you shall have no other gods before me," He already knew this would be one of our deepest struggles. The whole arc of her teaching traced why that is so, from Satan's original rebellion and his ongoing strategy of blinding minds and undermining trust in God's goodness, all the way into the cultural pressures Americans feel right now. Her argument was that ignoring the conflict does not mean we are not in it.
The idol question is not only cultural, though. Ray's 2011 message on 1 John pressed it down to the personal level, working through John's instruction to "do not love the world" and explaining that the key is verb tense. In the Greek, the command is continuous: do not be loving the world. John is not describing a single dramatic moment of choice but an ongoing posture, a direction of travel. That framing keeps the call from sounding like an impossible standard and keeps it honest about the fact that believers need to keep returning their affections to God rather than imagining they have settled the matter once for all.
Deborah's teaching connected both threads, the spiritual and the personal, by rooting the idol problem in the war for the mind. Satan's core strategy, she argued, is to make people question whether God is good, whether God is present, and whether a person has any real worth. That is the soil in which idols grow. The answer she kept returning to was not willpower but a clear-eyed understanding of who God is and what He has already done, grounded in the assurance that, as 1 John puts it, greater is He who is in us than he who is in the world.
Taught from 1 John 2:15-17 · 2 Corinthians 4:4 · Ephesians 6 · 1 John 4:15 · Revelation 20
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 15
1 Now I declare to you, brothers, the Good News which I preached to you, which also you received, in which you also stand,
2 by which also you are saved, if you hold firmly the word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.
3 For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,
4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
World English Bible
The messages that teach on it
- September 21, 2022 Women's Bible Study - September 21st, 2022 Deborah teaches on the "little g gods" competing for our attention, how Satan works through false philosophies, and four idols that keep us from trusting God fully.
- August 7, 2011 And Such We Are Ray walks through 1 John to show why the letter is meant to assure believers of their salvation in Christ, not condemn them.
Mentioned along the way
- October 25, 2015 Make Room: A Heartfelt Plea for Holiness Pastor Ray walks through 2 Corinthians 6-7, calling believers to examine the affections and attachments that keep their hearts from being fully open to God.