NOVEMBER 3, 2025

Believers Are to Avoid Idols and Worship God Alone
The Chosen Place of Worship
12 “Be careful to follow these statutes and ordinances in the land that Yahweh, the God of your fathers, has given you to possess all the days you live on the earth. 2 Destroy completely all the places where the nations that you are driving out worship their gods—on the high mountains, on the hills, and under every green tree. 3 Tear down their altars, smash their sacred pillars, burn up their Asherah poles, cut down the carved images of their gods, and wipe out their names from every place. 4 Don’t worship the Lord your God this way. 5 Instead, you must turn to the place Yahweh your God chooses from all your tribes to put His name for His dwelling and go there. 6 You are to bring there your burnt offerings and sacrifices, your tenths and personal contributions, your vow offerings and freewill offerings, and the firstborn of your herds and flocks. 7 You will eat there in the presence of the Lord your God and rejoice with your household in everything you do, because the Lord your God has blessed you.

Sarah Ricciardi
Don’t worship like everyone else. God is calling Israel to worship Him the way He declares He must be worshipped. Hey Temple family, I’m going to imagine that you and I are sitting down over iced coffee. We are digging into God's Word together. I will share from my heart–one child of God to another. Sometimes when we hear the word, “worship”, we think only of Sunday mornings or a weekend church retreat. It’s part of a typed-out agenda–neat, tidy, time-contained. Yet worship isn’t bound by time, or place, or geographic position. Worship happens all day long, every day of the week. Whom or what we worship may change. But we are worshipping all the time. I hope that sentence caught you like it did me. Whom are you worshipping when you wake up, go to work, hit the gym, sit on the sidelines, run onto the field, slide behind your desk, head to bed, wake up and repeat? Am I worshipping God Almighty–Creator, Sustainer, Provider. Or, am I worshipping the gods of success, of fame, of programs and entertainment, of production and work, of peer pressure and culture? Be careful, Sarah, this worshipping other gods can even happen in church. When my saying “yes” is done to please you and not done to please God, then I have my worship all messed up. What God calls each of us to is a relationship with Him first, and out of that our service flows and our testimony that points others to Him. Here’s another one: does my worship of God look like how others worship little gods? God calls us to be different, dear ones, different. That isn’t easy. It’s often painful. Getting Egypt out of Israel was hard–it took more than 40 years in the wilderness. Getting culture out of Sarah Lee Ricciardi can be just as hard. Unless we allow God to replace our Egypt.