 Ezekiel chapter 14 and verse 3, Son of man, these men have set up their idols in their hearts and put them before them, that which causes them to stumble into iniquity. Shall I myself be inquired at all by them? And so I just want us to pray in a minute. But what I want to underline today is in the NLT version, it says the following, Son of man, these leaders have set up idols in their hearts. They have embraced things that will make them fall into sin. Why should I listen to their requests? So leaders came to Ezekiel to inquire some things of God. And Ezekiel gets a word from the Lord that says, these leaders have set up idols in their hearts. It's crazy because in the Old Testament you rarely hear of God accusing his people setting up idols in their hearts. It's usually in their houses. But he says they set up idols in their hearts and then he says they have embraced things which make them fall into sin. So they didn't embrace sin, just things that could lead to sin. Why should I listen to their requests? As leaders, I believe that the greatest pleasure in life is twofold, is to know God's voice and for God to know ours. For God to hear us and for us to hear him. Not just have words of knowledge and words of prophecy, but to actually know God's leading, to have God speak to us regularly. God has to feel that our life is not driven by ego, success or need, but it's led by the Holy Spirit. And this is the part that kind of catches my attention is he says why should I listen to their requests? For me to hear God and for God to hear me and heed to what I have to say. As a leader, these two things I must keep in mind. One of them is he says that not to set up idols in your heart. Idol, in other words, for right now, for us as leaders, because our idols as leaders is insecurity. Behind every insecurity is an idol. An idol is something that has taken the place of Jesus in our heart. An idol is something that we draw identity from. An idol is something that we build our who we are on. And a lot of times as leaders, we start out with building our identity in Christ with time because of our work, our expectation, because of social media, who does an amazing job of exploiting our insecurities and building them through comparing and through all of this stuff. What happens is that our identity shifts from Christ to our ministry to our calling. And John the Baptist is a beautiful example of that, where his ministry was really, really doing good. He was attracting a lot of followers and they came to him and they asked him, who are you? And John the Baptist replied back and they asked him with a follow-up question. They said, are you Christ? He said, no. They said, are you Elijah? He said, no. He said, so who are you so we can tell those who send us? And he said, and he quotes. And this always caught my attention. He did not define himself by the newsletters of that day, which said that he attracted the largest crowds. He didn't define himself even by his miracles and the fact that biggest criminal soldiers, Romans were coming to him. He didn't define by none of that. He quoted Isaiah, meaning he took the scripture and he allowed the scripture to define who he was, not his success, not anything else. John the Baptist's ministry, of course, falls apart. He goes to jail. All of his followers, they leave him. Everything that was left there, nothing pretty much left. And he now he's confused. He goes to Jesus and Jesus responds this about John the Baptist and he looks at the whole history of the Old Testament and Jesus now compares John the Baptist and he says, there has been no greater prophet than John. Even though John is rotting in jail, his ministry has fall apart and he lost all of his followers. And to me it's always been a thing that if our ministry is succeeding right now, if we're doing great, never to shift our identity to people's opinions, to our polls, our followers, our social media following, the social media engagement, how many people in our own ministry embrace us, love us, how many people have sowed into us, blessed us financially, our finances, lack of our finances, our struggles, if we anchor our identity in anything else than that. And this is what happens. When we hit our jail times, we will fall apart. And eternity will never judge us based on our success. Jesus judged John based on his ability to still anchor himself in who he was, no matter what was going on. And so if I just wanted to encourage each one of us that as leaders, number one thing, what gems or frequency to hear God is our insecurities. We all have them. We have to learn to remove them from our heart because our insecurities is our idols. It's anything in our heart that we place that defines who we are now. I like to ask myself this question, to challenge my insecurity. Who will I be if I can't preach? Who will I be if I'm stripped from a title of being a pastor? How will I feel inside? How will my relationship with God be? And how will my inner world be if I no longer have the position today that I have? It's easy to say for me, oh, I'm not defined. My identity is not in preaching. My identity is not in the ministry and stuff. But if my whole world is wrapped in it, to some degree, after a while, it could let go inside us. So I just wanted to challenge each one of us, guys. Leading worship, business, internship, youth ministry, kids' zone, anything that you do, don't make it your identity because it's idolatry and it will fail you. Our titles, our temporary, our identity is permanent. The moment we're insecure, we will gravitate toward titles instead of toward the towel. It says about Jesus in John chapter 13 that before he took down the garment and put the towel around him, it says this is that he knew where he was going and he knew everything about himself. When you know who you are, you can let go of the title, pick up a towel any time of the day without feeling like your world has fell apart. And a lot of our titles heal, they will shift, they will change. Some of us will, those titles will be taken from us. Some of us will have to sacrifice those titles for something greater that God has for us. And the moment we find our identity in Christ, we can easily switch from a title to a towel without no problem. So I really want to encourage that. Otherwise what that's going to do is it says this, why should I listen to the requests? It gems our frequency to hear God when our identity is anchored in anything other than who we are in Jesus. The second thing that we see here is that they have embraced things which make them fall into sin. This hits home for all of us. God didn't have a problem necessarily with their sin, though God hates sin and everything, but the problem that these leaders had is they embraced things that could lead them into sin. One thing about us as leaders is that we are amazing at living double life. We can get a degree in the words in that. We're good at it because ministry teaches us to put our feelings aside. It teaches us to compartmentalize. Whatever you have at home, you can check it out. You leave it at home and you do another thing. So you learn how to operate out of your calling instead of out of your peace and everything. And that's really healthy. But sometimes what it does is that after a while we can also live with compromise and learn how to compartmentalize. Put that in a different part and say, hey, this is what I'm battling with? That's not who I am in Christ. And that's also healthy until it's no longer in the compartment it can't be contained. It begins to contaminate. The challenge I want to throw for each one of us, the first one is that treat insecurity as idolatry. Any trace you find it, you deal with it and you go back to anchoring who you are in Jesus, not in your title, not in your success or lack of it. And the second thing is that we guard ourselves against trigger points that lead to sin, not guarding ourselves from sin. Guarding ourselves from sin is not our calling. That's what people outside of the church do. They try to stay away from going to jail. They try to stay away from scandals and everything. For us, the line is way, way further than getting into sin. It's trigger points. For Cain, the trigger point was offense. He harbored offense. And how I know the trigger points, it's the things I always justify. Before we do the unthinkable, we first embrace the justifiable. And that's what God says. He says, you embrace things that will make you fall. But why do we embrace those things? It's because we can justify. And as leaders, we know the scripture. We know how to justify it. And Cain knew how to justify his offense. His offense, bitterness toward his brother, Abel, is the fact that it was God's fault and everything. He had all of his justification. He had a reason for harbor unforgiveness. And God comes to him and he says, you're attached to this. It will lead you to something else. And because he didn't deal with that, it led him eventually to murder. None of us as leaders will commit sins that will embarrass us and destroy our life until we first embrace things that are called trigger points. Justifiable things. Unwise things. Things that we can find in scripture even to say. You know what? It's okay. It could be something like watching things that are not appropriate. It could be something like abusing alcohol. It could be something like unforgiveness and offense. It could be something like David, where David stayed home when everybody went to battle. And he had a justification for it. Everybody's fighting. I don't need to fight. And then one thing led to another. He embraced that. Not fighting mentality. Embraced that. Led to laziness. Next thing that happened, he found himself committing adultery. Next thing that happens, he found himself committing murder. And so, things like offense and things like prayerlessness and things like immorality in a small doses. It comes through movies. It comes through even sometimes social media. I want you to watch your heart from embracing things that you justify but things that you know if this keeps going it will lead you into sin. And never trust yourself. Never trust your flesh. Everybody's flesh is bad. It's the same flesh that Hitler had. It's not sanctified. My flesh and your flesh is messed up. And if you feed it and you embrace and you and I embrace things that could lead eventually, no matter how much we say I could contain it, we will not be able to contain it. The price we pay for it is that we stop hearing God and second one is God stops hearing us.