Hollow Idols: What We Worship Instead of Jesus
How many of us would admit we have a short attention span? You walk into a room and forget why you went in. You open the fridge and forget what you were looking for. You pick up your phone to order groceries and forty minutes later you’re deep into pimple-popping videos.
Even at church, some of US forget what the sermon was about by the time you get to your car. I get it. People tell me, “Pastor, that’s exactly what you said last week,” and I have no idea what they’re talking about.
Paul knew this about his readers too. The church in Colossae had a short attention span, easily pulled toward whatever looked shiny. So after telling them about the fullness of Jesus, he doesn’t just move on. He warns them about what’s actually competing for their attention: things that look whole on the outside but are hollow on the inside.
Don’t Lose the Feeling
So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.
Paul isn’t giving new information here. He’s saying: don’t lose the moment. If you were one of the people we baptized in June, you know that feeling of being fully known and fully loved, no performance required. Paul is saying stay there. Keep living like that’s true, because it is.
Hollow Has No Center
Then Paul shifts to a warning.
See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.
Something hollow looks whole from the outside. It has a shape, a surface, maybe even a good reputation. But there’s nothing holding it together on the inside. Paul is naming the things we let distract us from the fullness we already have in Jesus.
The Idols We Don’t Admit To
I think most of what distracts us falls into three categories: reputation, safety, and control. Nothing wrong with wanting any of these in the right measure. The problem is when we make them the aim of our lives, and then, because we follow Jesus, we don’t admit that’s what we’re doing. We just slap his name on it.
I remember early in my faith wanting people at church to see how humble I was, so I made a big production out of taking out the garbage at a potluck. That wasn’t overflow, that was performance. You can build a whole reputation on looking holy and still be hollow. You can have reputation, or you can have Jesus. You can’t have both.
The same goes for safety. When our comfort and our stuff and our rights become the goal, the people around us stop being neighbors and start being threats. You can’t love Jesus and keep a list of enemies.
Control might be the sneakiest one. It shows up when we stop trusting God with outcomes and start trying to manufacture them ourselves, managing people, rehearsing conversations, refusing to admit we might be wrong. A few weeks ago I sat down with my journal and wrote out everything I’d gotten wrong in the last month. It was a long list. Surrender and control can’t live in the same heart at the same time. One of them has to go.
Nailed to the Cross
Paul says outside of Christ we were dead in our sin, worshiping everything but God. But even then:
God made you alive with Christ, for he forgave all our sins. He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.
Here’s how that actually solves the problem. Underneath our chase for reputation, safety, and control is usually a record we’re trying to outrun. Shame we haven’t dealt with. Failures we’re compensating for. Paul says that record, the whole case against you, was nailed to the cross. Not excused. Not ignored. Canceled.
But Paul goes further than forgiveness. He says the powers behind those idols, the pull toward performance, the fear that drives us to control everything, were disarmed. Stripped of their authority. Paraded as defeated. That’s what “public spectacle” means. Whatever keeps whispering that you need more reputation or more control to be safe, it already lost. It just hasn’t gotten the memo, and neither have we.
Nobody watching Jesus die would have called it a victory. He gave up the very things we cling to: reputation, safety, control. He let himself be mocked and stripped and killed in public, and rose again three days later. That’s the point. He proved there’s real life on the other side of losing all of it. So when reputation or safety or control still pull at you, you’re not fighting a power that’s winning. You’re fighting a power that already lost.
Three honest steps:
Name the hollow thing you’ve been calling holy.
Tell Jesus the truth about where you’ve been chasing reputation, safety, or control instead of him.
Bring it to the cross and leave it there, on purpose, more than once.
You’ve got hollow idols. So does everyone around you. And there’s a cross big enough to hold all of it.
