A Word

I heard the sermon that named my idol two or three years too late. By then I was already deep in it.

I got a job at Amazon out of school and it went well fast — promoted twice to Senior Product Manager inside three and a half years. I loved it. I thought I was building something that mattered. Then I quit to start my own company, and that one went nowhere. I spent the whole time on survival mode, working day and night, with nothing in my head but the work. When it moved, I was over the moon. When it stalled, I was depressed. That was the entire range of me.

The sermon was Tim Keller on idols. Before it, I read the Bible's warnings about idols and skimmed them — I pictured statues, other gods, people bowing to something. Not me. The sermon opened it. An idol is whatever you've made your meaning, the thing that decides whether you're worth anything, and mine was my career. I had been defining myself as a person who builds useful things. When the building went badly, so did I. I wasn't reading about someone else's problem. He was describing me, and I recognized it before he was done.

That was the start of a long walk back toward worshiping God instead. But the thing I keep returning to is the timing. I'd been sitting under sermons my whole life. Most Sundays I sat and waited for them to end. When one was good, I tried to take it in — and then found no place to put it, because I wasn't in that season, and I forgot it by the next week. This one reached me, but it reached me years into the trap. A word that had known where I was standing could have found me before I was in that deep.

That's what A Word is. A short teaching that arrives when the right passage meets the right moment in what a person has been carrying. It opens the Scripture on its own terms first — who wrote it, what was happening, what it shows about God — and then sets the person's situation down inside that, so the passage isn't explained to them but opened. It's particular. It uses this journey, this person, this thing they keep circling. The Sunday sermon speaks in general because it has no choice; it doesn't know your week. A Word does. It's personalized preaching, specific enough to one person on one road that a vague response to it can't stand.

The danger in building this is that A Word is good teaching, and good teaching has a payoff that feels almost holy but isn't. It's the click of understanding — now I see my situation, now it makes sense. That feeling is real and it's satisfying and it needs God for nothing. A sharp enough lecture delivers it. On the road to Emmaus, two disciples had the facts and were still lost; what opened them wasn't better information, it was that Jesus was there and their hearts burned. Take Him out of that and you don't get a fainter burn. You get a good talk about the Scriptures, and you walk home understanding more, and it is a different thing entirely, pointing the other way.

So A Word is built to terminate on God rather than on comprehension. The teaching aims at who God is in the passage, not at what the person's circumstances mean — Job at the end had nothing resolved and said now my eyes have seen you, and that seeing was the whole point. It sets the situation inside God's character so that what the person is left holding is Him, not a tidier read of their own life. And it ends with one question they can only answer to God's face — the thing they've been carrying on this journey and haven't brought to Him yet. If God doesn't speak, the question stays open. That's the shape of it: not a word that leaves you understanding yourself, but one that leaves you in front of Him.

Which is what I wish the Keller sermon had done to me sooner — not taught me about idols, but stood me in front of God as someone worshiping the wrong thing, while there was still time to hear it.