Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Have You Forgotten the Main Thing? | Historical Books | 2 Kings 17:24-41

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

Have you forgotten the main thing? Do you worship God exclusively? What are your idols? In today's episode, Tanya shares how 2 Kings 17:24-41 encourages us to worship Jesus alone. If you're listening on Spotify, tell us about yourself and where you're listening from! Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: 2 Kings 17:24-41

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Tanya Wilmuth. In the summer of 2025, Cracker Barrel, the Southern Country Store, known for rocking chairs, biscuits, and road trip nostalgia, unveiled a new logo. Cracker Barrel kept the same font. They kept the colors. They kept the name. But they left out one thing, the barrel.

people noticed, and so did the stock market. The company lost $100 million in a single day and over $103 million at the time I checked on this. The CEO said afterwards that before the launch, all the internal feedback had been great, so nobody expected such a negative reaction. Which makes me wonder, what conversations were they having that led to removing the very thing the brand is known for? Like the main thing, did someone think that that barrel was outdated, that it was irrelevant, not worth keeping? On one hand, here we are still talking about crackle. So, you know, as it goes, all publicity is good PR, right?

But we still know that cracker barrel went through something really challenging because they forgot the main thing. In 2nd King 17, we meet a group of people who are living without the main thing. Now, they're living in Israel's former northern kingdom. That's is a place that the Israelites had already been exiled from for their rebellion against God. And now these new settlers are there. They've been brought in by the Assyrians. First, they didn't worship God at all. But after attacks from lions, they assumed the God of the land was angry with them.

So the king of Assyria sent an exiled Israelite priest to teach them how to worship the Lord. And they did learn. They did learn to worship God. But here's the issue. They worship the Lord, it says, in 2nd Kings, Chapter 17, verse 33. But they also served their own gods. They didn't reject Yahweh. They simply added him to their list of other deities, other things that they loved. They believed in God, but not exclusively. They worshipped God, but not wholeheartedly. They included God, but they didn't center their lives around him. They left out the main thing. And God had told them already, God has shared with us the main thing.

God made his expectation clear in Exodus chapter 20 verse 3. You shall have no other gods before me. In other words, God is not a choice among many. He is the only living God, the only one worthy of our exclusive devotion. We may not bow to carved images in high places, but we still have idols. They're often invisible. and sometimes even accepted. Let's just think about some of these things. They turn into idols pretty quickly. Success, approval, comfort, control, security. Even religious performance can become an idol

when we rely on it more than our relationship with God. So here's a question that can help us uncover when we're not making God the main thing. Just a simple question. What do you turn to for comfort? When you feel anxious, bored, uncertain, or not enough. What you consistently do in these moments often shows what you truly believe about who God is and how central he is. As our creator, God knows our design. God knows that we were made for him.

God knows that there is a God-shaped capacity in us that nothing else can fill. And because he knows us, he also knows what destroys us. Idols never deliver what they promise. They thrill us for a while and then they quietly enslave us. In Exodus 3414, God makes his heart unmistakably clear. You shall worship no other God for the Lord whose name is jealous is a jealous God. He's not jealous of us, of course, he's jealous for us. His jealousy is like the passion of a husband,

refusing to share the love of his bride with anything else, with anything that will ruin her. He wants our hearts because he knows idols will break our hearts. Just a few verses later, God reveals how this happens. And it's a progression. It says first you make treaties with idol worshippers. Then you began to desire what they desire. Then you attend their sacrifices.

Then you intertwine your lives with theirs. Then you are seduced into worshipping their gods. Idols rarely capture us in a single fell swooshes. whoop, where a quick moment, they pull us in step by subtle step, and often the whole thing is unrecognizable to us, unless the Holy Spirit opens our eyes and shows us. Through Jesus, we are not just people who practice religion, who get to worship a loving, living God. We are those things, yes, but we are people who are in Christ. Being in Christ means that we get to bury our old identity. We get to respond to the Holy Spirit's leading. We're able to receive grace we didn't earn,

and we're rescued from sins and false gods that trap us. That means we're not stuck, y'all. When Jesus was asked to name the greatest commandment, he said, love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. Our affections are not centered on something, but on someone, someone who loved us all the way to the grave and then walked out in a resurrected body, out of the grave, of course. If Jesus truly rose from the dead and was seen by many witnesses, then what do we risk by placing every affection on him? In reality, we lose nothing of worth. The only things that slip through our fingers are the consolation praises of this world, as Tim Keller says. Things that can never last and could never compare to the life to come.

Lord, we thank you for being a God who loves us too much to let us settle for lesser gods. Reveal the places where our hearts have drifted toward other affections. Help us to see where we have tried to include you without fully centering our lives on you. Anchor us deeply in Christ, remind us of our identity in Him, and fill us with a greater love that satisfies us more than the consolation prices of this world. give us the courage to lay down what competes for our worship and the grace to walk in freedom as people who belong to you. In Jesus' name, amen.