When Our God is Small, We Worship other gods.

When our God is too small, we embrace false gods.
Numbers 25:1-9 "For they invited the people to the sacrifice of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down to their gods."

The Moabite people were worried. For them, the Israelites were a formidable force invading the land and thus a threat to them. So, they devised a plot; they would recruit Balaam, a prophet for hire, to pronounce a curse upon the Israelites. In their religious perspective, all gods were limited to specific geographic boundaries, so if they could entreat Balaam to elicit the gods of their area to pronounce a curse, they would be protected from the armies of Israel. For them, the gods were small, weak, and powerless outside their local setting. What they did not realize was that the God of Israel and the God of the Bible had authority over all the land and all the world. In a remarkable display of his power, God intervened and hindered Balaam from pronouncing a curse by having his donkey verbally warn him against going against the God of Israel. As a result, instead of pronouncing a curse four times, Balaam pronounces a blessing upon the people of Israel.  
While he was not able to pronounce a curse, Balaam was still able to defeat Israel. After his failed attempt to pronounce a curse, Balaam gave the King and people of Moab some advice. In Numbers 31:16, we discover that Balaam advised the people of Moab to entice  the Israelites with pleasure by inviting them to marry their daughters and join in their worship of Baal. Baal was one of the chief gods of the Canaanites. Baal was the storm god who was thought to be the god who brought fertility to crops, animals, and even people. Thus, the worship of Baal centered around sexuality and sexual pleasure. The people would perform sexual acts (often with temple prostitutes) within their temples to excite Baal sexually, thus increasing the fertility of the land.   Even though God had forbidden the Israelites from practicing idolatry, they embraced the worship of Baal. It would remain one of the ongoing temptations plaguing the people. Consequently, with the lure of sexual pleasure, the Moabite women began to entice the men to join them in worship. Not only did they participate in immoral rituals, but they also began to embrace Baal as their god. Instead of seeing the grandeur of the God of Abraham, they worshipped the immorality of the Canaanites.
When we lose sight of God's infinite power and position over the universe, we quickly abandon our worship of him to pursue the "gods" around us. Like the Canaanites, our culture has embraced the worship of pleasure, wealth, power, prestige, and entertainment. Instead of our identity being formed by the image of God, our identity is now based on our sexuality, our position in society, our wealth, and our success. But the problem is not just our failure to maintain our moral compass. The problem is spiritual and theological. We have rendered God small and insignificant. We begin to worship other things than God.
The word worship refers to that which we ascribe worth, value, and importance. To worship God is to keep him paramount in our life. Worshipping Jesus means that he takes precedence over everything else, and we chose him and His will over our own. But tragically, the focus has shifted, even within the church. Instead of Christ being the focus so that we serve him, we become the focus, so he serves us. Christ becomes secondary to everything else in life. Church attendance is based on convenience rather than the priority. All of which indicates that we have lost sight of the supremacy and worth of God. He has become small. Just as Israel needed a spiritual readjustment, we need to readjust our focus so that he becomes preeminent over the universe and our lives. How big is your God?