Saved But Still Stuck
“But the high places were not removed. Nevertheless Asa’s heart was loyal to the Lord all his days.”
1 Kings 15:14
Here’s the honest question under this Sunday’s message: You gave the thing to God. You’ve repented. You’ve started over more than once. So why does the same sin keep showing up?
Pastor Ben Norvig opened with a story about a $193 million NASA spacecraft — the Mars Climate Orbiter, launched in 1999 — that was destroyed within moments of reaching Mars. Two teams had worked on the same project. Both were doing their jobs. But one team was using imperial units and the other was using metric. One unaddressed misalignment, and everything was lost.
The detail that nobody dealt with became the thing that brought it all down.
That’s the setup for a message from 1 Kings 15 that most people have read past without stopping on it.
The “But” in the Bible
King Asa was one of the good kings. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord. He tore out idols. He kicked out the people who didn’t belong. He banished the obscene image his own grandmother had built and burned it. He stirred revival.
And then there’s the line.
“But the high places were not removed.” — 1 Kings 15:14
Ben made the distinction clearly: an idol and a high place are not the same thing.
An idol, in our context, isn’t usually something inherently bad. It’s a good thing — approval, success, money, comfort — that we’ve turned into the ultimate thing. The thing we sacrifice for, arrange our lives around, and quietly worship.
A high place is the place we go to worship it. The elevated pattern. The system. The emotional environment we return to when we want a hit of whatever our idol provides.
“High places always require a sacrifice,” Ben said. Not once — he said it twice, so you’d catch it. And he’s right. Every high place has a cost: your integrity, your peace, your time, your relationships. You keep paying it, and often you don’t even know you are.
The Lawn You Mowed
Ben’s illustration landed: imagine mowing a yard that’s full of crabgrass. When you’re done, it looks green. It looks level. From the street, it’s fine.
But walk through it — and it’s weeds. All of it. You managed the appearance without touching the root.
Most of us end our walk with idolatry there. We give the idol to God, and we mean it, and we move on. But the high place — the deeper pattern, the environment that keeps producing the idol — goes untouched. And within a season, the roots push back up.
The Personal Part
Ben didn’t preach this one from a safe distance. He named his own high place from the stage: the high place of approval. The need to be good enough. A pattern he traced back to age 13, through a string of drive and ambition that hurt people along the way, through a relationship he nearly lost, and into the parenting choices he was making without realizing it.
“What one generation will tolerate, the next generation will accept, and the next generation will embrace.”
He said it because it was true of his family — and because it’s true of most of ours.
What you leave standing, your kids will worship at. You may never see it. But in two generations, the pattern becomes the culture.
The Cycle That Had to Break Somewhere
The second passage was Jehoshaphat — Asa’s son. Jehoshaphat also did what was right in the eyes of the Lord. He also tore down idols. He walked in all the ways of his father.
But the high places were not taken away.
He did what his dad did. Including the part his dad got wrong.
Two generations later, the nation of Israel is gone.
Ben closed with the thing that makes this more than a warning: Jesus comes and makes the sacrifice that ends the cycle. He does what Asa and Jehoshaphat and the kings after them couldn’t do. The ultimate high place — the separation between us and God — was destroyed. And we get to be free.
“Free, free, free indeed.”
So What Do You Do This Week?
Three questions to sit with:
What is your high place? Not just your idol — the place you return to. The thing that wrecks you when you don’t get it.
What is it costing you? Name the sacrifice. Be specific.
What would it look like to go toe to toe with it this week — the way Ben modeled from the stage?
Watch the full message at lovechurch.org. If this landed and you want to talk to someone, reach out to us — you belong before you believe.
We are a community in Omaha, Nebraska helping people experience God’s best for their lives. Sundays at 9 + 11 AM.
