In Sunday’s sermon, we thought about how idolatry is “worshipping and serving a created thing rather than the Creator.” We also heard a quote from Tim Keller’s book Counterfeit Gods that reminded us we’re not too different from ancient pagan cultures. Following are more excerpts from that same book. As you read, pray about whether you need to repent of putting something/someone in the place of God. Pray for Him to mercifully wrench that influence out of your tight grip so that you can enjoy God as you were intended:
”A counterfeit god is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living. An idol has such a controlling position in your heart that you can spend most of your passion and energy, your emotional and financial resources, on it without a second thought. It can be family and children, or career and making money, or achievement and critical acclaim, or saving ‘face’ and social standing. It can be romantic relationship, peer approval, competence and skill, secure and comfortable circumstances, your beauty or your brains, a great political or social cause, your morality and virtue, or even success in the Christian ministry….
An idol is whatever you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, ‘If I have that, then I’ll feel significant and secure.’ There are many ways to describe that kind of relationship to something, but perhaps the best one is worship…
Idols capture our imagination, and we can locate them by looking at our daydreams. What do we enjoy imagining? What are our fondest dreams? We look to idols to love us, to provide us with value and a sense of beauty, significance, and worth….Idols give us a sense of being in control, and we can locate them by looking at our nightmares. What do we fear the most? What, if we lost it, would make life not worth living?…In this paradigm, we can locate idols by looking at our most unyielding emotions. What makes us uncontrollably angry, anxious, or despondent? What racks us with a guilt we can’t shake? Idols control us, since we feel we must have them or life is meaningless. Whatever controls us is our lord.
What many people call ‘psychological problems’ are simple issues of idolatry. Perfectionism, workaholism, chronic indecisiveness, the need to control the lives of others—all of these stem from making good things into idols that then drive us into the ground as we try to appease them. Idols dominate our lives.”