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December 5 - December 15, 2022
Sorrow is pain for which there are sources of consolation. Sorrow comes from losing one good thing among others, so that, if you experience a career reversal, you can find comfort in your family to get you through it. Despair, however, is inconsolable, because it comes from losing an ultimate thing. When you lose the ultimate source of your meaning or hope, there are no alternative sources to turn to. It breaks your spirit.
it comes from taking some “incomplete joy of this world” and building your entire life on it. That is the definition of idolatry.
Money can become a spiritual addiction, and like all addictions it hides its true proportions from its victims. We take more and greater risks to get an ever diminishing satisfaction from the thing we crave, until a breakdown occurs.
God was saying that the human heart takes good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts deify them as the center of our lives, because, we think, they can give us significance and security, safety and fulfillment, if we attain them.6
It turns the good thing into an absolute that overturns every other allegiance or value. The wearer of the Ring becomes increasingly enslaved and addicted to it, for an idol is something we cannot live without.
We think that idols are bad things, but that is almost never the case. The greater the good, the more likely we are to expect that it can satisfy our deepest needs and hopes. Anything can serve as a counterfeit god, especially the very best things in life.
say, in your heart of hearts, “If I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, 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.
If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning in life, and identity, then it is an idol.
They had taken a partial truth and made it into an all-encompassing truth, by which everything could be explained and improved.
Every human being must live for something. Something must capture our imaginations, our heart’s most fundamental allegiance and hope.
had he been waiting and sacrificing for God, or for the boy? Was God just a means to an end? To whom was Abraham ultimately giving his heart? Did Abraham have the peace, humility, boldness, and unmovable poise that come to those who trust in God rather than in circumstances, public opinion, or their own competence? Had he learned to trust God alone, to love God for himself, not just for what he could get out of God?
It was only because he knew God was both holy and loving that he was able to put one foot after another up that mountain.
If God had not intervened, Abraham would have certainly come to love his son more than anything in the world, if he did not already do so. That would have been idolatry, and all idolatry is destructive. From this perspective we see that God’s extremely rough treatment of Abraham was actually merciful. Isaac was a wonderful gift to Abraham, but he was not safe to have and hold until Abraham was willing to put God first.
God saw Abraham’s sacrifice and said, “Now I know that you love me, because you did not withhold your only son from me.” But how much more can we look at his sacrifice on the Cross, and say to God, “Now, we know that you love us. For you did not withhold your son, your only son, whom you love, from us.” When the magnitude of what he did dawns on us, it makes it possible finally to rest our hearts in him rather than in anything else.
The popular music and art of our society calls us to keep on doing it, to load all of the deepest needs of our hearts for significance and transcendence into romance and love.
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world [something supernatural and eternal].”
It is not enough to come forth with a demonstration of the evanescent character of your enjoyments . . . to speak to the conscience . . . of its follies. . . . Rather, try every legitimate method of finding access to your hearts for the love of Him who is greater than the world.
“You may turn out to be a great guy, and maybe even my husband, but you cannot ever be my life. Only Christ is my life.”
For Jesus, greed is not only love of money, but excessive anxiety about it.
“Trusters of money” feel they have control of their lives and are safe and secure because of their wealth.
Jesus’s salvation is received not through strength but through the admission of weakness and need. And Jesus’s salvation was achieved not through strength but through surrender, service, sacrifice, and death.
We are the product of three things—genetics, environment, and our personal choices—but two of these three factors we have no power over. We are not nearly as responsible for our success as our popular views of God and reality lead us to think.
We become like what we worship.
Scoffers always show contempt and disdain for opponents rather than graciousness. This is a sign that they do not see themselves as sinners saved by grace.
When God’s love prevented him from smashing Israel’s enemy, Jonah, because of his idol, was forced to see God’s love as a bad thing. In the end idols can make it possible to call evil good and good evil.
About idolatry he said, “Though few will own it, nothing is more common.”
We prefer our own wisdom to God’s wisdom, our own desires to God’s will, and our own reputation to God’s honor.
Of course, the general answer is “because we are weak and sinful,” but the specific answer in any actual circumstance is that there is something you feel you must have to be happy, something that is more important to your heart than God himself.
In other words, the true god of your heart is what your thoughts effortlessly go to when there is nothing else demanding your attention.
