More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
This strange melancholy manifests itself in many ways, but always leads to the same despair of not finding what is sought.
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.
“strange melancholy”
taking some “incomplete joy of this world” and building your entire life on it. That is the definition of idolatry.
They had sacrificed everything to the god of success, but it wasn’t enough.
human heart is an “idol factory.”
God was saying that the human heart takes good things
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 a...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
an idol is something we cannot live without. We must have it, and therefore it drives us to break rules we once honored, to harm others and even ourselves in order to get it. Idols are spiritual addictions that lead to terrible evil,
But counterfeit gods always disappoint, and often destructively so.
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.
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 is whatever you look at and 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.”
If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning in life, and identity, then it is an idol.
They love idols, trust idols, and obey idols.
Romance or success can become “false lovers” that promise to make us feel loved and valued. Idols capture our imagination, and we can locate them by looking at our daydreams.
God should be our true Savior, but we look to personal achievement or financial prosperity to give us the peace and security we need.
Idols give us a sense of being in control, and we can locate them by looking at our nightmares.
We make “sacrifices” to appease and please our gods, who we believe will protect us. We look to our idols to provide us wit...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The Bible also speaks of idols using a political metaphor. God should be our only Lord and Master, but whatever we love and trust we also serve. Anything that becomes more important and nonne...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Idols control us, since we feel we must have them or life is meaningless.
Whatever controls us is our lord.
We do not control ourselves. We are controlled by the lord
of our lives.15
Idols dominate our lives.
The only way to free ourselves from the destructive influence of counterfeit gods is to turn back to the true one. The living God, who revealed himself both at Mount Sinai and on the Cross, is the only Lord who, if you find him, can truly fulfill you, and, if you fail him, can truly forgive you.
rejection of idolatry.”19 The Bible is therefore filled with story after story depicting the innumerable forms and devastating effects of idol worship. Every counterfeit god a heart can choose—whether love, money, success, or power—has a powerful biblical narrative that explains how that particular kind of idolatry works itself out in our lives.
If anyone puts a child in the place of the true God, it creates an idolatrous love that will smother the child and strangle the relationship.
In an individualistic culture like ours, an adult’s identity and sense of worth is often bound up in abilities and achievements, but in ancient times, all the hopes and dreams of a man and his family rested in the firstborn son.
all idolatry is destructive.
we may not realize how idolatrous our career has become to us, until we are faced with a situation in which telling the truth or acting with integrity would mean a serious blow to our professional advancement. If we are not willing to hurt our career in order to do God’s will, our job will become a counterfeit god.
People who have never suffered in life have less empathy for others, little knowledge of their own shortcomings and limitations, no endurance in the face of hardship, and unrealistic expectations for life.
Idols enslave.
The most painful times in our lives are times in which our Isaacs, our idols, are being threatened or removed.
“I see that you may be calling me to live my life without something I never thought I could live without. But if I have you, I have the only wealth, health, love, honor, and security I really need and cannot lose.”
you don’t realize Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.
“Because I have God, I can live without you.”
We can’t know all the reasons that our Father is allowing bad things to happen to us, but like Jesus did, we can trust him in those difficult times.
Some bosses can make things hard on you, but real slave masters know no boundaries.
we know a good thing has become a counterfeit god when its demands on you exceed proper boundaries.
Making an idol out of work may mean that you work until you ruin your health, or you break the laws in order to get ahead. Making an idol out of love may mean allowing the lover to exploit and abuse you, or it may cause terrible blindness to the pathologies in the relationship. An idolatrous attachment can lead you to break any promise, rationalize any indiscretion, or betray any other allegiance, in order to hold on to it. It may drive you to violate all good and proper boundaries. To practice idolatry is to be a slave.
It has always been possible to make romantic love and marriage into a counterfeit god, but we live in a culture that makes it even easier to mistake love for God, to be swept up by it, and to rest all our hopes for happiness upon it.
“If I had her, finally, something would be right in my miserable life. If I had her, it would fix things.”
ancient times people didn’t generally marry for love, they married for status.
The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one’s life. All spiritual and moral needs now become focused in one individual. .
After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption—nothing less.
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.
We maintain the fantasy that if we find our one true soul mate, everything wrong with us will be healed.
