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“the love object is God.” No lover, no human being, is qualified for that role. No one can live up to that. The inevitable result is bitter disillusionment.
romantic love is an object of enormous power for the human heart and imagination, and therefore can excessively dominate our lives.
The person who can’t have it will avoid people who would be
wonderful partners. The person who must have it will choose partners who are ill-fitting to them or abusive.
If you are too afraid of love or too enamored by it, it has assumed godlike power, distorting you...
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Most people, if they have really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise.
putting the weight of all your deepest hopes and longings on the person you are marrying, you are going to crush him or her with your expectations.
You can blame the things that are disappointing you and try to move on to better ones.
blame yourself and beat yourself
blame the world.
I was made for another world
No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood.
“men use love to get sex, women use sex to get love.”
“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.”
Greed hides itself from the victim. The money god’s modus operandi includes blindness to your own heart.
Jesus warns people far more often about greed than about sex, yet almost no one thinks they are guilty of it.
For Jesus, greed is not only love of money, but excessive anxiety about it.
Money is one of the most common counterfeit gods there is. When it takes hold of your heart it blinds you to what is happening, it controls you through your anxieties and lusts, and it brings you to put it ahead of all other things.
God’s salvation was by grace, not through moral achievement or performance.
A changed life comes in response to the salvation, offered as a free gift.
deep idols have to be dealt with at the heart level. There is only one way to change at the heart level and that is through faith in the gospel.
the Cross proves God’s care for you and gives you the security.
“Achievement is the alcohol of our time,”
Successful people are much more shocked and overwhelmed by troubles.
Another sign that you have made achievement an idol is that it distorts your view of yourself.
If your success is more than just success to you—if it is the measure of your value and worth—then accomplishment in one limited area of life will make you believe you have expertise in all areas. This, of course, leads to all kinds of bad choices and decisions.
The main sign that we are into success idolatry, however, is that we find we cannot maintain our self-confidence in life unless we remain at the top of our chosen field.
Many people pursue success as a way to overcome the sense that they are somehow “outsiders.” If they attain it, they believe, it will open the doors into the clubs, into the social sets, into relationships with the connected and the influential.
that success can’t deliver the satisfaction we are looking for. Many of the most successful people testify to still feeling like “outsiders” and having doubts about themselves.
Naaman is after a God who can be put into debt, but this is a God of grace, who puts everyone else in his debt. Naaman is after a private God, a God for you and you but not a God for
everybody, but this God is the God of everyone, whether we acknowledge it or not.
this God is not an extension of culture, but a transformer of culture, not a controllable but a sovereign Lord. Now he was being confronted with a God who in his dealings with human beings only operates on the basis of grace. These two go together. No one can control the true God because no one can earn, merit, or achieve their own blessing and salvation.
But when you forgive, that means you absorb the loss and the debt. You bear it
yourself. All forgiveness, then, is costly.
If we set our hearts on getting to the top, but instead find ourselves on the bottom rung of the ladder, it will usually lead to great cynicism and bitterness.
We will not escape our idolatry of success simply by berating ourselves over it.
The idol of success cannot be just expelled, it must be replaced. The human heart’s desire for a particular valuable object may be conquered, but its need to have
some such object is unconquerable.63 How can we break our heart’s fixation on doing “some great thing” in order to heal ourselves of our sense of inadequacy, in order to give our lives meaning? Only when we see what Jesus, our great Suffering Servant, has done for us will we finally understand why God’s salvation does not require us to do “some great thing.”
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.
God chooses the weak things of the world to shame the strong, the foolish and despised things to shame the wise, even the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are
When love of one’s people becomes an absolute, it turns into racism. When love of equality turns into a supreme thing, it can result in hatred and violence toward anyone who has led a privileged life. It is the settled tendency of human societies to turn good political causes into counterfeit gods.
When we center our lives on the idol, we become dependent on it. If our counterfeit god is threatened in any way, our response is complete panic. We do not say, “What a shame, how difficult,” but rather “This is the end! There’s no hope!”
the main problem in life is sin, and the only solution is God and his grace. The alternative to this view is to identify something besides sin as the main problem with the world and something besides God as the main remedy. That demonizes something that is not completely bad, and makes an idol out of something that cannot be the ultimate good.
Rather than accept our finitude and dependence on God, we desperately seek ways to assure ourselves that we still have power over our own lives. But this is an illusion.
pride in one’s people is a good thing, but when the power and prosperity of the nation become unconditioned absolutes that veto all other concerns, then violence and injustice can be perpetrated without question.
nation’s goal of material prosperity becomes an idol when we use it to justify the destruction of the natural environment or allow the abuse of individuals or classes of people. A nation’s goal of military security becomes an idol when we use it to justify the removal of rights to free speech and judicial process, or the abuse of an ethnic minority.
ideologies hide from their adherents their dependence on God.72
Niebuhr argued that human thinking always elevates some finite value or object to be The Answer.
we feel that we are the people who can fix things, that
everyone opposing us is a fo...
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