Idolatry Quotes - Page 2

The point that I think myself to be so terribly clever is the precise point at which I am beginning to think myself to be god-like, which causes me to become God-less.

Although we should affirm the wonder and mystery of sexual intimacy and romantic attraction as God's good creations, we need to set these aesthetic enjoyments within the context of the Christian virtues of fidelity, self-sacrifice, and patience in suffering.Bringing this together, our pastoral approach should be double-edged, seeking to challenge our culture's worship of sexual desire and personal fulfillment while offering a different vision of human flourishing. Christian formative involves both RESISTANCE and REDIRECTION. But is is the redirection of our desires that enables our resistance of cultural idolatries. Failure to attend to the dynamics of our desires leads to inevitable self-deception regarding the 'freedom' of our actions. Especially within our sexual lives, our hearts must be truly captivated by the goodness of the Christian vision of life, so that our whole self is drawn toward it, or our commitment to live in tune with it will be brittle.

He would henceforth worship and defend the very reason for Joy, the Almighty Maker of Joy.

Reality is God-centered and all human beings are worshipers, whether or not they are conscious of this reality and its implications.

Be my God, so I can just be me.

To claim the mantle of purity is always a risky business. It just gives an excuse to be disillusioned once your ordinary humidity is exposed.

What are you really living for? It's crucial to realize that you either glorify God, or you glorify something or someone else. You're always making something look big. If you don't glorify God when you're involved in a conflict, you inevitably show that someone or something else rules your heart.

Since Genesis 3 we have been addicted to setting our sights on something, someone, smaller than Jesus.

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.")

Rather than continuing on the normal sexual path toward pain, emptiness, and idolatry, you can allow God to heal you, change the way you think, and place deliberate safeguards in your life to protect you.

Get out of this office! I'll have no feelings here.

Has what you do for God become more important to you than the Lord Himself?

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciproc

Shakespeare might have said, we are "consumed with that with which we are nourished by.

We call bad one who rejects the fruit he is given for the fruit he is expecting or the fruit he was given last time.

If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage as if it were God.

Under the absolute sway of an individual despot the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul, and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose superior to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.

Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.

These infinitesimal distinctions between man and man are too paltry for an Omnipotent Being. How these madmengive themselves away! The real God taketh heed lest a sparrow fall. But the God created from human vanity seesno difference between an eagle and a sparrow.

The Bible does not say money is the root of all evil; it says the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. A poor man who, in his heart, worships the idea of being rich is more vulnerable to its evils than a rich man who has a heart to use it all for the Lord.

God is the greatest thing that exists, ever has existed or ever will…for us to glory in anything else, would be sin, as there is nothing greater than God, there is no calling greater than praising God.

As all the rivers run into the sea, so all delights centre in our Beloved.

I don't see money as evil or good: how can illusion be evil or good? But I don't see heroin or meth as evil or good, either. Which is more addictive & debilitating, money or meth? Attachment to illusion makes you illusion, makes you not real. Attachment to illusion is called idolatry, called addiction.

Your pain could be God prying open your life and heart to remove a gift of His that you've been holding on to more dearly than Him.

Whatever controls us is our lord. The person who seeks power is controlled by power. The person who seeks acceptance is controlled by acceptance. We do not control ourselves. We are controlled by the lord of our lives.

Sometimes God seems to be killing us when He is actually saving us.

When anything in life is an absolute requirement for your happiness and self-worth, it is essentially an ‘idol,’ something you are actually worshiping. When such a thing is threatened, your anger is absolute. Your anger is actually the way the idol keeps you in its service, in its chains. Therefore if you find that, despite all the efforts to forgive, your anger and bitterness cannot subside, you may need to look deeper and ask, ‘What am I defending? What is so important that I cannot live without?’ It may be that, until some inordinate desire is identified and confronted, you will not be able to master your anger.

Gold, or at least the prospect of it, saved him, then killed him.

The engine that drives all your activities is hope. What you hope in shapes you.

We often forget how thirsty we are because we believe we will fulfill our dreams.

One man's faith is considered idolatry by another

Possibly the most debilitating deception of all is to create a god of my own making, fool myself into believing that this limp god of mine is the true God, and then construct the entirety of my life on this flamboyantly fictional character. Possibly the most devastating realization of all is when the real God shows up, and in the showing up all of this come crashing down.

Forged in the fires of human passion, choking on the fumes of human rage, with these out hells and our heavens, so few inches apart, we must be awfully small, and not as strong as we think we are.

Technology presents us with a unique spiritual challenge. Because it is meant to serve us in fulfilling our created purpose, because it makes our lives easier, longer, and more comfortable, we are prone to assign to it something of a godlike status. We easily rely on technology to give our lives meaning, and we trust technology to provide an ultimate answer to the frustration of life in a fallen world. Because of this, technology is uniquely susceptible to becoming an idol, raising itself to the place of God in our lives.

I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: "Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him." And they cried out in a great voice: "He made us." CS Lewis

When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you like them for who they are. And when you stop expecting material possessions to complete you, you'd be surprised how much pleasure you get from material possessions. And when you stop expecting God to end all your troubles, you'd be surprised how much you like spending time with God.

Sensual and spiritual are not easy words to use; that there are, perhaps, not twoAphrodites, but one Aphrodite with a Janus face.

I've never found time to indulge more than a single ambition.

As history shows, dead metaphors make good idols.

The males (of the Hutchinson family that included both religious dissenter Anne and immensely wealthy and politically connected Thomas) were merchants who sought salvation through commerce.

You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Propositions are true or false. Images are not.

Jealousy from a love affair is something even God can admit.

By giving us control, our new technologies tend to enhance existing idols in our lives. Instead of becoming more like Christ through the forming and shaping influence of the church community, we form, and shape, and personalize our community to make it more like us. We take control of things that are not ours to control. Could it be that our desire for control is short-circuiting the process of change and transformation God wants us to experience through the mess of real world, flesh and blood, face-to-face relationships?

Personalized filters play to the most compulsive parts of you, creating "compulsive media" to get you to click things more.

When one becomes accustomed to "companionship" without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming. Dependence on a person is risky but it also opens us to deeply knowing another.

The problems afflicting a nation are always in equal measure spiritual crises.

Sleep is a daily reminder from God that we are not God. Once a day God sends us to bed like patients with a sickness. The sickness is a chronic tendency to think we are in control and that our work is indispensable. To cure us of this disease God turns us into helpless sacks of sand once a day.

Keep yourselves from idols." The warning isn't given to them because it wasn't a real danger or because there was an off chance someone might fall into idolatry. It was given because this is our root problem on any given day. It is what we, especially as followers of Jesus, must fight against.

You are believing not in your god but in yourself if your god knows no better than you do...and yet, in this alone, I am afraid, you have already been fooling yourself.

Who can be astonished at anything, when he has once been astonished at the manger and the cross? What is there wonderful left after one has seen the Saviour?

I had taken up my quill to begin writing many times before now, but I always abandoned it quickly: each time I was overcome with fear. Yes, may God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons—and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them: they run off—and how will you ever get control of them again! They come to life, join, separate, ignore your commands, arrange themselves as they like on the paper—black, with tails and horns. You scream at them and implore them in vain: they do as they please. Prancing, pairing up shamelessly before you, they deceitfully expose what you did not wish to reveal, and they refuse to give voice to what is struggling, deep within your bowels, to come forth and speak to mankind.

... With the rise of modern scientific (or 'rational') knowledge religion is, for the first time, challenged by the disparate claims of other life-orders (Lebensordnungen)... a polytheistic and disordered world of competing values and ideals... the economic, political, aesthetic, erotic and intellectual, which, with the onset of modernity, separate out into relatively autonomous realms (the process of Eigengeseztlichkeit) with their own value-spheres (Wertsphären).

Jim Crow repeated the old strategies of the reptilian powers of the air: to convince human beings simultaneously and paradoxically that they are gods and animals. In the Garden, after all, the snake approached God's image-bearer, directing her as though he had dominion over her (when it was, in fact, the other way around). He treated her as an animal, and she didn't even see it. At the same time, the old dragon appealed to her to transcend the limits of her dignity. If she would reach for the forbidden, she would be "like God, knowing good and evil." He suggested that she was more than a human; she was a goddess.

While it lasts, the religion of worshiping oneself is the best.

Left to our own devices, we will make God in our own image.

The bottle of the creature cracks and dries up, but the well of the Creator never fails; happy is he who dwells at the well.

The most dangerous mistake that our souls are capable of, is, to take the creature for God, and earth for heaven (374).

Nixon was by nature a excluder. Halderman like to exclude people. When Nixon's need met Halderman's abilities, you had the most perfect formula for disaster. – Jim Shepley

Belief in Yahweh doesn't come with your mind. It comes with your heart. When you only believe in things you can see with your eyes and touch with your hands, it is idolatry.