Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters

Sometimes God seems to be killing us when he’s actually saving us.

You don’t lose your desire to live unless you have lost your meaning in life.

Why would the greatest punishment imaginable be to allow someone to achieve their fondest dream? It is because our hearts fashion these desires into idols. In that same chapter, Paul summarized the history of the human race in one sentence: “They worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator”

If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning in life, and identity, then it is an idol.

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.

Our patterns of spending reveal our idols.

We learn that through all of life there runs a ground note of cosmic disappointment. You are never going to lead a wise life until you understand that.

What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.

De Tocqueville says it comes from taking some “incomplete joy of this world” and building your entire life on it. That is the definition of idolatry.