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

When you finally realize this, there are four things you can do. You can blame the things that are disappointing you and try to move on to better ones. That’s the way of continued idolatry and spiritual addiction. The second thing you can do is blame yourself and beat yourself and say, “I have somehow been a failure. I see everybody else is happy.

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 prop

It’s not that you should try to love your spouse less, but rather that you should know and love God more.

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.

If you marry someone expecting them to be like a god, it is only inevitable that they will disappoint you.

Jesus had replaced money as Zacchaeus’s savior, and so money went back to being merely that, just money. It was now a tool for doing good, for serving people. Now that his identity and security were rooted in Christ, he had more money than he needed. The grace of God had transformed his attitude toward his wealth.

Most of the forces that make us who we are lie in the hand of God.

The reason for our confusion is that we usually read the Bible as a series of disconnected stories, each with a “moral” for how we should live our lives. It is not. Rather, it comprises a single story, telling us how the human race got into its present condition, and how God through Jesus Christ has come and will come to put things right.

If you are angry, ask, “Is there something here too important to me, something I must have at all costs?” Do the same thing with strong fear or despair and guilt. Ask yourself, “Am I so scared, because something in my life is being threatened that I think is a necessity when it is not? Am I so down on myself because I have lost or failed at somethi