The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it...

For him (LBJ) food was not an indulgence but and intoxicant, an object he reached for to fill a gaping void, one he could never fill up.

We are drawn towards a thing, either because there is some good we are seeking from it, or because we cannot do without it. Sometimes the two motives coincide. Often however they do not. Each...

Steam seems to have killed all gratitude in the hearts of sailors.

To the extent that we are trapped by the overvaluing, idealizing tendency, we are not free fully to celebrate the limited but real goods of creation. Idolatry by definition is not an accurate assessment of...

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...

When something becomes so important to you that it drives your behavior and commands your emotions, you are worshipping it.

No man engaged in a work he does not like can preserve many saving illusionsabout himself. The distaste, the absence of glamour, extend from the occupation to the personality. It is only when ourappointed activities...

Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your...

We imagine that a little anxiety and worry is an indication of how wise we really are; it may be an indication of how wicked we really are.

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.

mysterious money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil. He had seemed to love it little in the years when every penny had its purpose for...

You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other’s...

Ice hockey is the closest thing to religion permitted by the Soviet Union.

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.

She (his future wife) was so deep into the Lord’s presence that I felt like an outsider.

Could it be that desire for a good thing has become a bad thing because that desire has become a ruling thing?

Our culture says ‘live your dream,’ but God calls you to place your dream on His altar and to keep it there at all times. It is good to have hopes and dreams for the...

In youth his mind had been closed, for every prejudice of upbringing was a disinfectant against pagan ideas. He now had an even more satisfying answer to the puzzles of human strivings and destiny. Paganism...

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

Modernity has abandoned the household gods, not because we have rejected the idolatry as all Christians must, but because we have rejected the very idea of the household. We no longer worship Vesta, but have...

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...

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...

We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

I struggled with insecurity because I was trying to find my security in things. But when I began serving God with all my heart, my security was in Him.

The minute you hear a sermon on materialism, you’re glad somebody else is there to hear it.

If you feel that without a certain person, or position, or achievement, your life would be not worth living, you may be deeper into idolatry than you think.

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...

If you uproot the idol and fail to plant the love of Christ in its place, the idol will grow back.

Religion is the most fragile of all freedoms. And that’s because it is the most threatening to those in power.

Purge me from every sinful blot;My idols all be cast aside: Cleanse me from every evil thought,From all the filth of self and pride.The hatred of the carnal mind Out of my flesh at once...

This work of making trade righteous, of Christianizing trade, looks like the very hardest the Gospel has ever had to take in hand—in England at any rate.

By and large, the mission of any ghost is to offer humility. They point out what’s important by mocking what is not.(Joshua Malina, Sports Night)

Propositions are true or false. Images are not.

The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.

Saint Augustine defined idolatry as worshiping what should be used or using what should be worshiped

I was assigned to the office of a recently deceased faculty member; the office hadn’t been cleaned out yet, and a few days before the fall term began, I unlocked the door to find a...

You can either be god of certain areas of your life, or let Me be God of your whole life.

Idolatry, like all sin, is devastating to the soul. It cuts us off from the comforts of grace, the peace of conscience, and the joy that is to be our strength.

The readiest way which God takes to draw a man to himself is, to afflict him in that he loves most, and with good reason; and to cause this affliction to arise from some good...

Shopkeepers —the great landed and commercial interests—regularly sat and slept, and where the two publicans occupied pews, but seldom made even the pretence of worshipping.

This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” he said. “There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of...

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...

Until we embrace our mutual brokenness, our work with low-income people is likely to do more harm than good. I sometimes unintentionally reduce poor people to objects that I use to fulfill my own need...

Idolatry involves putting the things we love in the place of God or seeing God as a means of getting the things that we want, and that’s the second great struggle of our lives.

Because the culture we breathe and work in rushes against rest. It equates our worth with production and wealth and fame. The more we work toward those goals, the more society assigns us worth.

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...

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

God is not against you owning things, but he is against the things owning you.

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