idolatry

Most counseling cases today involve good desires that have become overgrown. In these cases most relevant passages of Scripture may not be those that rebut particular manifestations of sin, but those that remind us to love God with all our hearts.

The actual language of life is not the charts and graphs and stuff we map out to feel smart. The hidden language we are speaking is really about negotiating the feeling God used to give us.

If we was master, then we could help ourselves.

Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.

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?

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

He was vain and tended to surround himself with intellectual and moral pygmies.

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.

We have to love technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough to confront technology's true effect on us.

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.

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.

We have lived for too long in a world, and tragically in a Church, where the wills and affections of human beings are regarded as sacrosanct as they stand, where God is required to command what we already love, and to promise what we already desire.

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

If your deepest feelings are reserved for something other than Almighty God, then that something other is an emotional idol... if you get more excited about material things than the simple yet profound fact that your sin was nailed to the cross by the sinless Son of God, then you're bowing down to Tammuz.