Quotes About Idolatry

The spiritual reality for many of us is that the one thing is not the Lord. And the danger in that reality is this: your one thing will control your heart, and whatever controls your heart will exercise inescapable influence over your words, choices, and actions. Your one thing will become that which shapes and directs your responses to the situations and relationships of your daily life. If the Lord isn't your one thing, the thing that is your one thing will be your functional lord.

An idolatrous heart will produce idol words, words that serve the idol that grips us.

Spiritual adultery occurs when I give the love that belongs to God alone to something or someone else.

3. We replace vertical awe with horizontal addiction.

Remember the biblical principle of idolatry, desire for a good thing becomes a bad thing when that desire becomes a ruling thing.

We're all spiritually promiscuous, running from lover to lover, giving the loyalty of our hearts to things other than God.

Perhaps we commit vertical larceny much more than we realize. Perhaps we quest for personal glory more than we think. Perhaps we take credit for what only God can do more often than we think we do. Perhaps, in subtle idolatry, we give credit to places and things when it really belongs to God.

When good things become controlling, they command the affection of our hearts and then shape our words and behavior. When this happens, they take the place in our hearts that only God should have.

God designed us to be worshipers. Everything we do is the product of worship. We are always giving our hearts to something, and if it's not God, it's something God created. All

The war that rages in all our hearts is a war between the awe of God and the awe of self. The war really does somehow turn all of us into glory thieves. Perhaps we commit vertical larceny much more than we realize. Perhaps we quest for personal glory more than we think. Perhaps we take credit for what only God can do more often than we think we do. Perhaps, in subtle idolatry, we give credit to places and things when it really belongs to God.

Idolatry occurs when anything created to point you to God replaces God in the thoughts and desires of your heart.

whenever you ask creation to do what only the Creator can do, you are on your way to addiction.

Many people will get up today and in some way will ask creation to be their savior, that is, to give them what only God is able to give.

Worshiping the creation is never a pathway to life; it leads you in the opposite direction.

The question is not whether you will worship, but rather what you will worship—your glorious Creator or something he created.

words must respect the Mystery and never idolatrously take its place.

The conservative heretics were like all the others here in Dis: though they claimed to champion truth, in reality they loved something else more than truth—in this case, the comfort of their own smugness. It was a subtle form of idolatry, but idolatry nonetheless. Fancy that: feuding theological cousins—liberals and conservatives—the spitting image of each other, bedded down now side by side in flaming poetic justice.

the passionate defense of the Bible as a "history book" among the more conservative wings of Christianity, despite intentions, isn't really an act of submission to God; it is making God submit to us. In its most extreme forms, making God look like us is what the Bible calls idolatry.

When we grab hold of "correct" thinking for dear life, when we refuse to let go because we think that doing so means letting go of God, when we dig in our heels and stay firmly planted even when we sense that we need to let go and move on, at that point we are trusting our thoughts rather than God. We have turned away from God's invitation to trust in order to cling to an idol.

The Bible is not God, nor is it a substitute for God, and to treat it as if it were God or a surrogate of God is to treat it in the very way that it itself condemns over and over again.

So Jacob told his household and all who were with him, “Get rid of the foreign gods that are among you. Purify yourselves and change your garments.

So they gave Jacob all their foreign gods and all their earrings, and Jacob buried them under the oak near Shechem.

You shall have no other gods before Me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in the heavens above, on the earth below, or in the waters beneath.