When anything in life is an absolute requirement for your happiness and self-worth, it is essentially an ‘idol,’ something you are actually worshiping. When such a thing is threatened, your anger is absolute. Your anger is actually the way the idol keeps you in its service, in its chains. Therefore if you find that, despite all the efforts to forgive, your anger and bitterness cannot subside, you may need to look deeper and ask, ‘What am I defending? What is so important that I cannot live without?’ It may be that, until some inordinate desire is identified and confronted, you will not be able to master your anger.
– Tim Keller
Anger | Bitterness | Forgiveness | Happiness | Idolatry
There is nothing so abominable in the eyes of God and of men as idolatry, whereby men render to the creature that honor which is due only to the Creator
– Blaise Pascal
Idolatry
The God of the modern evangelical rarely astonishes anybody. He manages to stay pretty much with the constitution. Never break our by-laws. He’s a very well-behaved God and very denominational and very much like one of us…we ask Him to help us when we’re in trouble and look to Him to watch over us when we’re asleep. The God of the modern evangelical isn’t a God I could have much respect for.
– A. W. Tozer
Idolatry
Whatsoever we have over-loved, idolized, and leaned upon, God has from time to time broken it, and made us to see the vanity of it; so that we find the readiest course to be rid our comforts is to set our hearts inordinately or immoderately upon them.
– John Flavel
Idolatry
The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him.
– A. W. Tozer
Idolatry
You don’t have to go to heathen lands today to find false gods. America is full of them. Whatever you love more than God is your idol.
– Dwight L. Moody
Idolatry | America
Loving a holy God is beyond our moral power. The only kind of God we can love by our sinful nature is an unholy god, an idol made by our own hands. Unless we are born of the Spirit of God, unless God sheds His holy love in our hearts, unless He stoops in His grace to change our hearts, we will not love Him… To love a holy God requires grace, grace strong enough to pierce our hardened hearts and awaken our moribound souls.
– R. C. Sproul
Idolatry
Verily, we know not what an evil it is to indulge ourselves, and to make an idol of our will.
– Samuel Rutherford
Rebellion | Idolatry
Turn to God from idols. For the sword of His wrath that had been aimed at you has been sheathed into the heart of His Son. And the arrows of His anger that had been put against your breast were loosed into the Lord Jesus Christ. Because He has died for you, you were forgiven.
– Assorted Authors
Atonement | Idolatry
A god who let us prove his existence would be an idol.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
God | Idolatry
Every one of us is, even from his mother’s womb, a master craftsman of idols.
– John Calvin
Rebellion | Idolatry
It (idolatry) means turning a good thing into an ultimate thing.
– Tim Keller
Idolatry
Idolatry is in a man’s own thought, not in the opinion of another.
– John Selden
Reasoning | Idolatry
False gods patiently endure the existence of other false gods. Dagon can stand with Bel, and Bel with Ashtaroth; how should stone, and wood, and silver, be moved to indignation; but because God is the only living and true God, Dagon must fall before His ark; Bel must be broken, and Ashtaroth must be consumed with fire.
– Charles Spurgeon
Idolatry
To have a faith, therefore, or a trust in anything, where God hath not promised, is plain idolatry, and a worshipping of thine own imagination instead of God.
– William Tyndale
Faith | Trust | Idolatry
An idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.
– A. W. Tozer
Habits | Idolatry
As long as you want anything very much, especially more than you want God, it is an idol.
– A. B. Simpson
Greed | Idolatry
If religion might be judged of according to men’s intentions, there would scarcely be any idolatry in the world.
– Joseph Hall
Religion | Idolatry
When people say, ‘I know God forgives me, but I can’t forgive myself,’ they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important than God’s.
– Tim Keller
Idolatry
I would neither have you be idle in duties – nor make an idol of duties.
– William Secker
Idleness | Idolatry
When your thoughts and opinions become intellectual gods in rebellion against the Word of God, you are in idolatry.
– John Hagee
Reasoning | Idolatry
What each one honors before all else, what before all things he admires and loves, this for him is God.
– Origen
Idolatry
Man’s mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition; so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain.
– John Calvin
Reasoning | Idolatry
If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts.
– Tim Keller
Idolatry | work
If we exalt money, status, or sex above the Word of God, we are living in idolatry. Every time we inwardly submit to the strongholds of fear, bitterness, and pride, we are bowing to the rulers of darkness. Each of these idols must be smashed, splintered, and obliterated from the landscape of our hearts.
– Francis Frangipane
Idolatry