Idolatry Quotes

The more we listen to the voices of others, voices unlike our own, the more we remain open to the transcendent forces that save us from idolatry. The more we listen to ourselves, the more we create God in our own image until God becomes a tawdry idol that looks and speaks like us. The power of the commandments is found not in the writings of theologians, although I read and admire some, but in the pathos of human life, including lives that are very unlike our own. All states and nations work to pervert religions into civic religions, ones where the goals of the state become the goals of the divine. This is increasingly true in the United States. But once we believe we understand the will of God and can act as agents of God we become dangerous, a menace to others and a menace to ourselves. We forget that we do not understand. We forget to listen.

~ Chris Hedges

About the time I told God that He didn't exist, I was desperate for an identity.

~ Donald Miller

As history shows, dead metaphors make good idols.

~ Elizabeth A. Johnson

By giving us control, our new technologies tend to enhance existing idols in our lives. Instead of becoming more like Christ through the forming and shaping influence of the church community, we form, and shape, and personalize our community to make it more like us. We take control of things that are not ours to control. Could it be that our desire for control is short-circuiting the process of change and transformation God wants us to experience through the mess of real world, flesh and blood, face-to-face relationships?

~ Tim Challies

Images of the Holy easily become holy images -- sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example, it leads all previous idea of the Messiah in ruins.

~ C.s. Lewis

God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out air-quality. He knew it already. It was I who did. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the day all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize that fact was to knock it down.

~ C.s. Lewis

He would henceforth worship and defend the very reason for Joy, the Almighty Maker of Joy.

~ Philip Zaleski

When people turn other people into selfobjects, they are trying to turn a person into a kind of spare part.

~ Sherry Turkle

The narrator refers to a character as an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them.

~ Pearl S. Buck

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

~ The Skit Guys

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

~ Tullian Tchividjian

In games, he feels that he is creating something new. But this is creation where someone has already been. It is not creation but the FEELING of creation. These are feelings of accomplishment on a time scale and with a certainty that the real world cannot provide.

~ Sherry Turkle

For him, mastery of the game world is a source of joy.

~ Sherry Turkle

Although we should affirm the wonder and mystery of sexual intimacy and romantic attraction as God's good creations, we need to set these aesthetic enjoyments within the context of the Christian virtues of fidelity, self-sacrifice, and patience in suffering.Bringing this together, our pastoral approach should be double-edged, seeking to challenge our culture's worship of sexual desire and personal fulfillment while offering a different vision of human flourishing. Christian formative involves both RESISTANCE and REDIRECTION. But is is the redirection of our desires that enables our resistance of cultural idolatries. Failure to attend to the dynamics of our desires leads to inevitable self-deception regarding the 'freedom' of our actions. Especially within our sexual lives, our hearts must be truly captivated by the goodness of the Christian vision of life, so that our whole self is drawn toward it, or our commitment to live in tune with it will be brittle.

~ Jonathan Grant

Sensual and spiritual are not easy words to use; that there are, perhaps, not twoAphrodites, but one Aphrodite with a Janus face.

~ E.m. Forster

Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God, your functional savior.

~ Martin Luther

Forged in the fires of human passion, choking on the fumes of human rage, with these out hells and our heavens, so few inches apart, we must be awfully small, and not as strong as we think we are.

~ Rich Mullins

To use good things to our own ends is always a false religion

~ Richard J. Foster

I had taken up my quill to begin writing many times before now, but I always abandoned it quickly: each time I was overcome with fear. Yes, may God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons—and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them: they run off—and how will you ever get control of them again! They come to life, join, separate, ignore your commands, arrange themselves as they like on the paper—black, with tails and horns. You scream at them and implore them in vain: they do as they please. Prancing, pairing up shamelessly before you, they deceitfully expose what you did not wish to reveal, and they refuse to give voice to what is struggling, deep within your bowels, to come forth and speak to mankind.

~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Admirations are never paid in any way, try to make yourself of what you admire, and it will pay you with originality.

~ Auliq Ice

Be my God, so I can just be me.

~ Laura Story

When speculators have once entered Wall Street, they never leave it except in a pine box or a rosewood case, according to circumstances.

~ H.w. Brands

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.

~ Jonathan Darman

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.

~ Colin S. Smith

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

~ Timothy J. Keller

A god that can be reduced to what reason can cope with is not a God that can be worshiped.

~ Alister E. Mcgrath

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

~ Eli Pariser

Propositions are true or false. Images are not.

~ Gene Edward Veith Jr.

Not even generals can stop the rain.

~ Jeff Shaara

We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

~ Paul David Tripp

The author points to the impact of what he called Dutch disease, where the discovery of found wealth from a particular commodity causes a culture to atrophy with respect to work ethic and broader development. Continuing wealth from the single commodity is taken for granted. The government, flush with wealth, is expected to be generous. When the price of that commodity drops, a government which would remain in power dare not cut back on this generosity.

~ Daniel Yergin

We view God as a resource that will broker all my cheap desires.

~ Jon Hauser

If we would remember that all the trees of earth are marked for the woodman's axe, we should not be so ready to build our nests in them.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Get out of this office! I'll have no feelings here.

~ Charles Dickens

He fetishized limits.

~ Rick Perlstein

Gold, or at least the prospect of it, saved him, then killed him.

~ H.w. Brands

Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead.

~ Sherry Turkle

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

~ Orrin Woodward

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.

~ Thomas Hughes