For Keller an idol is “anything more important to you than God, anything which absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.” Elaborating on the book’s title, Keller writes that a “counterfeit god is anything so central and essential to your life, that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living.” What does Keller have in mind? Well, everything: family, children, career, earning money, achievement, social status, relationships, beauty, brains, morality, political or social activism—even effective Christian ministry.
The above is a quote from the Out of Ur blog (linked in the title).
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Tamy and I were just talking about how easy it is for Christians to make comfort and security an idol, specifically in the realm of family.
It is perhaps a Christian virtue to idolize ones children. They become the focus of our lives in a way that only Christ should; the focus of our dreams and plans, our sweat and sacrifice. We live for them, they become our ministry and mission. They become, in point of fact, the very reason we abandon our posts as followers of Jesus.
We all talk disapprovingly of 'those ministers who abandon their family for Jesus.' We, however, live for our children. We 'offer our bodies as living sacrifices' to them, this is 'our spiritual act of worship.'
They are our idols.
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Many of us have insider knowledge of this process; we are those idols.
A product of a Focus on the Family type of home. Where we were what was most important. God was important too, after all, He was the one who provided the justification for our esteemed place at the universal center...
...and this has not been good for our souls. Is it any wonder that our generation is walking away from Jesus?
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