idolatry on Enslaved

Nothing enslaves more than that which we think we cannot live without.

The central plot device of The Lord of the Rings is the Dark Lord Sauron’s Ring of Power, which corrupts anyone who tries to use it, however good his or her intentions. The Ring is what Professor To...

Pastor: God our Redeemer, you have saved your people through Jesus Christ, your Son. You have delivered your people out of slavery to sin and have freed us into new life. Yet, we still wander through ...

Sin isn’t only doing bad things, it is more fundamentally making good things into ultimate things. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything, even a very good thing, more than on God. Whatever...

Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.

We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.

We are complicit and we do not even realize it, O Holy God. Every day we participate in systems of idolatry, and we promote the captivity of a nation to gods. We have bought the subtle lies of our cul...

A possession ought to belong to the possessor, not the possessor to the possession.

A glutton is one who raids the icebox for a cure for spiritual malnutrition.

At this very moment, and for as long as this world endures, everybody inhabiting it is bowing down and serving something or someone—an artifact, a person, an institution, an idea, a spirit, or God thr...

Tony Reinke does a great job capturing the deep ambivalence many of us feel about our smartphones in this short excerpt: This blasted smartphone! Pesk of productivity. Tenfold plague of beeps and ...

Leader: Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness People: Put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord Leader: N...

Pastor: “Not to us, O LORD, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness!” All: Yet because of the sin in our hearts, we have strayed far from yo...

I know most Americans today do not worship Baal, but when I look at the church in America, I fear that we have our own Baals that demand our worship. I see so many people bowing down before prosperity...

What the early Christians did not have to deal with to the same extent that we do today is how race has become an idol. On both sides of the racial divide, so much is twisted by the social constructs ...

Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.

Idols are dangerous when a worshiper, having lost patience in God, transfers his hope and joy into a deity represented by a handmade thing and cries to it: “Awake and arise!” In this move, human antic...

Money is a good servant but a bad master.

He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.

In a world where sex, wealth, power, and beauty are the dominant idols, these idols will flood our dominant media.

In the Bible, the children of Israel fall into disastrous behavior patterns whenever they abandon the majestic authority of God revealed to them through Moses at Mount Sinai. In fact, they commenced r...

The heart clings to collected treasure. Stored-up possessions get between me and God. Where my treasure is, there is my trust, my security, my comfort, my God. Treasure means idolatry.

The ultimate reason for our misery, however, is that we do not love God supremely. As Augustine so famously put it in prayer, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they fin...

We sometimes imagine surrender to God as emotional starvation. Every pleasure feels suspicious, and every passion feels in competition with our love of God. We think that the more miserable we are in ...

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the ...

We are masters at creating an image, but we are novices at recognizing and repenting of the image we have created.

The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to worship unnatural things. . . . If man cannot pray, he is gagged; if he cannot kneel, he is in irons.

Two golden rules at the heart of spirituality. You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character o...

In Easter Everywhere: A Memoir, Darcey Steinke recounts how she, the daughter of a Lutheran minister, left her Christian profession. Moving to New York City she entered a life of club hopping and se...

“My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the...