idolatry on Loss

Almighty God, we bow before You, humbly able to admit how small, fragile, and dependent we are. Unfortunately, for many of us, it takes a disaster to convince us that we are not in control. Over the p...

You may not have heard of Phil Vischer, but you have heard his voice. He is the creator of the wildly successful Veggie Tales and provided the voice of Bob the Tomato. Veggie Tales was massively s...

Lamenting a Living Son This is God’s own lament: a brokenhearted father mourning the loss of a still-living son.  Throughout the book, God has led Hosea to draw from moments of Israel’s past.  Here, ...

Preaching Commentary Lamenting a Living Son This is God’s own lament: a brokenhearted father mourning the loss of a still-living son.  Throughout the book, God has led Hosea to draw from moments of...

God of the common and of the uncommon. You meet us in the ordinary routines of life–when we play and when we rest, while we work and while we worship. And You reveal yourself in the extraordinary, too...

Failure is a gift. When we are forced to drink the dust of our idols, we can begin to turn our sights toward home.

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

Joy’s trick is to supply  Dry lips with what can cool and slake,  Leaving them dumbstruck also with an  ache Nothing can satisfy.

What people revere, they resemble, either for ruin or restoration.

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

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

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.

Each of us, Lord, has failed to fully observe your beauty. We fall in love with our own image and are left disappointed and alone. Please be faithful to us, Jesus, even when we turn from You. We...

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 ...

Idolatry is not just a failure to obey God, it is a setting of the whole heart on something besides God.

Great needs grow from great possessions.

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.

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

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...

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...

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

There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he ...

Steve Jobs’s idol was food. This is perhaps the most surprising and wrenching revelation of Isaacson’s admiring book: from early in his life, Steve Jobs was obsessed with food in ways that increasingl...

Preaching Commentary Different Levels of Maturity? There is an interesting dynamic I have noticed that often occurs as people begin to mature into adults. In my life it was a stage that took place ...

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...

This prayer also works well for the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18) Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner. I have failed to love as You Love I have treated others as objects and...

Pastor: In the beginning God created all things People: and God saw that they were good. Pastor: God created Adam and Eve in His image, to be in relationship with Him. When confronte...

All idols begin by offering great things for a very small price. All idols then fail, more and more consistently, to deliver on their original promises, while ratcheting up their demands, which initia...

Different Levels of Maturity? There is an interesting dynamic I have noticed that often occurs as people begin to mature into adults. In my life it was a stage that took place following high school, ...