I am sure you wouldn’t leave some words to self-promote!

However, as I am guilty myself on certain occasions, I will look the other way!

Yes, the heart is an “Idol Factory” as Calvin and Luther both noted, with Luther also affirming that this is the default mode of the human heart!

I will quote some pieces for you and readers from “the Cardiologist’s”… Keller’s new book, “Counterfeit God: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matter,” from the Introduction… which may help to illustrate from Keller, what you are affirming

In the 1830s, when Alexis de Tocqueville recorded
his famous observations on America, he noted
a “strange melancholy that haunts the inhabitants . . .
in the midst of abundance.”2 Americans believed that
prosperity could quench their yearning for happiness,
but such a hope was illusory, because, de Tocqueville
added, “the incomplete joys of this world will never
satisfy [the human] heart.”3 This strange melancholy
manifests itself in many ways, but always leads to the
same despair of not finding what is sought.
There is a difference between sorrow and despair.
Sorrow is pain for which there are sources of consolation.
Sorrow comes from losing one good thing among
others, so that, if you experience a career reversal, you
can find comfort in your family to get you through
it. Despair, however, is inconsolable, because it comes
from losing an ultimate thing. When you lose the ultimate source of your meaning or hope, there are no
alternative sources to turn to. It breaks your spirit.
What is the cause of this “strange melancholy” that
permeates our society even during boom times of frenetic
activity, and which turns to outright despair when
prosperity diminishes? De Tocqueville says it comes
from taking some “incomplete joy of this world” and
building your entire life on it. That is the definition of
idolatry…
…It would have been hard to make this case convincingly
during the era of the dot-com boom and of the real
estate and stock bubble of the last twenty years. However,
the great economic meltdown of 2008–2009
has laid bare what is now being called “the culture of
greed.” Long ago, Saint Paul wrote that greed was not
just bad behavior. “Greed is idolatry,” he wrote. (Colossians
3:5) Money, he advised, can take on divine attributes,
and our relationship to it then approximates
worship and obeisance.
Money can become a spiritual addiction, and like all
addictions it hides its true proportions from its victims.
We take more and greater risks to get an ever diminishing
satisfaction from the thing we crave, until a breakdown
occurs. When we begin to recover, we ask, “What were
we thinking? How could we have been so blind?” We
wake up like people with a hangover who can hardly remember
the night before. But why? Why did we act so
irrationally? Why did we completely lose sight of what
is right?
The Bible’s answer is that the human heart is an
“idol factory.”5
When most people think of “idols” they have in
mind literal statues—or the next pop star anointed by
Simon Cowell. Yet while traditional idol worship still
occurs in many places of the world, internal idol worship,
within the heart, is universal. In Ezekiel 14:3,
God says about elders of Israel, “These men have set
up their idols in their hearts.” Like us, the elders must
have responded to this charge, “Idols? What idols? I
don’t see any idols.” God was saying that the human
heart takes good things like a successful career, love,
material possessions, even family, and turns them into
ultimate things. Our hearts deify them as the center of
our lives, because, we think, they can give us significance
and security, safety and fulfillment, if we attain
them.6
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 Tom Shippey calls
“a psychic amplifier,” which takes the heart’s fondest
desires and magnifies them to idolatrous proportions.7
Some good characters in the book want to liberate
slaves, or preserve their people’s land, or visit wrongdoers
with just punishment. These are all good objectives.
But the Ring makes them willing to do any thing
to achieve them, anything at all. It turns the good thing
into an absolute that overturns every other allegiance
or value. The wearer of the Ring becomes increasingly
enslaved and addicted to it, for an idol is something we
cannot live without. We must have it, and therefore it
drives us to break rules we once honored, to harm others
and even ourselves in order to get it. Idols are spiritual
addictions that lead to terrible evil, in Tolkien’s
novel and real life.
Cultural moments like the one we are in provide us
with an opportunity. Many people are now more open
to the Bible’s warning that money can become much
more than money. It can become a powerful lifealtering,
culture-shaping god, an idol that breaks the
hearts of its worshippers. The bad news is that we are
so fixated on the problem of greed, which we tend to
see in “those rich people over there,” that we don’t realize the most fundamental truth. Anything can be
an idol, and everything has been an idol.
The most famous moral code in the world is the
Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. The very first
commandment is “I am the Lord your God . . . you
shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3).
That leads to the natural question—“What do you
mean, ‘other gods’?” An answer comes immediately.
“You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of
anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or
in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them
or worship them. . . .” (Exodus 20:4–5) That includes
everything in the world! Most people know you can
make a god out of money. Most know you can make
god out of sex. However, any thing in life can serve as
an idol, a God-alternative, a counterfeit god…
…What is an idol? It is anything more important to you
than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination
more than God, anything you seek to give you
what only God can give.9
A counterfeit god is anything so central and essential
to your life that, should you lose it, your life would
feel hardly worth living. An idol has such a controlling
position in your heart that you can spend most of
your passion and energy, your emotional and financial
resources, on it without a second thought. It can be
family and children, or career and making money, or
achievement and critical acclaim, or saving “face” and
social standing. It can be a romantic relationship, peer
approval, competence and skill, secure and comfortable
circumstances, your beauty or your brains, a great political
or social cause, your morality and virtue, or even
success in the Christian ministry. When your meaning
in life is to fix someone else’s life, we may call it “codependency”
but it is really idolatry. An idol is whatever
you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, “If I have
that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I
have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure.” There
are many ways to describe that kind of relationship to
something, but perhaps the best one is worship…
…The way forward, out of despair, is to discern the
idols of our hearts and our culture. But that will not
be enough. The only way to free ourselves from the
destructive influence of counterfeit gods is to turn back
to the true one. The living God, who revealed himself
both at Mount Sinai and on the Cross, is the only Lord
who, if you find him, can truly fulfill you, and, if you
fail him, can truly forgive you. (Emphasis Mine)

To read all the Introduction to Keller’s new book, this link will download it…

http://www.wtsbooks.com/pdf_files/9780525951360.pdf

As it relates to believers, Keller also talks about “functional” idols, which is a great way to frame, understand, and communicate what happens at such times in a believers life. In those moments of sin, we functionally turn to something else, functionally, something other than Christ, and say, “I need you, I must have you in my life, I need you to find functional redemption.”

As Christians, this is where the nexus of the issue resides, and one of the reasons why believers should get hold of Keller’s resources!

I have listened to a few Tim Keller MP3s over the break which has been quite refreshing.

http://www.redeemer.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Keller
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1Q6Zun2v-8

Keller, assuming that I am understanding him correctly, understands idolatry based in the first commandment as the basis for much of our sinfulness (thus it is the first/primary (meta?) commandment). The sin of the heart then becomes putting something else before God, putting the desires of MY heart before the desires of HIS heart. I think this is a very nice way of teaching and working on our hearts. So often we are in a battle where MY will is done instead of THY will be done.

So the heart is full of very dull shades of grey — nothing like this website of course

Anyway, this was not so much meant for just those who are labelled as “rebellious”, based on given acts or dispositions, as even the most religious people have the most rebellious hearts!

Start Now My Regular Reading Friend! Parenting the Gospel Must Grow Out of Who We Are, Not in What We Do!

You Feel Me!

On the Design… It is definitely safe! I might be precious (said with “smegel” overtones), but opinion control is so passe!

There will be differing opinions on the colour design, or lack thereof, but presently, I am happy with the look! This may develop, but that is prophetic!

Less is More My Blogging Buddy!

How many other sites do you visit with a look like this?

BTW, is it safe to suggest to brighten up the color scheme of this blog?