Counterfeit Gods

Recently read Tim Keller's book Counterfeit Gods. Very good stuff as much of what Keller writes is. Some takeaways:

• What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give. A counterfeit god is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living (xvii-xviii).

• People who have never suffered in life have less empathy for others, little knowledge of their own shortcomings and limitations, no endurance in the face of hardship, and unrealistic expectations for life (15).

• Tithing is a minimum standard for Christian believers. We certainly wouldn’t want to be in a position of giving away less of our income than those who had so much less of an understanding of what God did to save them (62).

• The increasing political polarization and bitterness we see in US politics today is a sign that we have made political activism into a form of religion (100).

Good stuff indeed.