From my biblical counseling studies this morning:
“A god is that to which we look for all good and in which we find refuge in every time of need. To have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe him with our whole heart. As I have often said, the truth and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true God. On the other hand, if your trust is false and wrong, then you have not the true God. For these two belong together, faith and God. That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I say, really your God.” – Martin Luther, Luther’s Catechism
Our emotions are pointers to what we worship: What controls us? What do we desire above all else? What do we live for? What are we pursuing to satisfy ourselves? What do we need? What do we feel we have to have? If we trace these questions back, we will find what we really worship.
Perhaps it’s pleasure, control, respect, being understood, acceptance, opinions of others, being pretty, being pain free, golf, football, video games, tv, friends, family, food, exercise, shopping, to only name a few. We are all idolators and what we worship leads to our behavior.
“From this we may gather that man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols. . . . So it goes. Man’s mind, full as it is of pride and boldness, dares to imagine a god according to its own capacity; as it sluggishly plods, indeed is overwhelmed with the crassest ignorance, it conceives an unreality and an empty appearance as God.” – John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
Consider Ezekiel 36:25-27, “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statues and be careful to obey my rules.”
An Everyday Theologian 