"Why do people choose the substitute over God himself? Probably the most important reason is that it obviates accountability to God. We can meet idols on our own terms because they are our own creations. They are safe, predictable, and controllable; they are, in Jeremiah's colorful language, the 'scarecrows in a cornfield' (10:5). They are portable and completely under the user's control. They offer nothing like the threat of a God who thunders from Sinai and whose providence in this world so often appears to us to be incomprehensible and dangerous . . . [People] need face only themselves. That is the appeal of idolatry."
- David F. Wells
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
From Prayer by Richard J. Foster:
Sometimes we are invaded to the depths by an overwhelming experience of the love of God. Walking down the streets of New York, D.L. Moody was so overcome by God's loving presence that he rushed to the home of a friend in order to have a room alone where, for two hours, wave after wave of God's ravishing love swept over him. At other times we experience such a flaming vision of light that we are forever blinded to all competing loyalties. In the center of his greatest spiritual moment Blaise Pascal wrote the single word "Fire!"
