Encouraging - Idols

Typically most of my posts are merely excerpts, but I decided to summarize and elaborate on Tim Keller’s answer to “How do I discern my idols?” in his latest book, Counterfeit Gods.

• Test #1: Where does your mind wander? What do you enjoy daydreaming about? In the quietness of your soul, from where do you seek and find joy?
• Test #2: How do you spend your money? A good friend, who has since passed, once told me the easiest way to gauge a man’s heart is to look at his checkbook. What would we see by looking at your checkbook?
• Test #3: “What is your real daily functional salvation? What are you really living for, what is your real – not your professed – god? A good way to discern this is how you respond to unanswered prayers and frustrated hopes” (169).
• Test #4: Assess your most uncontrollable emotions. Ask the hard questions and do not be afraid of the answers.

Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters (Dutton, NY, NY: 2009), 168-169.