“When anything in life is an absolute requirement for your happiness and self-worth, it is essentially an ‘idol,’ something you are actually worshiping. When such a thing is threatened, your anger is absolute. Your anger is actually the way the idol keeps you in its service, in its chains. Therefore if you find that, despite all the efforts to forgive, your anger and bitterness cannot subside, you may need to look deeper and ask, ‘What am I defending? What is so important that I cannot live without?’ It may be that, until some inordinate desire is identified and confronted, you will not be able to master your anger.”
JOURNAL
One of the blessings of doing this every day has been that I cannot avoid tough scripture. I cannot simply turn to passages that are more comfortable or encouraging. I have to sit with the hard ones. These recent readings have been especially revealing, because Paul makes it very clear that the only allegiance acceptable for my heart is God. Anything else is counterfeit. As he writes in 1 Corinthians 2:3–5, “I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.”
Having grown up in the church, I have heard this most of my life, yet I feel as though I am finally beginning to understand it in ways I never have before. When I consider my actions, the community I live in, and the world around me, I can see how easily my faith attaches itself to things that are not God. Timothy Keller wrote that when something becomes an absolute requirement for happiness and self-worth, it becomes an idol. That truth has been pressing on me, because I can see how anger, bitterness, or disappointment often reveal what I am really worshiping.
For me, one of the chief counterfeits has always been people. For most of my life I have placed unrealistic expectations on friends, family, and authority figures. Over and over again I have discovered that people are flawed, they are not God, and they were never meant to carry the weight of being my refuge. Trusting in them as if they could fill that role creates dependence and burdens that ultimately destroy relationships.
This does not mean relationships should be avoided. Quite the opposite, they are essential. But they are never meant to be my ultimate refuge. The psalmist makes this plain in Psalm 118:8–9: “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in humans. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes.” Only God can be my refuge. Everything else will eventually fail, and placing my identity or hope there will end in disappointment and damage.
As sobering as this is, it is also freeing. It frees me to let people off the hook. It frees me to love them—not for what they can provide, but simply because they are here, because God placed them in my life, and because His Spirit enables me to love. That is a freedom worth celebrating. That is a joy worth holding tightly.
Paul reminds me in 1 Corinthians 2:12–13: “What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words.”
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