I haven't read the book, but summaries and reviews I've read show that this perhaps Keller's best work.
I'll use Daniel Im's summary for now, highlighting his famous quotes from the book:
- An idol is something we cannot live without. We must have it.
- Anything can serve as a counterfeit god, especially the very best things in life.
- Definition: An idol is anything more important to you than God. Anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God. Anything you seek to give you what only God can give. Anything that is so central and essential to your life, that should lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living.
- If I have that [idol], then I will feel like my life has meaning. Then I’ll know I have value. And I’ll feel significant and secure.
- The Bible uses three basic metaphors to talk about how people relate to the idols of their hearts: they love idols, trust idols, and obey idols. Spiritual adultery.
- Idols give us a sense of being in control and we can locate them by looking at our nightmares: What do we fear the most? What if we lost it would make life not worth living?
- Idols control us since we feel like we must have them or life is meaningless.
- Whatever controls us is our Lord. The person who seeks power is controlled by power. The person who seeks acceptance is controlled by the people he or she wants to please. We do not control ourselves, we are controlled by the lord of our lives.
- We will always be disappointed by idols, there are four things you can do: You can blame the things that are disappointing you and try to move on to better ones (that’s the way of continued idolatry and spiritual addiction), you can blame yourself and beat yourself (that’s the way of self loathing and shame), you can blame the world (that’s how you get hard, cynical, and empty), or you can reorient the entire focus of your life on God.
- Jesus warns people far more often about greed than about sex, yet almost no one thinks they’re guilty of it.
- Tithing is a minimum standard for Christian believers.
- There’s only one way to change at the heart level…and that’s through the gospel.
- One sign that you’ve made success an idol is the false sense of security it brings. The poor and the marginalized expect suffering. They know that life on this earth is nasty, brutish, and short. Successful people are much more shocked and overwhelmed by troubles: Life isn’t supposed to be this way.
- It’s a lust…a longing to be inside...Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain ~ C.S. Lewis.
- It is impossible to understand a culture without discerning its idols.
- When you pray and hope for something and you don’t get it and you respond with explosive anger or deep despair, then you may have found your real god [idol].
- What are you looking to in order to justify yourself? It is a counterfeit god.
- You may know about the love of Christ with your head, but not your heart. How can that be remedied? This takes spiritual disciplines.
- Spiritual disciplines are forms of worship. And it is worship that is the final way to replace the idols of your heart. You can’t just get relief by figuring out your idols intellectually. You have to actually get the peace that Jesus gives…and that only comes when you worship. analysis can help you discover truths, but then you have to pray them into your heart. That takes time.