To What Am I Bowing?

I get these great daily devotions for Lent from Christianbook.com. If you want to sign up, the link is here. Today's edition is from a book called "Lent and Easter Wisdom from G. K. Chesterton." It really spoke to me, as I hope it will speak to your heart. An idol is not necessarily something carved out by human hands. It's actually more: something carved out by the human heart.

American Idols

Idolatry exists wherever the thing which originally gave us happiness becomes at last more important than happiness itself. Drunkenness, for example, may be fairly described as an engrossing hobby. And drunkenness is, when really comprehended in its inward and psychological reality, a typical example of idolatry. Essential intemperance begins at the point where the once incidental form of pleasure, which comes from a certain article of consumption, becomes more important than all the vast universe of natural pleasures, which it finally destroys. Lunacy and Letters

Have You Not Understood? To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him? An idol?--A workman casts it, and a goldsmith overlays it with gold, and casts for it silver chains. As a gift one chooses mulberry wood --wood that will not rot-- then seeks out a skilled artisan to set up an image that will not topple. Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing. Isaiah 40:18-23

Prayer Lord, my idols are all dead things. They are not living; they cannot act. How do I forget that so easily? Yet they promise to comfort me, Father, when I am afraid, lonely, or dejected, because I can see them. I cannot see you, God, and so I easily lose faith. I instinctively turn to something tangible. O Lord, have mercy on me. I believe; help my unbelief.