THE COUNTERFEIT

"...I argued that if you are so afraid of love that you cannot have it, you are just as enslaved as if you must have it. The person who can't have it will avoid people who would be wonderful partners. The person who must have it will choose partners who are ill-fitting to them or abusive. If you are too afraid of love or too enamored by it, it has assumed godlike power, distorting your perceptions and life."

"'You're nobody till somebody loves you,'" went the popular song, and we are an entire culture that has taken it literally. We maintain the fantasy that if we find our one true soul mate, everything wrong with us will be healed. But when our expectations and hopes reach that magnitude, as Becker says, 'the love object is God.' No lover, no human being, is qualified for that role. No one can live up to that. The inevitable result is bitter disillusionment."

"The gods of moralistic religions favor the successful and the overachievers. They are the ones who climb the moral ladder up to heaven. But the God of the Bible is the one who comes down into this world to accomplish a salvation and gives us a grace we could never attain ourselves. He loves the unwanted, the weak and unloved. He is not just a king and we are the subjects; he is not just a shepherd and we are the sheep. He is a husband and we are his spouse. He is ravished with us -- even those of us whom no one else notices."

"A final test works for everyone. Look at your most uncontrollable emotions. Just as a fisherman looking for fish knows to go where the water is roiling, look for your idols at the bottom of your most painful emotions, especially those that never seem to lift, and that drive you to do things that you know are wrong. If you are angry, ask, 'Is there something here too important to me, something I must have at all costs?' Do the same thing with strong fear or despair and guilt. Ask yourself, 'Am I so scared, because something in my life is being threatened that I think is a necessity when it is not? Am I so down on myself because I have lost or failed at something that I think is a necessity when it is not?' If you are overworking, driving yourself into the ground with frantic activity, ask yourself, 'Do I feel that I must have this thing to be fulfilled and significant?' When you ask questions like that, when you 'pull your emotions up by the roots,' as it were, you will often find your idols clinging to them."

"We think we've learned about grace, set our idols aside, reached a place where we're serving God not for what we're going to get from him but for who he is. There's a certain sense in which we spend our entire lives thinking we've reached the bottom of our hearts and finding it is a false bottom. Mature Christians are not people who have completely hit the bedrock. I do not believe that is possible in this life. Rather, they are people who know how to keep drilling and are getting closer and closer."

— Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods (2009)