Charles R. Swindoll Quotes

Whatever you love more than God is your idol.

Any idol, regardless of its beauty or usefulness or original purpose, is to be set aside so that Christ might reign supreme, without a single competitor.

People were never meant to be idols. We aren't supposed to be worshipped. Only God deserves that kind of praise.

The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him.

But things that are intrinsically good can also become idols-if we allow them to take over any of God's functions in our lives.

Whatever thing a man sets his heart on...is his god; and if his god doesn't also happen to be the true and living God of Israel that man is laboring in idolatry.

Tis mad idolatry To make the service greater than the god.

...I do not say, Don't play games or cricket and so forth. By all means play and enjoy them, giving thanks to Jesus for them. Only take care that games do not become an idol to you as they did to me. What good will it do to anybody in the next world to have been the best player that ever has been? And then think of the difference between that and winning souls for Jesus.

When you worship an idol, you're substituting a thing for the ultimate.

When we do not adore God, we adore something else. Money and power are false idols which often take the place of God.

If the Lord is to be Lord, worship must have priority in our lives. The divine priority is worship first, service second.

The idol in the temple is not God. But since God resides in every atom, He resides in that idol too.

Whatever we worship, short of God, is sure to be our undoing.

... we need to interrogate "reverence," for idolization can be another way one is objectified and not really taken seriously.

Prayer is essentially the practice of the presence of God, and that is the road to Heaven. There is no alternative. God is the only game in town. All other roads are dead ends. Since we must give our all to the one true God, we must not give any part to idols, to the many false gods that now bite away at our lives.

We must visit Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament a hundred thousand times a day.

When exhaling this air, we announced Jesus Christ risen by the same Spirit. No one can live without breathing. It is the same for the Christian: without praise and mission there is not Christian life. And with praise, worship. We rarely speak about worship. What do we do when we pray? We ask things of God, we give thanks. But worshipping and adoring God is part of breathing - praise and worship.

What does the divine sufferer (Jesus) demand from us? Only our faith, our love, our grateful praise, our consecrated hearts and lives. Is that too much to ask?

Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another. Idolatry does not offer a journey but rather a plethora of paths leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth.

Even our pets can become idols.

A loving God who has no wrath is no God. He is an idol of our own making as much as if we carved Him out of stone.

The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service to Him. It is never 'Do, do' with the Lord, but 'Be, be' and He will 'do' through you. The only way to keep true to God is by a steady persistent refusal to be interested in Christian work and to be interested alone in Jesus Christ.

We may worship a picture as God, but not God as the picture. God in the picture is right, but the picture as God is wrong. God in the image is perfectly right. There is no danger there. This is the real worship of God. But the image-God is a mere Pratika.

You know the Ark of Israel and the calf of Belial were both made of gold. Religion has never yet changed the metal of her one adoration.

Never think that you need to protect God. Because anytime you think you need to protect God, you can be sure that you are worshipping an idol.