Timothy Keller, in his book, The Reason for God (continuing a previous post “The Consequences of Sin”) wrote: The good things that enslave us are good things that deserve to be loved. But when our heart loves become inordinate, then we fall into patterns of life that are not unlike substance addiction. As in all addiction, we are in denial about the degree to which we are controlled by our god-substitutes. And inordinate love creates inordinate, uncontrollable anguish if anything goes wrong with the object of our greatest hopes. Continuing. . .
As a pastor at my first church in Hopewell, Virginia, I found myself counseling two different women, both of whom were married, both of whom had husbands who were poor fathers, and both of whom had teenage sons who were beginning to get in trouble in school and with the law. Both women were angry with their husbands. I advised them and talked (among other things) about problems of unresolved bitterness and the importance of forgiveness. Both women agreed and sought to forgive. However, the woman who had the worst husband and was least religious was able to forgive. The other woman was not. This puzzled me for months until one day the unforgiving woman blurted out, “Well, if my son goes down the drain then my whole life will have been a failure!” She had centered her life on her son’s happiness and success. That is why she couldn’t forgive.10
. . . .A life not centered on God leads to emptiness. Building our lives on something besides God not only hurts us if we don’t get the desires of our hearts, but also if we do. Few of us get all our dreams fulfilled in life, and therefore it is easy to live in the illusion that if you were as successful, wealthy, popular, or as beautiful as you wished, you’d be happy and at peace. That just isn’t so. In a Village Voice column, Cynthia Heimel thought back on all the people she knew in New York City before they became famous movie stars. One worked behind a makeup counter at Macy’s, one worked selling tickets at movie theaters, and so on. When they became successful, every one of them became more angry, manic, unhappy and unstable than they had been when they were working hard to get to the top. Why? Heimel writes: That giant thing they were striving for, that fame thing that was going to make everything OK, that was going to make their lives bearable, that was going to fill them with ha-ha-happiness had happened, and the next day they woke up and they were still them. The disillusionment turned them howling and insufferable.12 ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New Your, N.Y., Penguin Books, 2016,2018), 172-73. (Continued see “centered on God”.)
