Counterfeit

Excerpt from Introduction to Tim Keller’s next book, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters.

A counterfeit god is anything so central and essen-
tial to your life that, should you lose it, your life would
feel hardly worth living. An idol has such a control-
ling position in your heart that you can spend most of
your passion and energy, your emotional and financial
resources, on it without a second thought. It can be
family and children, or career and making money, or
achievement and critical acclaim, or saving “face” and
social standing. It can be a romantic relationship, peer
approval, competence and skill, secure and comfortable
circumstances, your beauty or your brains, a great po-
litical or social cause, your morality and virtue, or even
success in the Christian ministry. When your meaning
in life is to fix someone else’s life, we may call it “co-
dependency” but it is really idolatry. An idol is whatever
you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, “If I have
that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I
have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure.” There
are many ways to describe that kind of relationship to
something, but perhaps the best one is worship.