Grace Quotes

(Octavius Winslow, "Christ and the Christian in Temptation" 1877) Of all the sins common to our fallen nature, God has the most signally marked that of Idolatry, or False Worship. Man is by nature an idolater. His sinful mind, being alienated from God, seeks some object of worship other than the true and living God. The 'renewed' man is not entirely exempt from this sin. Hence the exhortation of the Apostle addressed to the early Christians, and in these last days addressed to us: "Little children, keep yourselves from idols." "My dearly beloved, flee from idolatry." Surely, it was not the gross and senseless idolatry of the heathens to which the Apostles thus refer; from this many of those saints to whom they wrote had already been delivered; but to other idols and other worship, less palpable and degrading, but not less superstitious or offensive to God. The worship of SELF is a natural and fearful form of idolatry. It is an innate and never entirely eradicated principle of our nature, but clings to us to the very last of life. Alas! the holiest and the best of us want to be something, and to do something, when in reality we are nothing, and can do nothing. We walk in our religious life, for the most part, upon stilts; always appearing in the eyes of others taller than we really are! But real greatness and true humility have ever been in alliance with entire abnegation of SELF. Who can stand before the cross and gaze upon the Creator of all worlds impaled between two criminals, Himself dying as the chief, and not shrink into his own nothingness, bewailing that he should ever have been betrayed into the folly and the sin of burning the incense of idolatry before the wretched idol, SELF! Beware of SELF idolatry! It is the most insidious, hateful, and degrading form of idolism to which the soul can be subjected.