Selfishness and Sovereignty: Common Idols for Men and Women

Last week, I wrote about idolatry, and I want to share more observations from my small group. If I were to generalize from our small sample, I’d say the men tend to idolize selfishness, while the women tend to idolize sovereignty—two “S” words to make it easy to remember.For me, my idol was my iPhone, which I traced back to a desire for laziness—to give my attention to my phone instead of to God and others, and to be selfish with how I use my time. Whether it’s an iPhone or other distractions, many of the men in my group struggled with an idol of selfishness.For the women, the common idol was sovereignty—the desire to be in control. Whether it was wanting things to go according to plan or planning everything in extreme detail, there was often disappointment when things fell out of their control.I’ll make some biblical connections with this in my next newsletter!