This is Scott Anderson, CEO for Desiring God.

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Thanks for your part in helping us freely share the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.

This week, we are joined on the Aspetra John podcast with Dr. Richard Lentz, who is the vice president for academic affairs and the Dean of the main campus at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary,

just a short drive north of Boston.

And Dr. Lentz is also the author of a book that releases this winter titled Identity and Ideometry, the image of God and its inversion,

which is published in Don Carson's Silver Series, New Studies in Biblical Theology.

So implicitly, Dr. Lentz, where we ended yesterday is that an idol is something that is not God and something that we cannot imagine living without.

Is that right?

That's exactly right. And it often points at and beyond itself to deeper needs you're trying to gain deeper significance and census security that are there.

And so often significance and safety are the two dilemmas we face with idols, idols in every age.

How do we gain security, safety in a world which threatens us and it threatens us in different ways? And how do we gain significance?

And I think the smart phone just to use that again as the anecdote tells us that we are significant if we are connected to enough other people's lives.

But what we find is being connected to so many different people's lives, we gain actually a greater sense of insignificance.

And our safety is apparently or allegedly granted here because we are connected with lots of other people. That's our safety net, if you will.

And when you pull that out, you begin to say to yourself, how will I be granted security or safety without this? And that's the dynamic of feeling a loss when you take the idol out.

Yeah, that's a key definition. Yesterday I mentioned a study that says that the average college student uses their phone nine hours a day.

So one of these college students comes up to you and wants to know how he or she can tell if their smart phone is an idol.

What are the diagnostic tests, the questions that you would put forward?

Right, a couple of them. The immediate thing is what would you lose if you didn't have it? Second would be what role does it play, honestly.

And third, how big of a presence is it? What's its function in your life?

And so again, those are questions that are sometimes hard to answer by yourself.

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