Shrink-wrapped by sin?

"What's wrong with me?" I asked my wife as I lay down to sleep after a day of grouchy-demandingness. The challenges of the day had exposed the idolatrous loves of my heart in ugly ways. What was wrong with me? Most fundamentally, what was wrong was the disease called 'self-deification'. King Jesus isn't good enough for me. I wanted to be king.

In his recent book, A Quest for More, Paul Tripp takes us on a biblically-guided tour of our self-deifying hearts and gives us the ammunition needed to fight our self-enthroning compulsions so that Jesus alone can take His rightful place on the throne in our lives. Here's a taste from the banquet table Paul spreads for us as he spells out just how fundamentally the Fall has warped our original relational orientation:

"Sin causes fundamental changes in the 'molecules' of my heart. No longer is my heart driven by a deep-seated love for God. No longer is my heart motivated by a genuine care for others. No longer do I carry around a sense of responsibility for the surrounding, created world. No longer is every decision I make shaped by a clear sense of what is morally right and morally wrong. No longer is everything I do shaped by joyful and thankful worship. The DNA of sin is selfishness, and it shrinks the size of my universe to the size of one. Sin creates the ultimate shrink dynamic. It causes all of us in some way to shrink our lives to the size of our lives. Sin shrinks my motivation, zeal, desire, care and concern to the contours of my life. In the shrunken kingdom of self, there is no functional room for God or others. It is humbling, but spiritually essential, to admit that sin has shrink-wrapped us all." (p. 86)

In your quest to let Jesus be Lord of your life, this book can help greatly.