1 John 5:21 "Little children, keep yourself from idols."

This is the last line of John's first letter, and what a good last line it is! Earlier, John says "We know that we are of God, and the whole world is in the power of the evil one." John 5:19. The evil one is constantly, unceasingly, presenting idols to us and trying to turn our attention to them and from God. He never tires, and he never stops. He plays on our emotions, our weaknesses, our temptations, and even on our desire to do good. And we are like little children, as John calls us, so easily distracted and led astray.

Absolutely anything can be an idol. Anything that we allow to take more of our time, energy, focus, or sacrifice than we give to God is an idol. Anything that leads us to break God's laws in service of it is an idol. Our family can be an idol, our job can be an idol, our volunteer work can be an idol, politics can be an idol, leisure can be an idol, technology can be an idol, fear can be an idol, lust can be an idol, our sexuality can be an idol, and the list goes on, practically infinitely.

As we tell ourselves we are worshiping God properly, but devote more and more of our time and attention to these other things, we come to sacrifice our relationship with God for our idols. We tell ourselves, for example, that lies told in favor of our political party are acceptable, because only they can save the country; we tell ourselves that contraception is acceptable because our sexual relationship with our spouse is very important; we tell ourselves that ostracizing and demonizing people, even depriving them of medical care and the right to earn a living, for not taking a vaccine that we allowed ourselves to be convinced was the world's "savior" is acceptable; we tell ourselves that volunteer work can take the place of our Sunday Mass obligation, etc., etc. In each case, look at to whom or what the sacrifice is being offered. Is it to God? Does He want people ostracized and demonized? Does He want us to treat our sexuality as an end in and of itself? Does He want us to lie?

We must always look to God's law and its bedrock of love, and ask ourselves if what we are doing is in service of that (and remember, if we love God, we will keep His commandments (John 14:15)). If we are breaking His laws, for any reason, we are not loving Him nor our fellow man. We are instead pursuing idolatry. The devil is gleeful as he watches us volunteer instead of going to Mass, or do any of the other things that we think are good, and often are, while disobeying God.

Idolatry can be as overt as worshiping a golden calf (and, unfortunately, we are seeing more of things like that now), but it very often is much more subtle and insidious. We must be wary of it by always testing our motivations and our actions against God's law. That way, we can keep ourselves from idols, as John exhorts.