What Do You Worship?
The question Easter forces on every man
After my divorce, my net worth was cut in half. I rebuilt it in eighteen months through crypto. I should’ve taken that money off the table and put it into traditional investments. The kind that would’ve generated a solid five-figure monthly income without touching the principal. Secure and stable. Done.
Instead, the thoughts came.
If I could just double from here, we’re talking supercars. Yachts. Maybe a plane.
Here’s what’s ugly about that. I’d heard those exact thoughts before. Twenty years earlier, at the top of the dot-com bubble. I lost a pile of money back then and swore to myself I’d recognize the fever if it ever came back.
I didn’t recognize a thing. The fever walked right past every lesson I’d learned and sat down at the controls like it owned the place.
I held all the way down. By the grace of God, I ended up back where I started instead of worse. But that season taught me something I couldn’t learn from a book or a podcast or a men’s group.
Greed was the symptom. Worship was the disease.
Most men would never use that word in reference to themselves. Worship is for churches and cults and people who cry during songs. It’s not for men trying to rebuild after their life blew up.
But worship isn’t about singing. Worship is about whatever you give final authority over your life. Whatever tells you what you’re worth. Whatever you sacrifice for without being asked, or fear losing more than anything else.
Every man worships: his bank account, his title, the approval of others, his body in the mirror, the grudge he won’t put down. Those are altars. He built them whether he meant to or not.
Paul said it plainly two thousand years ago:
They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator
(Romans 1:25)
That verse isn’t about pagans bowing to statues. It’s about men like me, staring at a portfolio balance and asking it to tell me I’m significant.
If you want to know what you worship, don’t look at what you say you believe. Look at what ruins your peace when it’s threatened.
If approval is your god, every criticism feels fatal.
If control is your god, uncertainty feels unbearable.
If your body is your god, aging feels like dying.
If resentment is your god, forgiveness feels like losing.
If money is your god, you never have enough.
These aren’t bad habits. These are altars. And every man has built one whether he meant to or not.
The thing about false gods is they’ll accept your sacrifice. They’ll take your time, your sleep, your health, your marriage, your kids, your integrity. They’ll take everything you put on the altar. They just can’t give you anything back when you actually need it.
When the career collapses, it doesn’t come looking for you. When the marriage dies, the identity you built on it dies with it. When the money disappears (and I can tell you firsthand that it can disappear in a calendar quarter) it doesn’t bleed for you. It doesn’t fight for you. It doesn’t raise you back up.
In the end, every false god delivers the same thing: Nothing.
As he came from his mother’s womb he shall go again, naked as he came, and shall take nothing for his toil that he may carry away in his hand.
Ecclesiastes 5:15
You don’t need anyone to tell you these things can’t save you. You already know. You’ve watched them prove it. The harder question is why you’re still serving them.
Easter is the day every dead god gets measured against a living Christ.
Christianity stands or falls on a dead man walking out of His grave. Not a metaphor or an inspirational idea or a seasonal sentiment. A historical claim that the tomb was empty. That the One who walked out of it is still alive.
Every man in the second half has already been to the altar of something that promised it would be enough. And it wasn’t. You went back, and it wasn’t—again. It never is. Easter says there’s a reason nothing else has held: because nothing else was supposed to.
Just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may walk in newness of life
(Romans 6:4)
That’s not a greeting card. That’s the offer. The man that life has emptied is not beyond the reach of the Christ who emptied the tomb. But he has to stop kneeling at an altar that can’t answer him.
I still have investments that could pay off well. The money isn’t the difference. The difference is what I’d do with it. I don’t think about the baller lifestyle anymore. I think about who I could help. What I could build that serves people instead of proving something about me.
That shift didn’t come from maturity or self-discipline or getting older and wiser. It came from the center changing. The thing I worship changed, and everything downstream from it changed with it.
You already know how to worship. You’ve been doing it your whole life. The discipline, the sacrifice, the devotion. It’s all there. You’ve proven that beyond any doubt.
The only question Easter asks is whether you’ve given all of that to something that will still be standing when everything else you built your life on is in the ground.
Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.
He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.
Great read Vic! Happy Easter!
Writing that makes me reflect without the preaching. Good job!