The Idol of Popularity

 By Tim Challies - Posted at @Challies:

One of the realities of being a writer is that much of what a writer does is easily quantified. If your writing is online, you can get minute-by-minute reports and updates to see exactly how many people have read it or engaged with it. If you write books, you can get royalty reports to tell you exactly how many books have been sold with your name on the cover. It’s a very numbers-driven field, and necessarily so.

It’s easy, then, for writers to make popularity into a kind of idol. How can you know that you’ve made popularity into an idol? Perhaps you find yourself thinking that happiness or validation is just a few thousand clicks away. Or perhaps you are battling feelings of worthlessness and believe that value is in some way tied to book sales. Or perhaps you think God’s favor is necessarily displayed in more books sold rather than fewer. In these ways and others, you can make an idol out of popularity.

I can speak with first-hand experience to this because it is an idol I once had to fight. I had to take radical action against it. I had to take radical action because this idol was leading to jealousy and envy. I realized that I didn’t just want to be popular, I wanted to be more popular —more popular than someone else. I compared myself with others and somehow saw their success as challenging or invalidating my own. I realized the sin of envy had begun to root in my heart. When I spotted it, I was alarmed by it, disgusted by it, and realized I needed to put it to death.

For those tempted by the idol of popularity, whether in writing or any other field, here are a few matters to consider.

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