The opening line of Andre Agassi’s autobiography is one of the most honest sentences a professional athlete has ever put in print: “I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.”
What follows is the story of a boy who hit two thousand five hundred tennis balls a day from the age of three, driven by a father who built a ball machine in their Las Vegas backyard and left no room for any other future. Agassi turned pro at sixteen, won eight Grand Slams, and eventually ascended to the top of the rankings. He expected, as he later said, that becoming number one would be the moment his life finally made sense. Instead, it left him empty, and he spiraled until he knew something had to change.
I think about Agassi when I talk with people who have built successful lives and still find themselves restless in the middle of them. These are men and women who worked hard to achieve something good, who sacrificed and persevered and got the promotion, grew the company, raised the capital, built the platform, and earned the respect. And then, standing in the very life they had worked so hard to construct, they found themselves scanning the horizon for the next thing, unsettled by how few of their achievements had actually solved anything.
We don’t usually call this a spiritual problem. We call it drive, or ambition, or a healthy refusal to coast through life. And sometimes that’s exactly what it is. But sometimes the restlessness is telling us something else — something lee flattering and harder to face.
Idols That Don’t Look Like Idols: When Good Things Become Ultimate Things
The Apostle Paul, writing to Titus, includes a jarring line: “At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures” (Titus 3:3, NIV). The word that deserves attention here is enslaved. Most of us read that and picture someone who is obviously self-destructive and whose life has visibly come apart. But Paul is also describing decent, capable, disciplined people who are making reasonable choices, trying to build worthwhile lives, and yet have handed their hearts over to gifts instead of the Giver, and to created things instead of the Creator.
That’s what makes what the Bible calls idolatry so difficult to see. It rarely begins with something that is obviously evil. More often it begins with something that is genuinely good: work, family, success, influence, comfort, reputation, security, a dream, a relationship, or even a calling. The danger is not that these things matter deeply to us. The danger is that they become our everything.
The Factory That Never Shuts Down
Reformation pastor and theologian John Calvin wrote that the human heart is an idol factory, and he didn’t mean it as an insult aimed at pagans bowing before statues. He meant it as a sober description of what every one of us does, himself and all believers included, whenever God does not genuinely occupy the center of our hearts.
The idol factory never shuts down, and it doesn’t only produce crude or obviously shameful things. It also turns out sophisticated products, especially for people who have spent decades of their lives achieving and winning. Their idols rarely look like rage or drunkenness or reckless self-indulgence. They look more like accomplishment, legacy, relevance, control, being needed, being admired, and being the one who still has the chops.
They feel like virtues, which is precisely what makes them so hard to detect and so costly to surrender back to God.
Jesus gave us a way of discerning our idols: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21, NIV). Follow the trail and it will lead you to your preferred idols. It will take you into the idol factory that is your heart. What do you protect most fiercely? What would you sacrifice almost anything to keep? What loss would feel not just disappointing but devastating, not merely like a setback but like the collapse of your identity?
For many of us, if we’re honest, the answers to such questions point to some person, position, possession, outcome, or approval that is not God.
The Wrong Fuel
C.S. Lewis put it plainly in Mere Christianity: “God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other.” When you try to run an engine on the wrong fuel, it doesn’t just lose horsepower. It also corrodes from the inside, and the breakdown often comes gradually. You keep going, you keep producing, and you keep performing. From the outside, everything may still look good. But inside, something is wearing down.
What Idols Cost Us
Jonah said it from inside the belly of the fish, which was the extreme it took for God to get his attention: “Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs” (Jonah 2:8, NIV).
Idols don’t merely disappoint us, though they always end up doing so. They actually cost us something we were meant to have. The career hardens into a soul-sucking identity instead of remaining a life-giving calling. The reputation, guarded so carefully, becomes a merciless cage. The need for control is maintained at the expense of the very relationships that require honesty and trust.
We tell ourselves we are building something. But in a way we haven’t recognized yet, we have been shrinking.
The Identity Idols Cannot Give
Everything idols steal from us, Jesus gives back:
- Idols demand your sacrifice. Jesus sacrificed himself for you.
- Idols punish failure. Jesus forgives it.
- Idols keep raising the bar no matter how high you jump. Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28, NIV).
By the time most of us reach midlife and beyond, we’ve learned that the things we once leaned on for ultimate security can be taken from us: the positions we held, the health we assumed would last, the influence we enjoyed, the people we loved, and the capacities we once took for granted. Into that loss, Paul speaks a word that both humbles and liberates: “You are not your own; you were bought at a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20, NIV).
That may sound at first like a limit on our freedom, but once our hearts are tuned by faith, it becomes one of the most stabilizing promises in the New Testament. You belong to Another. Your worth was settled at the cross and is no longer subject to review by critics, admirers, rivals, followers, algorithms, or your own anxious inner voice.
The mercy of Jesus gives us an identity that success cannot improve and failure cannot erase.
Learning to Hold Things Loosely
During my graduate school years I went through a season of immobilizing anxiety, the kind that kept me from sleeping at night and wore me out in the daytime. A wise mentor gave me counsel that eventually cut through the noise. “Talk to yourself more than you listen to yourself,” he told me. When intrusive thoughts came knocking, I had to learn to challenge the lies beneath them with what I knew to be true. I had to stop treating every fear as if it deserved the microphone.
Philippians 1:21 became an anchor: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” (NIV).
That one verse gave me ground that remained firm when my circumstances invited panic. For the Christian, the long-term worst-case scenario is resurrection and everlasting life. As Lewis suggested, heaven will work backward and turn even our agony into glory. I was learning, slowly and imperfectly, to hold things with a more open hand before God — not to abandon my calling or relationships or responsibilities, but to loosen my grip on them enough that they would not become counterfeit gods.
The Restlessness That Wakes Us Up
Saint Augustine, who chased nearly everything this world has to offer before Christ found him, wrote that every human heart remains restless until it finds its rest in God. He was right, and the restlessness itself can become a mercy, if it wakes us up to our true home in the One who loved us and gave himself for us.
The Father Running Down the Road
The story Jesus tells in Luke 15 is familiar enough that we can hear it without being moved by it. A son demands his inheritance early, squanders everything, and ends up feeding pigs in a foreign country. When he finally comes to his senses, he begins the long walk home, rehearsing the speech he hopes will secure him a place among the hired hands.
But what he finds is not a father standing on the porch with crossed arms. He finds a father who has apparently been watching for him down the road. The father sees him while he is still a long way off, and he runs toward him. Before the son can finish his speech, the father embraces him, and no probation follows, no conditions to satisfy before mercy can begin. The robe, the ring, and the feast all arrive before the prodigal can get a single sentence out.
That posture, the father watching and running, is how God moves toward anyone who has been feeding on things that cannot nourish them and finally turns back toward home. The mercy of God is not reluctant or hesitant. He doesn’t greet returning sons and daughters with a lecture before surrounding them with an embrace.
He runs.
Ground That Cannot Be Pulled out From Under Us
Agassi eventually found his way to a life that was more durable. By his own account, the school he built in Las Vegas for underserved children gave him more genuine satisfaction than any trophy or Grand Slam achievement ever had. He had spent most of his life asking tennis to tell him who he was, and tennis, for all his brilliance at it, had nothing to say to him. Only when he stopped asking the game to carry that weight did room open up for something better.
Most of us have spent long stretches of adult life doing a version of the same thing. We ask a career to tell us who we are. We ask success to tell us we are enough. We ask the approval of people we admire to stand in for a love that isn’t contingent on our latest result. We ask good things to become our ultimate things, and then we wonder why they begin to let us down and make us hurt.
The invitation of Jesus is not to stop caring about our work or the people we love or the responsibilities we carry. That would be to kill our hearts, and God wants our hearts to be alive. The invitation is to stop asking any of these things to bear an ultimate weight they were never made to bear, and to discover, perhaps for the first time or perhaps all over again, what it is like to stand on solid ground that cannot be pulled out from under us.
Jim Elliot, the missionary and martyr, wrote: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.”
That is a different kind of life, and the good news is that it is never too late to come home to it.
Jesus is not waiting for you to fix yourself before coming to him. He is already running in your direction. Mercy has come looking for you; all you need to do is receive it.
The Bible tells us that God’s mercies are new every morning. It’s not just poetic language; it’s a reflection of who he is. His mercy is personal. It pursues you.
In The Mercy King: How the Kindness of Jesus Heals Your Sin, Shame, and Weakness, you’ll encounter Jesus as he actually is — gentle, welcoming, and full of mercy — and discover that it’s in your weakness, not your strength, that he draws near to heal, forgive, and make you whole.
Scott Sauls is founder of Healthy Leaders, Inc. and The Sycamore Community, equipping leaders to live with honor, purpose, and emotional health from a faith perspective. For thirty years, Scott pastored flagship churches in New York City and Nashville, planted churches in Kansas City and St. Louis, and taught preaching at the master’s level. The author of seven books, he also hosts the Scott Sauls podcast.
