finances on The Material World

Seeing that wealth is neither to be avoided nor praised but rather stewarded wisely and generously, how should we think about material wealth creation? This is an important question worthy of thoughtf...

Members of the Natomo family sit on the flat roof of their mud house in Mali, Africa, posing for their early morning photograph. Their earthly belongings are arrayed in front of them. Two kettles, pla...

Material wealth is either a window through which we see God or a mirror in which we see ourselves.

Generosity is not strictly for those who have material abundance. Because Oseola McCarty recognized this truth, the world is a better place. Born in 1908 in rural Mississippi, she quit school after si...

An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, whil...

We care more for our possessions with which we hope to make our way in the world than with our thoughts and dreams which tell us who we are in the world.

Material success is no measure of spiritual health. Nor is apparent affluence any criterion of real godliness. And it is well for us that the Shepherd of our souls sees through this exterior and takes...

The three immutable facts: You own stuff. You will die. Someone will get that stuff.

Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

Hold material goods and wealth on a flat palm and not in a clenched fist.

The world asks, "What does a man own?" Christ asks, "How does he use it?"

The soul is a spiritual thing, riches are of an earthly extract, and how can these fill a spiritual substance? How man does thirst after the world, but, alas, it falls short of his expectation. It can...

A social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid the creation of a people whose souls are superficial and whose daily life is captured by sentimentalities. They will ask questi...

Gregg Easterbrook wrote about this in a 2003 book called The Progress Paradox. Easterbrook’s subtitle was How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. He describes how affluent we have become—​​​bett...

After striking a large deposit of gold, two miners in the Klondike gold rush were so excited about unearthing more and more gold each day that they neglected to store up provisions for the winter. The...

Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that is "finding his place in it," while really it is finding its place in him.

Work supplies the physical, psychological, artistic, and religious needs of communities extending to the ends of the earth. Furthermore, through work, we create abundance out of which we help meet the...

Everything in the universe is all jumbled together. So God begins to do some creative separating: he separates light from darkness, day from night, water from land, the sea creatures from the land cru...

In her engaging treatment, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes both the beauty and pain of seeing our own sinful nature: It is often true that once we are made to see, we don’t like w...

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

The common expression that describes such a value system as “the pursuit of the almighty dollar” is soundly based in the recognition that the exaltation of possessions to the level of ultimacy is the ...

Lord, You are a great and holy God, and you have asked us to pursue you as the object of our worship and devotion. But Lord, we have fallen short of what you ask of us, we are a sinful people. We have...

There has been a paradigm shift going on in neighborhoods in the United States since the end of WWII. For decades before the 1940s, neighborhoods were places where people were known and were active. W...

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfac...

For many of us, living in excess doesn’t express itself in extremities. It doesn’t translate to tying $4,000 to balloons and releasing it into the air. It doesn’t have to amount to owning six houses (...

We should live more simply and give more generously because Heaven is our home. The single greatest deterrent to giving and to living more simply is the illusion that this world is our home.

Westerners have a complicated relationship with money. We don’t like it when wealthy people receive special treatment or look down on the rest of us as riffraff. But many (can we say most?) of us aspi...

Let us pray. Almighty, powerful, creator God So often we think we know best. We confess to you our sin alongside the sin of all humanity. We have tried to master creation rather than care for it. We ...

My dear King, my own King, without pride, without sin, You created the whole world, eternal, victorious King. King of the mysteries, You existed before the elements, before the waters covered the ocea...

In this context (Matthew 6)…storing up treasures focuses particularly on the compassionate use of material resources to meet others’ physical and spiritual needs, in keeping with the priorities of God...