desire on Greed

“Here’s the thing about wishes, the more you have, the more you want.”

All: “The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; they have eyes, but do not see; they have ears, but do not hear, nor is there any breat...

Preaching Commentary Summary of the Text Our lectionary text can be fairly easily broken into two major sections, with verses 29-34 concerned with John the Baptist testifying to Jesus’ ministry and...

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...

Holy God, we come to You confessing that we never have enough. We are never satisfied with what You have given us. We look at others with envy and we want more, even when our homes are overflowing wit...

My suspicion is that we have simply lost our way. I suspect that our material longings are more largely formed by our culture than by the Christ and that our spending habits do not differ radically fr...

Let temporal things serve your use, but the eternal be the object of your desire.

The church fathers consistently acknowledged the beauty and goodness of desire (e.g., Augustine, above), but they were not naive to the potential for desire to be bent by sin. They knew that our longi...

In one of the classic scenes from Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist, the misfortunate young orphan, Oliver, is stuck in a workhouse, laboring for long hours and getting barely enough gruel to keep h...

Satan, like a fisher, baits his hook according to the appetite of the fish.

Pastor: “Be not envious of evil men, nor desire to be with them, for their hearts devise violence, and their lips talk of trouble.” All: Forgive me, O God, for I have envied evil people who have mor...

Satan promises the best, but pays with the worst; he promises honor, and pays with disgrace; he promises pleasure, and pays with pain; he promises profit, and pays with loss; he promises life, and pay...

Father, we confess to boasting in success and security. We have denied you rather that desire you. We have cowered when we needed to be courageous. Jesus, we long to be people who follow you, no matte...

Desire alone, divorced from the will, ruins peoples’ lives time after time. In our public life and even among leaders of our denominations or church organizations, time after time we see a desire that...

Sin comes when we take a perfectly natural desire or longing or ambition and try desperately to fulfill it without God. Not only is it sin, it is a perverse distortion of the image of the Creator in u...

All of us live inside of an economy of desire.

May God make you “worthy of your calling, and fulfill every desire of goodness and work of faith with power, that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the g...

Lord, only You are significant enough to deserve glory. So why do we desire glory for ourselves? Lord, to know You is to have eternal life. So why are we satisfied with worldly wisdom and living in th...

In her thought-provoking book, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes the tension in listening to our deepest desires: some of them these desires are integral to our identity, but they a...

Desire is infinite partly because we were made by God, made for God, made to need God, and made to run on God. We can be satisfied only by the one who is infinite, eternal, and able to supply all our ...

"What is it you’re looking for in this endless quest? Tranquillity. You think if only you can acquire enough worldly goods, enough recognition, enough eminence, you will be free, there’ll b...

Desire is primal: to be human is to want

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.

We are people of desire. We want things. We long for things. It is primal to our nature to yearn. As Saint Augustine reflected, “The whole life of the good Christian is a holy longing. . . . That is o...

Desire haunts us. In its deepest sense, it is a God-given dimension of human identity. As such, desire is what powers all human spirituality. Yet at the same time, spirituality in Christianity and in ...

Let us love the Lord God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength. Let us love Him with all our understanding, powers, and fortitude. Let us offer to Him our every effort, ...

We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture…. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s de...

Everybody’s got a hungry heart.

What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.

All joy emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.