poor on Abundance

Leader: How good it is to sing praises to our God! People: Great are You, Lord and mighty in power. You understand everything about each one of us. You heal the brokenhearted and bind up our wounds....

Deacon or other leader With all our heart and with all our mind, let us pray to the Lord, saying "Lord, have mercy." For the peace from above, for the loving-kindness of God, and for the ...

Gracious God, in Christ Jesus, you teach us to love our neighbors but instead we build dividing walls of hostility. You show us how to love one another as sisters and brothers but instead we hide from...

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

Hence, whatever certain people have in superabundance is due, by natural law, to the purpose of succoring the poor.

AIM Commentary Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? "Hear O Israel..." The Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9) commands the Israelites to love the Lord their God with h...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? "Hear O Israel..." The Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9) commands the Israelites to love the Lord their God with heart, soul, and m...

Poor and content is rich, and rich enough.

I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.

Contentment makes much of little; greed makes little of much. Contentment is the poor man’s riches and desire the rich man’s poverty.

The world says: "You have needs — satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This ...

We don’t believe our ability to bless others might result from our poverty. Our need might be the thing that most blesses the body of Christ.

Surrender your poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers y...

Idolatry is when you become the source of your own joy. Poverty of spirit is a wonderful thing.

Gracious God, too often we believe that our hard work should earn us comfort, conveniences, and control. Too often, we rely on our own abilities to craft and maintain a life independent from You. Forg...

There is a helplessness in poverty that precedes the move of God in our lives because we understand an aspect of grace that so many miss: we do nothing to earn it. When we understand this, all becomes...

I am mended by my sickness, enriched by my poverty and strengthened by my weakness…. What fools are we, then, to frown upon our afflictions! These, how crabbed soever, are our best friends. They are n...

In a world of greed and consumerism, the church ought to be a community of generosity and selflessness. In a host empire that is committed to marginalizing the poor, resisting the place of women, caus...

If our goods are not available to the community, they are stolen goods.

There is an old story of a king who went into the village streets to greet his subjects. A beggar sitting by the roadside eagerly held up his alms bowl, sure that the king would give handsomely. Inste...

[A] rock-star preaches capitalism. Wow. Sometimes I hear myself and I just can’t believe it. But commerce is real. . . . Aid is just a stopgap. Commerce—entrepreneurial capitalism—takes more people ou...

One Sunday, an usher brought to me an offering plate holding a bacon biscuit that a college student had deposited in the morning offering. A little note attached said, “Silver and gold have I none, bu...

The claim here is not that the poor are inherently more righteous or sanctified than the rich. There is no place in the Bible that indicates that poverty is a desirable state or that material things a...

[The Poor in Spirit have] a complete absence of pride, a complete absence of self-assurance and self-reliance.

Many years ago, I watched a documentary on the remarkable ministry of Mother Teresa among the poverty-stricken people of Calcutta. At one stage there was a moving exchange between her and the commenta...

It is nothing, then, that we can produce; it is nothing that we can do in ourselves. It is just this tremendous awareness of our utter nothingness as we come face-to-face with God.

Father God, too often we show preference to those who appear to have it all together, to those whom we consider complete: the self-motivated, self-made, and self-sufficient. We honor the rich and look...

With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one bu...

In 2021, Americans gave an impressive $326.87 billion to charity. But when that’s weighed against Americans’ 2021 income of $23.617 trillion, that works out to just 1.4 percent of our earnings.

I was teaching an English class in a high-rise apartment complex full of low-income families in Minneapolis—mostly immigrant and refugees from East Africa. The tenants’ association paid for me to come...