Sermon quotes on Destructive behavior
Milton
But what will not Ambition and Revenge Descend to? Who aspires must down as low
As high he sor’d, obnoxious first or last
To basest things.
Paradise Lost
Blaise Pascal
There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present. But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.
Pensées, (thought #425), trans.W. F. Trotter (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), 113.
Blaise Pascal
Silence. All human unhappiness comes from not knowing how to stay quietly in a room.
Herbert Schlossberg
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 end of a religious quest, one that seeks and ascribes ultimate meaning. Like all idolatries, it finds ultimate meaning in an aspect of the creation rather than in the Creator. And like all idolatries it finds outlet in destructive pathologies that wreck human lives.
Idols for Destruction (Nashville, Tenn.: Nelson, 1983), 88–89.
Leeana Tankersley
One of the ways we punish ourselves for not being more or better or thinner or stronger is by trying to squeeze ourselves—force ourselves, even—into all kinds of ill-fitting relationships. With other people, with ourselves, with our pants.
Breathing Room
E. James Wilder
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 has been harbored and protected—nursed instead of deliberated—ruining the life of the person or group that they are leading. Your desires are not your friends.
Renovated: God, Dallas Willard, and the Church That Transforms, NavPress, 2020.
Dallas Willard
If you don’t come apart for a while, you will come apart after a while.
Dallas Willard
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 needs; we are only at home in God. When we fall away from God, the desire for the infinite remains, but it is displaced upon things that will certainly lead to destruction.
Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23 (Nashville: Nelson, 2018).
W.B. Yeats
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Louis Zamperini
I think the hardest thing in life is to forgive. Hate is self destructive. If you hate somebody, you’re not hurting the person you hate, you’re hurting yourself. It’s a healing, actually, it’s a real healing…forgiveness.
St. Syncletice
Everything that is extreme is destructive. So do not suddenly throw away your armor, or you may be found unarmed in the battle and made an easy prisoner. Our body is like armor, our soul like the warrior. Take care of both and you will be ready for what comes.
Dallas Willard
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 needs; we are only at home in God. When we fall away from God, the desire for the infinite remains, but it is displaced upon things that will certainly lead to destruction.
Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23 (Nashville: Nelson, 2018).
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