Sermon quotes on Materialism
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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 is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
The Brothers Karamazov
Epictetus
Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.
Thomas à Kempis
Let temporal things be in the use, eternal things in the desire.
The Imitation of Christ
Campbell Morgan
Persecution was the devil’s second-best tactic. His best tactic is materialism, and we in the West have been sleepwalkers in our faith for too long, forgetting in the midst of a life of material ease and manic busyness that we are even in a spiritual battle.
Quoted in Ronald Boyd-MacMillan, Faith That Endures (Grand Rapids: Revell, 2006), p. 6.
John Piper
Who do you think has the deepest, most satisfying joy in life, the man who pays $140 for a fortieth-floor suite downtown and spends his evening in the half-lit, smoke-filled lounge impressing strange women with ten-dollar cocktails, or the man who chooses the Motel 6 by a vacant lot of sunflowers and spends his evening watching the sunset and writing a love letter to his wife?
Desiring God (Portland, Ore.: Multnomah, 1987), p.157.
Anna Quindlen
There was a period when I believed stuff meant something. I thought that if you had matching side chairs and a sofa that harmonized and some beautiful lamps to light them you would have a home, that elegance signaled happiness.
Leonard Ravenhill
Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
Charles Spurgeon
Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.”
Morning and Evening, Based on the English Standard Version
John Steinbeck
A strange species we are, we can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick.
Letter to Adelai Stevenson
Paul David Tripp
The minute you hear a sermon on materialism, you’re glad somebody else is there to hear it.
Robert Wuthnow
Materialism is not fundamentally an economic problem, but a cultural one… a spiritual issue. It runs to the depths of our souls, and, for this reason, needs to be understood less in terms of budgets or fiscal cycles and more in terms of where we locate the sacred, of where we search for meaning and transcendence, and of how we think about justice, equality, and the future of our world.
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