A recent experience showed me just how powerful the trend is toward materialism. My three-year-old daughter and I were leaving the record store when I noticed she was carrying an unopened, unpurchased Sesame Street video cassette. In a firm voice I said, “Jessica, let’s put that back where we found it.”
“But I want it, Daddy.” Ever wise, I said truthfully, “But Daddy doesn’t have enough money to buy it.” Pleased with my loving management of another parental crisis, I was shocked by her reply. She gave me that patronizing look known to all parents of three-year-olds and said, “Daddy, just charge it, silly.”
… My little girl is picking up the values of the consumer age in which she lives.
—Dick Staub in World Christian (March/April 1988)
So little place for thanksgiving
It is probable that in most of us the spiritual life is impoverished and stunted because we give so little place to gratitude. It is more important to thank God for blessings received than to pray for them beforehand. For that forward-looking prayer, though right as an expression of dependence upon God, is still self-centered in part, at least, of its interest; there is something we hope to gain by our prayer. But the backward-looking act of thanksgiving is quite free from this. In itself it is quite selfless. Thus it is akin to love. All our love to God is in response to his love for us; it never starts on our side. “We love, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
—William Temple, from 3000 Quotations on Christian Themes
The wrong measuring stick
A little boy once told his mother that he was six feet tall. When she doubted the statement, he assured her that he had just measured himself. His calculations were right, but his ruler was not; it was only about six inches long. This is the sort of rule by which many Christians measure themselves.
—A. B. Simpson in A Larger Christian Life
Learning the hard way
When I was young I was sure of everything; in a few years, having been mistaken a thousand times, I was not half so sure of most things as I was before; at present, I am hardly sure of anything but what God has revealed to me.
—John Wesley, quoted in New Beginnings, by Evelyn Bence
Upwardly mobile
If you think you should be loved just because you are you, you missed your vocation. You should have been God.
—Benedict J. Groeschel in The Courage to Be Chaste
Basic responsibility
Renew your hope; love your family. Raise your children, don’t abandon them. Cats raise kittens. Dogs raise puppies. Eagles raise their eaglets. Surely man can raise his babies.
You have not earned the right not to raise your children! You have not earned the right to do less than your best! Though your knees may buckle sometimes, you never earn the right to surrender!
—Jesse Jackson, quoted by columnist Roger Simon (Los Angeles Times Syndicate, June 5, 1988)
Everything good is from God
Some people are appreciative by nature, but some are not; and it is these latter people who especially need God’s power to express thanksgiving. We should remember that every good gift comes from God and that He is (as the theologians put it) “the Source, Support, and End of all things.” The very breath in our mouths is the free gift of God.
Thankfulness is the opposite of selfishness. The selfish person says, “I deserve what comes to me! Other people ought to make me happy.” But the mature Christian realizes that life is a gift from God, and that the blessings of life come only from His bountiful hand.
—Warren W. Wiersbe in A Time to Be Renewed
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