Spiritual Poverty

Ree is a single mom trying to navigate the rising cost of living, Ree has been feeling "stressed and upset" most days, with the battle only intensified by personal issues. Ree told Yahoo News Australia she was feeling anxious at the prospect of making ends meet before visiting her local Woolworths store.

However, two strangers' patience while she discarded several items at the checkout because she "couldn't afford" them truly made all the difference. She said, “The lady behind me asked the cashier to ring up everything I had put back because she was going to pay for them for me.”

After thanking the stranger and explaining that payment wasn't necessary, Ree was told the stranger was insistent on buying the discarded items for her. "I explained my situation to her and she said she knew how it felt to not be able to pay for things in the past."

In a time of emotional strife, the stranger's kind act has had a profound impact on Ree—one that she struggles to articulate. When asked what it meant to her, she simply replied with one word: "Everything. From the bottom of my heart thank you for making a truly awful situation so much easier in the moment. I walked out crying."

Possible Preaching Angle:

All of us are spiritually bankrupt with no way to pay our debt of sin. Jesus stepped up and fully paid the price for us (Eph. 1:7; 1 Pet. 2:24; 1 John 2:2).

More Americans believe their home is inhabited by someone or something that isn’t a living being. A study from the company Vivint found that nearly half of the thousand surveyed homeowners believed that their house was haunted. Another survey of 1,000 people found similar results, with 44 percent of respondents saying that they’ve lived in a haunted house.

One researcher offers the following explanations for this phenomenon. Haunted houses can be “a way to connect to the past or a sense of enchantment in the everyday world. [Younger generations in particular] might be searching for meaning in new places. If the modern world they live in isn’t providing food for the soul … it’s not hard to figure out that younger people will search elsewhere for that and find the idea of an alternate world — of ghosts, aliens, et cetera — to be enticing to explore.”

Another researcher claims that the pandemic also played a role in society’s relationship with houses and ghosts. The presence of death in our culture increased, igniting a desire for evidence of an afterlife for some people. “Think of all the sudden, and often not-sufficiently-ritually-mourned deaths during COVID. Many times, people lost loved ones with no last contact, no funeral.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

When people stop attending church or believing in Christianity they don’t stop seeking “spiritual experiences.” The spiritual hunger is still there.

Death abounded in America in 2020 and 2021. According to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 570,000 more people died in 2020 than in 2019, with about 350,000 of those attributable to COVID-19. Another 350,000 people died from the coronavirus by the fall of 2021, bringing the death total to 700,000 and counting (as of March 18, 2022 over 969k deaths are attributable to COVID).

When roughly that same number died over the four years of the Civil War, it had a widespread impact on American culture. Historians say changes included increased attention to cemeteries, the rise in the importance of family photographs, and rapid growth in the popularity of practices of spiritualism, a new religious movement that claimed to help people communicate with the dead.

What impact today’s pandemic deaths will have on American culture remains to be seen. But one shift is notable now: The percentage of people age 40 and older who say that religion is “very important” in the funeral of a loved one has gone up for the first time in a decade.

The importance of religion at funerals jumped 10 percentage points in 2020. It went up another 2 points in 2021. Most Americans still don’t think religion is important at funerals, but a growing number are feeling a new need for it.

Sarah Jones, an atheist raised in a strict evangelical home, wrote about this experience:

I could plant a flag for my grandfather . . . but the gesture feels thin. I don’t know what exactly I would want from a memorial—whether it’s catharsis or meaning or something else altogether. I thought several hundred times this year, Maybe I should go to church.

Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympian of all time, but what’s left to accomplish after you’ve proved you’re the best in the world? In the 2020 documentary “The Weight of Gold,” Phelps takes a long look at life after the Olympics and how he was not alone in experiencing depression after winning it all.

“The Weight of Gold” features interviews with Olympians who discuss going their entire lives without normal childhoods, without outside skills or interests beyond their sport, without any plans after the Olympics, and whose entire lives have been defined by a rapid, 40-second race. Phelps says, “We’re just so lost. A good 80 percent, maybe more, develop a post-Olympic depression. I thought of myself as just a swimmer, and not a human being, and that’s where I thought, why don’t I just end it all?”

Brett Rapkin directed “The Weight of Gold,” and Phelps is just one subject of the film that also includes interviews with many Olympians including Steve Holcomb (who died from a combination of alcohol and sleeping pills in 2017), and Jeret Peterson (who died by suicide in 2011).

Peter Townshend is a singer, songwriter, and co-founder and leader of the rock band The Who. For over 50 years the band has been widely considered as one of the most influential and important rock bands of all time, selling over 100 million records worldwide. In an interview in The New York Times on his life and accomplishments, Townshend is honest about the meaning, or lack of, of his life’s work and the work of other notable rock musicians:

The massive question was: Who are we? What is our function? What is our worth? Are we disenfranchised, or are we able to take society over and guide it? Are we against the establishment? Are we being used by it? Are we artists, or are we entertainers?

Townshend admits that rock music has provided no substantial answers to the needs and questions of recent generations:

Rock ’n’ roll was a celebration of congregation. A celebration of irresponsibility. But we don’t have the brains to answer the question of what it was that rock ’n’ roll tried to start and has failed to finish.

What we were hoping to do was to create a system by which we gathered in order to hear music that in some way served the spiritual needs of the audience. It didn’t work out that way. We abandoned our parents’ church, and we haven’t replaced it with anything solid and substantial. But I do still believe in it. I do believe, for example, that if I were to go to an Ariana Grande concert — this iconic girl who … rose up after the massacre at her concert in Manchester with dignity and beauty — that I would feel something of that earlier positivity and sense of community.

Imagine that you've decided to go sailing. The problem is that you know next to nothing about sailing. So you to the store and you purchase several books to find out what's involved. You carefully read them and then you talk to a veteran sailor who answers questions for you. The next day, you rent a sailboat. You examine it closely to make certain that everything needed for a successful sailing experience is present and in good working order. Then, you take your boat out onto the lake. Your excitement is at a fever pitch, though you're also afraid. But you follow the instructions you've read and the counsel received from the experience sailor, and you launch your boat into the water. You carefully monitor each step and hoist the sail.

At that precise moment you learn a crucial lesson. You can study sailing. You might even be able to build a sailboat. You can seek from the wisest and most veteran of sailors. You can cast your boat onto the most beautiful of lakes under a bright and inviting sun. You can successfully hoist the sail. But—and this is a big "but"—only God can make the wind blow!

Possible Preaching Angles: Sam Storms adds, "You and I can study the Bible…. We can orchestrate a worship service according to biblical guidelines. We can do everything that lies in the power of a Christian man or woman. But only the Spirit can make the wind blow.

On January 24, 1975, the world-renowned pianist Keith Jarrett played in front of a live audience in the Cologne opera house. The album for the concert recording was released in the autumn of 1975 to critical acclaim, and went on to become the best-selling solo album in jazz history, and the all-time best-selling piano album.

But all of this didn't come easy. Jarrett had originally requested the use of a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial concert grand piano for the performance. But there was some confusion by the opera house staff and instead they found another Bösendorfer piano backstage—a much smaller baby grand used for rehearsals—and placed it on the stage. According Vera Brandes, the concert's organizer, the substitute piano was "was completely out of tune, the black notes in the middle didn't work, the pedals stuck. It was unplayable." "Keith played a few notes," recalls Brandes. "Then [Jarrett's producer] played a few notes. They didn't say anything. They circled the instrument several times and then tried a few keys. Then after a long silence, [the producer] came to me and said, 'If you don't get another piano, Keith can't play tonight.'"

Despite the obstacles, Jarrett decided to go ahead with the concert. The minute he played the first note, everybody knew it was magic. The audience hushed into awed silence. That night's performance began with a simple chiming series of notes, then quickly gained complexity. Standing up, sitting down, moaning, writhing, Jarrett didn't hold back in any way as he pummeled the unplayable piano to produce something unique. One music critic noted, "Mr. Jarrett turned the banal and familiar into something gorgeous and mysterious."

In an interview with Rolling Stone, singer-songwriter-guitarist J. Tillman (now known as "Father John Misty") was asked: "You were raised in an evangelical Christian household. How did that affect you?"

Misty responded, "I remember asking my Sunday-school teacher who made God. It was the first time I ever saw someone's eyes glaze over and robotically recite something. She said, 'God's always been.' For the Western world, enlightenment is having an airtight answer to a question. That to me is the quickest way to make yourself absurd. I think certainty is completely grotesque."

Misty was then asked: Was there anything valuable about your evangelical upbringing? Misty replied, "I was promised redemption and forgiveness and salvation over and over, but it never manifested in any meaningful way. It was like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. There's something about my writing that keeps looking to that problem."

The Walk is the 2015 motion picture, and true story, about high-wire artist Philippe Petit. In 1974 he fulfilled his dream of walking between the World Trade Center towers, but in an early scene from the film he's in a Big Top circus in France tying a rope to a beam. Philippe says, "So [my mentor] Papa Rudy let me travel with his troupe. Of course I never did any performance. But any time the big top was empty, I would practice on the wire."

In the next scene, Philippe is high up just under the tent's ceiling and balancing himself on a wire with a pole. Papa Rudy enters the tent and looks up at Philippe, who was walking carefully but confidently across the thin wire. He hesitates as he is about to reach the platform and then takes a more assertive forward step. But suddenly Philippe and his wire start shaking precariously. He falls to the side, grabbing on to the wire with both hands, barely avoiding falling to his death as the pole plummets to the ground.

As he hangs onto the wire with both hands, the ground a great distance below, he slowly works his way to the platform. Breathing heavily and making his way down the ladder he faces Papa Rudy who tells him, "Most wire walkers, they die when they arrive. They think they have arrived, but they're still on the wire. If you have three steps to do, and you take those steps arrogantly, if you think you are invincible, you're going to die."

Editor's Note: This scene starts at Chapter 5 at 25:29 and runs to 27:02.

Writing in The Harvard Business Review, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a CEO and business professor, had some surprising conclusions about self-confidence and leadership. Thomas wrote:

There is no bigger cliché in business psychology than the idea that high self-confidence is key to career success. It is time to debunk this myth. In fact, low self-confidence is more likely to make you successful. After many years of researching and consulting on talent, I've come to the conclusion that self-confidence is only helpful when it's low. Sure, extremely low confidence is not helpful: it inhibits performance by inducing fear, worry, and stress, which may drive people to give up sooner or later. But just-low-enough confidence can help you in the following three ways:

1. Lower self-confidence makes you pay attention to negative feedback and be self-critical.
2. Lower self-confidence can motivate you to work harder and prepare more.
3. Lower self-confidence reduces the chances of coming across as arrogant or being deluded.

Of course Christians would add a fourth and most important benefit for low-enough self-confidence—it helps us put our ultimate confidence in the Living God. But Christians can agree with this article's conclusion: "In brief, if you are serious about your goals, [low-enough] self-confidence can be your biggest ally to accomplish them. … It is therefore time to debunk the myth: High self-confidence isn't a blessing, and low self-confidence is not a curse—in fact, it is the other way around."

Every year there are a few shocking celebrity deaths in the world of entertainment that create brief searches for meaning among their fans. After one recent high-profile example, movie critic Roger Friedman expressed his bewilderment that actor Heath Ledger, while seemingly at the peak of his career, died from a drug overdose in his Manhattan apartment in January 2008. Friedman wrote, "It's hard for the average movie fan, including yours truly, to totally grasp why a guy like Heath Ledger—drop-dead handsome, popular, incredibly talented—could be depressed about anything."

It's hard to grasp if you think image-bearers of God could ever find meaning in good looks and fame. But clearly those things are not enough for an image-bearer of God. We want him, and all our wonder moments are a search for God.

When asked by GQ magazine about the best advice he has to offer, actor Nick Nolte said,

This is going to sound strange, but my best advice is to accept losing. It's the grandest thing you can do. We as a culture think it's a terrible thing to lose, but it's only through losing that we grow. We don't grow by winning. … But our culture glorifies winning, so to accept losing is the opposite of everything we're taught.

Sometimes our greatest losses can become our most profound teachers. … I'm not saying you should strive to lose or that you have to lose all the time. It's great to win. But a fair amount of losing is what makes us progress as people. You learn acceptance and humility. You learn how to find happiness.

Joyce Carol Oates, an American novelist, and her husband, Raymond Smith, also a writer, met while attending graduate school in 1960. They got married and spent 47 years side by side. In 2008 Smith entered a hospital with pneumonia, and it took his life. His death was sudden, before his wife could get to him.

In her memoir, A Widow's Story, Oates describes how she went through her husband's things following his death and discovered an unfinished novel. In the notes for this work, she found when he was in a hospital prior to their marriage and he fell in love with a fellow patient. To Oates' surprise, she also discovered that a psychiatrist had diagnosed her husband's condition by calling him a "love-starved" individual. She was shocked and even disillusioned. She had been close to her husband for years and never knew that he was starved for love. Oates wrote, "It should not fill me with unease to learn this, after Ray's death, and so many years after it happened. But he hadn't told me! It was his secret. He'd been 'love-starved'" (emphasis mine).

Isn't that an accurate description for all of us? Everyone has a need, a hunger and even a craving for love, and when it isn't found, we become "love-starved." As Oates said elsewhere in one of her short stories, "Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat."

Possible Preaching Angles: This illustration shows both our hunger for God's love, the hole in our hearts that only Christ can fill, and our hunger for human connection and community.

In a 2010 interview with New York magazine, a self-confident Lady Gaga declared,

I believe that everyone can do what I'm doing. Everyone can access the parts of themselves that are great. I'm just a girl from New York City who decided to do this, after all. Rule the world! What's life worth living if you don't rule it?

But two years later, a much less confident and vulnerable Lady Gaga admitted to a group of Long Island high school students that she's struggled with bulimia since she was a teenager. Gaga admitted,

I used to throw up all the time in high school. So I'm not that confident. I wanted to be a skinny little ballerina, but I was a voluptuous little Italian girl whose dad had meatballs on the table every night. I used to come home and say, "Dad, why do you always give us this food? I need to be thin." And he'd say, "Eat your spaghetti …." It's really hard …. It made my voice bad, so I had to stop. The acid on your vocal cords … it's very bad.

Lady Gaga confessed that she still struggles to maintain her weight and feel good about her body:

Weight is still a struggle. Every video I'm in, every magazine cover, they stretch you—they make you perfect. It's not real life. I'm gonna say this about girls: The dieting has got to stop. Everyone just knock it off. Because at the end of the day, it's affecting kids your age—and it's making girls sick.

Psychologist Madeline Levine has been counseling teenagers for over 25 years, but recently Levine has begun to see a new breed of unhappy teenagers—smart, successful, and privileged kids who feel utterly lost and empty. For Levine, one client in particular typified this kind of unhappy teenager. Late on a Friday afternoon—the last appointment of her week—Levine saw a 15-year-old girl who was "bright, personable, highly pressured by her adoring, but frequently preoccupied … parents." The girl was also "very angry."

Levine quickly recognized the girl's "cutter disguise"—a long-sleeve t-shirt pulled halfway over her hand, with an opening torn in the cuff for her thumb. Such t-shirts are used to hide self-mutilating behaviors: cutting with sharp instruments, piercing with safety pins, or burning with matches. When the young girl pulled back her sleeve, Levine was startled to find that the girl had used a razor to carve the following word onto her forearm—"EMPTY."

Levine commented:

I tried to imagine how intensely unhappy my young patient must have felt to cut her distress into her flesh …. The most common thing I hear in my office from the kids is, "I'm fake." The surface of [their family life] always looks good …. The lawns are always perfectly manicured, the houses always look beautiful. But when you get to what's going on beneath these kids' T-shirts, there's not much happening inside.

Chuck Colson said in a sermon:

The great paradox [of my life] is that every time I walk into a prison and see the faces of men or women who have been transformed by the power of the living God, I realize that the thing God has chosen to use in my life … is none of the successes, achievements, degrees, awards, honors, or cases I won before the Supreme Court. That's not what God's using in my life. What God is using in my life to touch the lives of literally thousands of other people is the fact that I was a convict and went to prison. That was my great defeat, the only thing in my life I didn't succeed in.

Tim Keller offers the following definition for what Jesus meant by being "poor in spirit":

It means seeing that you are deeply in debt before God, and you have no ability to even begin to redeem yourself. God's free generosity to you, at infinite cost to him, was the only thing that saved you.

But many people today resist Jesus' teaching about our spiritual poverty. Keller writes:

On the contrary, you believe that God owes you some things—he ought to answer your prayers and to bless you for the many good things you've done. Even though the Bible doesn't use the term, by inference we can say that you are "middle-class in spirit." You feel that you've earned a certain standing with God through your hard work. You also may believe that the success and the resources you have are primarily due to your own industry and energy.