Possessions (9)
If you set your love on worldly things, they will not satisfy. You may as well satisfy your body with air, as your soul with earth. "In the fullness of his sufficiency, he shall be in straits" (Job xx. 22). Plenty has its penury. If the globe of the world were yours, it would not fill your soul. And will you set your love on that which will never give you contentment? Is it not better to love God? He will give you that which shall satisfy.
Thomas Watson
https://www.ccel.org/ccel/watson/cordial.ix.html5.5K
Plutarch observeth that the ass hath the fattest heart, and is the dullest of all beasts. They who have the fattest possessions are generally the dullest in the matters of religion. Like the sun, they move most slowly when highest in the zodiac. Oh, it is far better to be a low tree and fruitful, than a tall one and barren.
Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.
Whatever we have of this world in our hands, our care must be to keep it out of our hearts, lest it come between us and Christ.
There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.
America today is a "save yourself" society if there ever was one. But does it really work? The underdeveloped societies suffer from one set of diseases: tuberculosis, malnutrition, pneumonia, parasites, typhoid, cholera, typhus, etc. Affluent America has virtually invented a whole new set of diseases: obesity, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, venereal disease, cirrhosis of the liver, drug addiction, alcoholism, divorce, battered children, suicide, murder. Take your choice. Labor-saving machines have turned out to be body-killing devices. Our affluence has allowed both mobility and isolation of the nuclear family, and as a result, our divorce courts, our prisons and our mental institutions are flooded. In saving ourselves we have nearly lost ourselves.
He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. Shadow of the Almighty: The Life
Thousands have trodden the path you are pursuing, and have awoke too late to find it end in misery and eternal ruin. They have fought hard for wealth, and honor, and office, and promotion, and turned their backs on God, and Christ, and heaven, and the world to come. And what has their end been? Often, far too often, they have found out that their whole life has been a grand mistake. Holiness (Chapter 4)
It is a melancholy fact, that constant temporal prosperity, as a general rule, is injurious to a believer's soul. Holiness (Chapter 6)
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