O my forgetful soul,

A wake from thy wandering dream;

turn from chasing vanities,

look inward, forward, upward,

view thyself,

reflect upon thyself,

who and what thou art, why here,

what thou must soon be.

Thou art a creature of God,

formed and furnished by him,

lodged in a body like a shepherd in his tent;

Dost thou not desire to know God’s ways?

 

O God,

Thou injured, neglected, provoked Benefactor

when I think upon thy greatness and thy goodness

I am ashamed at my insensibility,

I blush to lift up my face,

for I have foolishly erred.

Shall I go on neglecting thee,

when every one of thy rational creatures

should love thee,

and take every care to please thee?

I confess that thou hast not been in all my thoughts,

that the knowledge of thyself as the end of

my being has been strangely overlooked,

that I have never seriously considered

my heart-need.

But although my mind is perplexed and divided,

my nature perverse,

yet my secret dispositions still desire thee.

Let me not delay to come to thee;

Break the fatal enchantment that binds

my evil affections,

and bring me to a happy mind that rests in thee,

for thou hast made me and canst not forget me.

Let thy Spirit teach me the vital lessons of Christ,

for I am slow to learn;

And hear thou my broken cries.

There are, in fact, two quite distinct ways in which the New
Testament speaks of crucifixion in relation to holiness. The
first is our death to sin through identification with Christ;
the second is our death to self through imitation of Christ. On
the one hand, we have been crucified with Christ. But on the
other we have crucified (decisively repudiated) our sinful
nature with all its desires, so that every day we renew this
attitude by taking up our cross and following Christ to
crucifixion (Lk. 9:23). The first is a legal death, a death to
the penalty of sin; the second is a moral death, a death to the
power of sin. The first belongs to the past, and is unique and
unrepeatable; the second belongs to the present, and is
repeatable, even continuous. I died to sin (in Christ) once; I
die to self (like Christ) daily.

–John Stott

I stumbled upon a treasure-trove of quotes while searching for a CS Lewis quote about the evil of advertising.

“There is a burden of care in getting riches; fear of keeping them; temptation in using them; guilt in abusing them, sorrow in losing them; and a burden of account at last to be given concerning them.”

-Matthew Henry (1662-1714)

Nobody who gets enough food and clothing in a world where most are hungry and cold has any business to talk about ‘misery.’

-C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) Letters to Arthur Greeves, 13 January 1917

Whither thou goest, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

-Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), On the Road, 1957

Theirs is an endless road, a hopeless maze, who seeks for goods before they seek God.

-Bernard of Clairvaux, (1091-1153) On the Love of God

Give the public the ‘image’ of what it thinks it ought to be, or what television commercials or glossy magazine ads have convinced us we ought to be, and we will buy more of the product, become closer to the image, and further from reality.

Madeline L’Engle (1918-2007), A Circle of Quiet, 1972

When I walk into a grocery store and look at all the products you can choose, I say, “No king ever had anything like I have in my grocery store today.”

-Bill Gates quoted in Parade Magazine, 14 Jul 02

Sunday Jesus has some words for us:
See Luke 18:18-30

We’ll think about words to the wealthy (us!):
“Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it.”

-G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), Commonwealth, 1933