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Beware of Greed

Sam Stringer

Jan 6, 2025

And He said to them, "Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not
even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions."
Luke 12:15

Consumer cultures are bred on an appetite for more. The more that we feed the desire for
more, the more we find that we simply need more. The problem we often have is that we fail to
see greed for what it is when we define it in narrow ways. People look at those with a lot of
money and fancy possessions as greedy, but you know what? You can be greedy at any
financial station in life. You can be a prisoner on death row, everything revoked from you, and be
greedy. You can be 100 years old and greedy, and you can be a baby and get greedy.

Greed isn’t just about money. It isn’t just about possessions. It’s about the sense of having more
of anything I have concluded I need more of. I need more friends. I need more respect. I need
more understanding. I need more proof. I need more time. I need more power, more control. I
need more knowledge. I need more justice. I need more apologies and I need more sincerity
from others.

You see, greed is only obvious in some ways more than it is in others. Greed destroys our lives
because it robs us of peace when we tell ourselves that whatever it is we’ve got, we don’t have
enough of it. It’s always waiting eagerly to be told what it should want more of, isn’t it? I was fine
five minutes ago and now I’ve desperately got to have something I was ok with just moments
ago. Greed makes us do stupid things, but one of the dumbest things it leads us to do is to
obsess in ways that distract us and distance us from God.

Greed takes a blessing, minimizes it, refuses to be thankful for it, looks for the problems with it,
and despite the blessing either wonders when it’s going to be taken away or if there’s more of it
to be had. Always focusing on what is not present, always denying to give God glory as a good
and benevolent God because greed incites us to doubt Him and to demand more from Him.

By the way, greed can even come in the form of wanting more good and noble things. I read
some articles this morning about pastoral libraries, and while they can be seen as noble and
wise, even the incessant pursuit of obtaining Christian books (and how that can create either a
reflection back to us of who we are or a representation to others of who we are) can be a form
of greed. Greed can and is fueled as well by how we see ourselves, and is an indicator of when
we’re not finding our identity in Christ, but in those temporal things we use to inform us of who
we are.

While I could go into, “How do we tackle this?” I think that the first step is beginning to identify it
for what it is in our lives. When we give ourselves justifications and beg for others to either
overlook it or agree with our assessment of what we need, we’re doing ourselves, our families,
our neighbors and our God no great good. We don’t need more, we need to stop the greed
more. Listen to Jesus:

Beware. Be on your guard against every form of greed. Not even when one has an abundance
of possessions (material or immaterial) does his (or her) life consist of his possessions.

Sam Stringer

“Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright ©
1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights
reserved. lockman.org”

Braver Than Lions

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