Sermon Resources:
1. “We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves…In the last twenty-five years, the patient increasingly confronts the psychiatrist not with well-defined symptoms of their personal difficulties but with their dissatisfactions about life. He does not suffer from fixations or phobias or nervous ailments or emotional immaturity; instead he complains "of vague, diffuse dissatisfactions with life.” He describes "subtly experienced yet pervasive feelings of emptiness and depression," "violent oscillations of self-esteem," and "a general inability to get along." He gains "a sense of heightened self-esteem only by attaching himself to strong, admired figures whose acceptance he craves and by whom he needs to feel supported." He depends on others to validate his self-esteem, and yet happiness eludes him.” --Dr. Christopher Lasch, “The Culture of Narcissism”
2. “Life became dangerous; The day we all became famous; No one cares if you're happy; Just as long as you claim it; How can we change this? The day we all became famous; No one cares if you have it Just as long they think you do; I don't need the word, just need you to think I said it; I don’t need to learn, just need you to think I get it; I don’t need the sermon, just need you to think I read it.” -Jon Bellion, "The Internet"
3. “Pride is the beginning of sin. And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation. It is the abandoning of God to whom the soul ought to cling as its source of life and to imagine itself instead as the source of its own life.” -Augustine, "City of God"
4. “How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove off? The point is that each person’s pride is in competition with everyone else’s pride. It is because I wanted to be the focus of things that I am so annoyed at someone else being the focus. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others.” -C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity"
5. “For a very long time I considered low self-esteem to be some kind of virtue. I had been warned so often against pride and conceit that I came to consider it a good thing to deprecate myself. But now I realize that the real sin is to deny God’s first love for me, to ignore my original goodness. Because without claiming that first love and that original goodness for myself, I lose touch with my true self and embark on the destructive search among the wrong people and in the wrong places for what can only be found in the house of my Father.” -Henri Nouwen, "Life of the Beloved"
