Tom Shrader walks through four pervasive cultural myths identified by Chuck Colson — that man is basically good, that utopia is achievable on earth, that all values are relative, and that radical individualism is sufficient — and contrasts each with what Scripture teaches. Drawing on passages from Ecclesiastes, Jeremiah, Romans, Hebrews, and James, Shrader argues that man is depraved and in need of a Redeemer, that trials are inevitable and spiritually necessary, that God's Word provides absolute truth and moral standards, and that believers are designed to need one another. The teaching closes with a practical challenge to resist the consumerist pull of accumulation and to remain deeply connected to community, church, and God.
“We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we're sinners.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Standalone Teachings
Recorded: 2000 at East Valley Bible Church
Duration: 43 min
Themes: human nature, truth, community, individualism, culture, suffering, moral absolutes, materialism, questioning faith, struggling with materialism, feeling self-sufficient, new believer, young adult, navigating culture, spiritually isolated, parent
Scripture: Ecclesiastes 9, Jeremiah 17:9, Jeremiah 17:10, Romans 5:12, John 8, John 16:33, James 1:2-4, Hebrews 4:12, Matthew 22:37-39, Matthew 28:19-20, 1 John 4:11, Matthew 18, 2 Timothy 3:16-17
Theological Themes: total depravity, sin nature, biblical authority, absolute truth, cultural engagement, eschatology, sanctification, the body of christ
Full Transcript
Introduction: Four Myths That Define Our Time
What I want to do today is start the year with a review and preview, breaking it up over the next week. I didn't want to go into the book of 1 Corinthians and then come back to it three weeks later. Today's message flows out of a discussion I had at breakfast a couple of weeks ago with Jerry Smith. Somebody had just given Jerry a copy of a book — a series of 12 lectures that Chuck Colson delivered over the last decade. Jerry was reading to me from one of those lectures, the first one in the book, titled "The Enduring Revolution," and that is going to be the context and text of this morning's talk.
In that lecture, Chuck Colson identifies four great myths that define our times. These are four false premises that pervade the thought process of our world today. They dominate the culture, and because they are present in the culture, they are present in thought. Therefore, many people are building their lives based on these four assumptions — and those assumptions are false. Their lives are built on a false foundation.
This ties into what we have been talking about: don't be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Don't copy the behavior of this world. Think differently than this world. As we finished the first chapter of 1 Corinthians, the whole message was the wisdom of God versus the wisdom of man. What Colson is saying is that here are four things that dominate the wisdom of man.
If you miss any of this, every Sunday I direct you to the website. All the notes are already posted by Sunday morning, and the Real Audio is there by Wednesday. The four great myths that are defining our culture are: number one, that man is basically good; number two, that we can achieve some sort of utopia here on this earth; number three, that values are relative and there are no absolutes; and number four, radical individualism. We are going to look at each one of these, understand the myth, and then understand what God says in response.
Myth One: The Goodness of Man
The first myth is the goodness of man. This myth says that man is basically good — that all of us are good, and that no matter who a person is, there is something good inside of them. All we have to do, whether as an educator, a society, a boss, or a friend, is find that good and unlock it. Someone told me years ago, to illustrate this point, that man is like an onion. He may look rough and gruff on the outside, he may not be exactly a lovable person, but when you get down to his core, he is basically a good guy.
I believe the onion illustration does work, but not in the way it is intended. Man does sometimes appear to be pretty good. He sometimes does nice things and sometimes smiles. But when you unpack him, he is awful, despicable, and evil. When you get inside, you think: that is worse than I could possibly have imagined. That is the true condition of man.
When we live in a society that says man is basically good, people start thinking — and I love the phrase Colson uses here — that they are always victims, never villains, always deprived, and never depraved. What is born out of this myth is the idea that we are all part of God's children. You have heard this: people all around the world, five billion of us, all part of God's family. That is simply not true.
In John 8, as Jesus comes into contact with the Pharisees, He does not say, "You are all part of God's family." He says, "You are of your father, the devil." You are either for Him or against Him. We are not all part of the family of God. Should we care about each other? Absolutely. But don't fall into the trap of thinking we are all God's children, each seeking God in our own different way, with God as the hub of a wheel and all of us as spokes inevitably leading to that hub. That illustration doesn't hold up. You have beliefs that are contradictory — they cannot possibly all be leading in the same direction.
So when something like Columbine happens, this myth compels us to assume there must be an explanation: a teacher, a bully, a dietary problem, some external issue that prompted the violence. Nobody would just do this on their own — because man is basically good. That is how completely this myth permeates our thinking.
What God Says About the Condition of Man
If we want to see the true condition of man, we must look at man not as man looks at man, but as God looks at man. The view is diametrically opposed. Society says man is basically good. What does God say? In Ecclesiastes chapter 9, God says this: "The hearts of the sons of men are full of evil." Jeremiah said, "The heart is more deceitful than all else. Man is desperately sick. Who can understand man?" God answers that in Jeremiah 17:10 when He says, "I, the Lord, can understand."
Susan gave me for Christmas the best gift I have ever had or could possibly have. She cleaned my office. And for those of
Man Is Not Basically Good
Those of you who have been around know this has been quite a journey. My wife found a State Farm 1991 calendar in there. It was interesting — about every fifteen minutes she would come out and say, "Look at this," and I would say, "Wow." She found two shirts still in their boxes, pictures, all kinds of things. The room had not been cleaned in a long time. Part of the challenge was getting all the books off the floor, because there were just stacks of books everywhere. We have a lot of bookshelves in my study, and now all the books are double-stacked — pushed back to the wall with another layer in front of them.
I was on the phone the other day looking at some of these books. A lot of them need to go, but some came from my wife's educational background — she was a special education major. There are all these books on psychology, books on unlocking your child's heart, that kind of thing. You look at them and you think: the premise is wrong. Man's heart is desperately wicked. I love the phrase Coulson uses: the problem with man is not that he is deprived, it is that he is depraved.
How did all that happen? Romans chapter 5, verse 12 gives us the explanation: "Just as through one man" — that is Adam — "sin entered into the world and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all have sinned." Here is a question we ask regularly: how many sins does it take to be a sinner? The answer is none. Not one — none. We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners.
Today is a very special day — my daughter Sarah's twenty-first birthday. I get melancholy this time of year anyway, and I was thinking about her this week. She was born on New Year's Eve, and I remember sitting the next day at the Jerry's at 24th and Thomas — the only restaurant open — just tearing up, thinking about the day she would leave home. There have been a lot of pictures around this week, great baby pictures. Whenever Sarah would eat she would fall asleep, and there are hundreds of pictures of her just passed out with pudding all over her face.
As I think back on everything we did to be used by God to shape Sarah, I can tell you that we never — not one single time — had to sit her down and say, "Okay, Sarah, today's lesson is how to lie, and tomorrow we're going to teach you how to disobey." That seemed to come naturally to Sarah, just as it did to Haley, just as it does to your children, and more importantly, just as it does to you. When Adam sinned, he plunged all of us into ruin — physical death, spiritual death, separation from God, and if we die in that condition, eternal separation from God and eternal punishment.
Man is not basically good. All men are bad, evil, depraved. So we do not look around and ask why bad things happen to good people, because we know there are no good people. We do not sit around and ask how there could be an Adolf Hitler. My question is: why aren't there more Adolf Hitlers? Why aren't there more Charles Mansons? Why don't we see more Jeffrey Dahmers? Because those are the rare moments when God lifts the curtain and lets you get a glimpse of what man is really like. In a small group once I posed the question: what is the difference between Adolf Hitler and me? The answer that came back was "one little mustache." What that person understood is that in our natural condition there is no difference between Adolf Hitler and me.
Man is not basically good. If I build programs around the idea that man is basically good — if I treat man as though all I have to do is unlock the goodness already in him — then I have missed the fundamental principle, which is that man is evil and needs a Redeemer. Man's problem is not that he is good and we just need to let it out. Man is evil and needs to be redeemed.
We Cannot Build Utopia
Here is the second myth: that we can build utopia here. This is the myth that human nature can be perfected by government — or by any institution. We see that idea all around us. In my lifetime, I would say communism is the clearest example — the attempt to level everything out. I read the other day that Fidel Castro's net worth is three hundred million dollars. So communism has been very, very good to him. The idea is: we will give everybody the same amount of everything and then we will all be fine.
Now, let me spend just a moment here, because government does have a place. Scripture is very clear that we as Christians are to submit to the government, that we are to render to Caesar the things that are due him — and that word "due" does not mean voluntary, it means it is an obligation to pay. All government is ordained by God. We understand that government has a role. But their role is —
Suffering Has a Purpose
We live in a time that seems to want to say we can take heaven and put it in place here on earth — and you cannot do that. I see this even as Christians begin to deal with one another, because we try to arrive at a place where we say, "I want to get rid of all the suffering." When somebody comes in and they are hurting, there is nothing wrong with wanting to help them — I understand that. But I think it is helpful in most instances to stop and ask: Why are you suffering? What have you learned? Is God teaching you something? You are suffering for a reason.
Here is the promise Jesus speaks the night before He dies. He says, "These things I have spoken to you" — the fact that He is going to prepare a place, that He will come back, that He will leave a Helper, that He will never leave or forsake, that the Holy Spirit will come so we will not be left as orphans — "I have spoken these things to you that you might have peace, because in this world you will have tribulation." You cannot create a utopia or a suffering-free environment on this earth.
In fact, here is the promise we have as Christians. James writes, "Consider it all joy" — and note the very important word that follows — he does not say *if*, he says *when*. It is inevitable that you will encounter various trials. The word "trial" there means to trouble something, or to invade something and break a pattern of peace, comfort, joy, and happiness in somebody's life. Something invades your life and breaks that pattern. The idea is to put something to the test — to reveal what is really there.
It may be some horrific thing that you look at and think, "There is no way I could handle this." But then God brings you into that circumstance, and all of a sudden you do not just survive — you thrive. You see that you are strong, not in and of yourself. Remember, He said, "I will give you peace," and "In this world take courage, because I have overcome the world" — not you. All of a sudden, you are strong.
Trials Are Inevitable — and Necessary
That leads to the next verse, because James says that the testing of your faith produces endurance. Someone once said that God knows the maximum elasticity of our faith — He knows in His trials how much He can pull us, and He knows what we can take. These trials are inevitable, and it seems to me they are also necessary for us to understand that God is working in our lives.
If the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control, then I have to have circumstances that test those things. This morning, for the second time in the history of East Valley Bible Church at this location, I drove from my house to this building without hitting a red light. It has happened one other time in three and a half years, and it was perhaps the most pleasant trip over I have ever had. There was no aggravation — in fact, there were even a couple of moments along the way where I saw things that normally produce some agitation in me, and I actually prayed for those things on the way over. I arrived here with a sense of peace.
But I do not know if I have patience based on that drive. Patience is when the arrow is pointing left, the car in front of you has North Dakota plates, and now we will find out. I do not know if I have love until I come up against something unlovable. I do not know if I love my kids until I go in and say, "Okay, I need you to clean your room," and they say, "Dad, I already did that — right after I washed the car." That is very easy to love. How do you not love that child? But how do you handle it when a C is the best they can give? You figure that out. The facts are, you are not going to get perfection on this earth.
The Myth That Everything Is Relative
Here is the third thing this myth addresses: the idea that everything is relative, that there is no distinction between good and evil, that those lines are blurred. Words like *right* or *wrong*, *good* or *bad*, are essentially banished from the language. I watch *Hardball* with Chris Matthews just about every day, and Chris was making a point the other day when someone said the way a person was acting was "not normal." He stopped and said, "Wait a minute — I cannot really say that, because that is a judgment." We have arrived at a point where words like *right* and *wrong* are treated that way.
That is why I recommended that Clarence Thomas interview to you. Clarence Thomas told those students a dozen times in an hour: "This is wrong. This is right. This is wrong. This is right." It was so refreshing to hear someone speak that way, because we live in a time when the response is, "Well, can you really know truth?" Out in the marketplace, I encounter this all the time: "I understand what you are saying, but that is true as *you* understand truth." Help me out here — Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." How do you relativize that?
We live in a time where everything is viewed as relative, and we are denying that there are absolute truths with consequences just as real as the laws of gravity. If you go to a thirteen-story building and jump off, you are going to hit the ground and die. That is the law of gravity — that is the way life is. It may be exhilarating until about the third floor, but it gets rugged toward the end. God's laws work the same way. If you violate His laws, the consequences are as inevitable as the consequences of gravity.
So we come into this world and say it is not all relative. Two plus two is four. When a teacher marks that wrong, it does not matter how sincerely you feel the answer is five — it is still wrong, because the answer is four.
Judging by God's Standard, Not Our Own
When you say, "I just worship God as I understand God to be in my own individual way," I love you and I care for you, but let me help you out: you're wrong. The loving thing is not to say, "Oh, that's beautiful, that's great, you got a poem that goes with that, terrific, we really admire that." The loving thing is to say otherwise, and I think you say it with gentleness.
We encourage people here to be judgmental — now hang with me. Judgmental in the sense that we say there are answers, not judgmental to condemn, but judgmental to say that there are answers and there are standards. That is what we get from Scripture. All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. Matthew 18 addresses how we deal with sin — how can we possibly begin to deal with sin and discipline sin if we don't judge it?
Our judging is not based on some list of personal preferences. Our judging is based on what God says in His Word. It is good for teaching — it tells us what is right. It is good for reproof — it exposes sin and tells us what is not right. So when we talk about judging, we are not talking about superficial things. We are saying that when somebody is involved in sin — let's say adultery — we don't say, "Well, that may be right or it may be wrong." We say it is wrong.
When somebody asks, "Who made you king?" the answer is nobody made me king. We are not judging anything on our own. All we are doing is bringing to light what God says is wrong. We don't call something wrong that God is neutral on or has no view on. If God says it's wrong, it's wrong. If God says it's right, it's right. That is the power of what the Word does.
The Word of God as a Two-Edged Sword
Look at Hebrews 4: "For the Word of God is living and active and sharper than a two-edged sword, and it is piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart." It is like a mirror. When I open this up, you and I can look at actions, but God's Word judges my heart, my intent.
"And there is no creature hidden from these things. All things are open." That word "open" appears only here in the New Testament. In extra-biblical literature it is used to describe a man laying down with his neck exposed for the purpose of beheading. That is what Scripture does — it lays you open, naked before God.
Here is my favorite illustration of this. I was teaching a class on a Wednesday night, and a woman came in with her sister. She introduced the sister, who was pleasant enough, but you could tell the sister was not all that eager to be there — she was just going along with it. So I started to teach.
Now, let me give you a tip, because this matters to the story. Some of you seem to think that you can see me but I cannot see you. That is a very strange assumption. I can see you. Well, this woman, as I was talking, was sitting there with no body language whatsoever — arms closed, not buying anything that was happening. When it was over, they were gone immediately. I didn't think much of it. I packed up and walked to my car, and there, under a light, were these two sisters, face to face, going at it.
I had a very important decision to make. My car was one way and they were the other way, but I smelled an illustration. So I walked over and said, "Hi, ladies, how are you doing?" The one said, "Tell him what you said. Tell him." The sister said, "I don't know him." She said, "He can handle it. Tell him what you think." Finally the sister said, "I know what that lesson was all about tonight. My sister called you today and told you exactly what to say about me. That's what you did, isn't it?"
I said, "Well, I don't think so. If you remember, we just picked up where we left off from last week. This isn't about me and your sister. This is about the Spirit of God taking the Word of God and applying it to your heart, because that is what the Word of God does. Your sister couldn't do that. I couldn't do that. But God does that."
Teaching, Reproof, Correction, Training
It is good for teaching. It is good for reproof. It is good for correction — and that word for correction appears only this one time in the New Testament. It means to restore something to its proper condition. In extra-biblical literature it is used to describe taking something that has fallen and picking it back up. The Bible tells me how to get right. And then there is training in righteousness.
It is a simple but profound pattern, and if you have been around long enough you know it well. Teaching, reproof, correction, training in righteousness. The Bible tells me what is right, what is not right, how to get right, and how to stay right. Those are the absolutes.
The Fourth Myth: Radical Individualism
Let me spend some time on this fourth myth — the idea of radical individualism. What Colson is talking about is the idea that I will go it on my own, look out for myself, pull myself up by my own bootstraps, and that I don't need anybody or anything. George MacDonald puts it this way: "The principle of hell is, I am my own."
Colson says this myth dismisses the importance of family, church, and community. Let me stop there. I was listening to a man talk about society, and he made this observation: everybody understands that the fundamental building block of society is — what is it? For years I was taught it is the family. But he said no, in current thinking it is the individual. That is a very important shift. If the fundamental building block of society is the individual rather than the family, everything that follows from that changes.
The Myth of Radical Individualism
The fundamental building block of society used to be the family. Many of us were taught that we are knit together, that we cannot exist without one another. But now we live in a time where the individual has replaced the family as that fundamental unit. Rugged, radical individualism says: I'll do it on my own, I pull myself up by my own bootstraps, I don't need anybody. How many people do you know who say, "I don't need church, I can worship God on a golf course, I can worship God at the Grand Canyon and look at His creation"? What happens as a result is that sacrifice disappears, because I think only of myself, I elevate my rights, and pleasure is what consumes me.
There are two ideas worth focusing on here. The first is the idea of accumulation and pleasure. The second is why we need one another.
The Myth That More Is Better
There is a book called *The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need*. The premise is straightforward: we want all these things, but we don't really need them. Nothing on the calendar demonstrates this more clearly than Christmas — buying something for somebody they don't really need, for people they don't really like, with money they don't really have.
This came to life in an unprompted moment at home. My mom was sitting with Haley and me in the family room, and she said that when she was a little girl — there were two girls and a boy in her family — for Christmas they got a bag of candy, a banana, and an apple. She didn't say it with any malice or bitterness. She just said it. And then she got to the point.
What my mom figured out, it turns out a Stanford researcher needed an entire study to discover. My mom said: "We had no idea we were poor. In fact, we didn't even think we were poor. We thought we were rich, because we got the banana and the apple and the candy." Most of the time, her mother would go to the grocery store, spend a dime on candy, and the three kids would split it and make it last the whole week. They had no idea they were poor.
How Consumerism Escalated
Here is what the author of that book discovered. In the 1940s and 50s — the era my mom was describing — people kept up with the Joneses, but all the Joneses were essentially the same. Everyone lived in the same neighborhood and made roughly the same amount of money, so there was a natural ceiling. Then in the 1960s and 70s, some families generated a second income as mothers entered the workforce, and the economic disparity began to grow. Now someone making thirty thousand dollars a year was trying to keep up with a couple making sixty thousand.
But what she argues is that we have moved far beyond even that. Now someone making fifty thousand a year is trying to keep up with people making three hundred, four hundred, or five hundred thousand dollars a year — and you simply cannot do it. The result is an insatiable appetite for more things, driven by the marketplace and by what she calls the new consumerism.
My mom found a toy model car while cleaning the office. When she asked what it was, I explained that on my sixteenth birthday I had asked my parents for a car, and that toy model was what they gave me. My mom said, reflecting on it, "We didn't give you boys anything. We didn't get you started with anything. You had nothing. And somehow, you made it."
Four Conclusions About Accumulation
From all of this, I draw four conclusions, and I believe they are right. The more you have, the more you need. The more you have, the less you are satisfied. The more you have, the more frustrated you become, because you need more and you are still not satisfied. And this, to me, is the most important point of all: the more you have, the more you are distracted from the things that are truly important.
One of the families here at the church gave me Bill O'Reilly's book for Christmas. In it, O'Reilly writes this: "Here's something that really surprises me. The more stuff I have, the more stuff I want. As I looked around, I saw that everyone else was the same. It was not until I had a few things that I noticed how this works. Material stuff is addicting. Greed is a destroyer of success. You cannot be successful and greedy at the same time." He goes on to say he is talking about both material and emotional greed. What I am pointing to is material and spiritual greed. You cannot want desperately —
The Impossibility of Serving Two Masters
You cannot desperately pursue the things of the world and the things of God and achieve them both. It is too hard. It takes a lot of work to be successful, a lot of time, a lot of energy. The minute you achieve it, it demands more. That is true in the world's economy.
In the kingdom of God, it also takes a lot to be successful. It takes a lot of work, a lot of effort, a lot of prayer, a lot of study, and a lot of serving. There are very few people who are successful in the world's economy and equally successful in God's. It simply is not laid out that way.
The Myth That More Money Is Always Enough
This point can be built out numerically. Consider the people who say, "I cannot afford to buy everything I need." Twenty-seven percent of people making over $100,000 a year said they cannot get everything they really need. The median income in the country right now is right around $50,000, and 43% of people making that or more say they cannot get everything they need on what they earn.
Consider also this finding: 20% of people making over $100,000 a year said all their money goes to just the basics. You may laugh at that if you are making $35,000 a year and thinking that $50,000 would solve your problems. But here is exactly what a study discovered: people making $50,000 said they needed $70,000, people making $70,000 said $90,000, people making $90,000 said $100,000. There is no end to it, because there is no definition to it.
The thinking goes: I will go it on my own, pull myself up by my bootstraps, be successful, work hard, earn what I deserve. But here is the fact — you cannot go it alone.
The Great Commandment Against Rugged Individualism
You are called to love God with all your heart, mind, and soul. The idea there is not three separate parts; the idea is that you completely love God, that there is a whole-life passion for God. That is the great commandment. But then you are also called to love your neighbor as yourself.
Rather than the rugged individualism that says, "I can go it on my own, I don't need anybody else," exactly the opposite is true. You cannot even live the Christian life apart from other people. The great commandment is to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself — and you cannot love your neighbor as yourself if there is no neighbor there.
The great commission calls us to go and make disciples, to teach them and baptize them. You cannot do that without other people. The Bible is filled with the idea of the one and others.
The "One Another" Commands of Scripture
Starting with 1 John 4:11 — "Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another" — the New Testament repeats the phrase "one another" fourteen times. That is meant to be the dominant orientation of our lives. Live at peace with one another, honor one another, instruct one another, serve one another, forgive one another, pray for one another, comfort one another. The list goes on and on.
We desperately need each other. You cannot take Jesus as Savior and not as Lord and expect that to work. You need to be part of a church — not only for what you can give, though some noble people might say that is their reason, but also for what you can receive. We are linked to one another. We are the body of Christ. We call each other brother and sister. We have more in common than a chain of DNA.
Tracing Society's Problems Back to Four Myths
Looking at the society around us, there are serious problems — things that do not make sense — and if you trace them back, they come back to these four myths. The myth that man is basically good. The myth that through sociology, politics, or economics we can build a society with no suffering, no pain, no hardship. The myth that it does not really matter what you believe, only that you believe, that moral values are simply your values and it makes no difference whether they are right or wrong.
That last one deserves a direct response. The idea that sincerity is what matters, regardless of what you believe, simply breaks down. If you are heading south and you sincerely believe you are on your way to Flagstaff, it does not matter how sincere you are — Flagstaff is north. You can be sincerely wrong. The culture says it is what you feel; we say it is what we know, not instinctively, but through God's Word.
And then there is the fourth myth — that you can go it alone. You do not want to go without the Lord, and beyond that, God has designed us to need each other, to meet each other's needs. We need you to serve, but we also need to be able to serve you. And we need to collectively figure out how to touch a world together.
Serving Others and Avoiding Self-Reliance
I'm not into guilt — that's not my deal. My point is, you have people who need a touch from us, from us as a church, from you as an individual. This "I'll go it alone" thinking is very dangerous, and we have to be very careful there.
This world does not offer equal footing to everyone. Do you think Michael Jordan and I came into the world with the same opportunity to play in the NBA? You can imagine someone saying, "If you just try hard enough, you'll jump eight feet." It isn't happening. There are people who legitimately need help, and you were put here by God to help them. We just have to figure out how to do that.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking, "I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps." Maybe you did in business — although you couldn't take the next breath if God didn't give it to you. Even if that were true in business, don't bring that thinking over into God's kingdom. You can't do anything apart from Him.
Embracing Truth and Serving the World in Love
We don't want to be conformed to the world. We want to understand the truths God has given us — that there will be trials, that there will be difficulties. And because God has given us that truth, we take it into the world. In love, we carry that truth and that judgment in love to serve the world, and we desperately need each other.
Closing Prayer
Father, we pray that You teach us this list, that You open our hearts and help us understand it. God, remind us that we are all sinners — some of us here redeemed by Your grace. God, that fills our hearts with a sense of gratitude and a desire to love.
Father, don't let us fall into the idea that we can do it on our own. We know we need You, but we also need one another. We need to be able to serve, and God, we need to be able to be served.
Don't let us fall into the trap of wanting the stuff of the world. Help us listen to You. And even if we were going to set You aside and listen to Bill O'Reilly, we are never going to have enough — so why even play that game? God, focus us on the eternal, not the temporal. We pray to You in Jesus' name, amen.