Sermon Illustrations

One of the deepest forms of poverty a person can experience is

isolation. If we look closely at other kinds of poverty, including

material forms, we see that they are born from isolation, from not being

loved or from difficulties in being able to love. Poverty is often

produced by a rejection of God's love, by man's basic and tragic tendency

to close in on himself, thinking himself to be self-sufficient or merely

an insignificant and ephemeral fact, a “stranger” in a random universe.

Man is alienated when he is alone, when he is detached from reality, when

he stops thinking and believing in a foundation[125]. All of humanity is

alienated when too much trust is placed in merely human projects,

ideologies and false utopias[126]

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