Of all the winds that blow on love, The demand for money is the coldest and most destructive.

– Gustave Flaubert

A reversal at the outset of the story is that the beggar is given a name and the rich man is not. That single fact ought to alert us that the story we are about to hear is going to have surprises in it.

– David Ewert

Wealth is no mark of God’s favor. Poverty is no mark of God’s displeasure. Those whom God justifies and glorifies are seldom the rich of this world. If we would measure men as God measures them, we must value them according to their grace. “Let not the rich man boast in his riches. But let him that boasts boast in this, that he knows and understands Me” (Jeremiah 9:24).

– J.C. Ryle

The sin of this rich man was his providing for himself only. He was not sent to hell because of his wealth, he was sent to hell because his obsession with wealth blinded him to His need of a Savior and to the needs of others.

– Adapted from Matthew Henry

In the final analysis, it is Lazarus, the one who never says a word and always is the passive recipient or expecter of things, who is lauded. How’s that going to be received in our activist culture?

– William Long

After re-reading Luke 16:15, we would do well, I believe, to explore those things which our culture highly esteems, and then to consider whether or not these things are well pleasing in the sight of God.

– Hampton Keathley