Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Spurgeon

A Victorian preacher dangling a worldly carrot is the kind of irony Spurgeon knew how to weaponize. "It's not the having, it's the getting" sounds like a motto for consumer culture, but in a pulpit it functions as a diagnostic: it exposes desire as a restless engine that never actually wants what it claims to want. The line is short, punchy, almost proverbial. That compression matters. It lands like a streetwise truth smuggled into a sermon, making the listener feel recognized before they feel corrected.

Spurgeon preached to a rapidly industrializing London where aspiration was becoming a civic religion: more wages, more goods, more status, more self. His intent isn’t to romanticize the chase; it’s to unmask it. "Having" is supposed to be the payoff, the stable state where craving stops. Spurgeon argues the opposite: acquisition is a letdown because the thrill was always the pursuit - the fantasy, the forward motion, the intoxicating sense that one more rung will finally quiet the soul.

The subtext is theological and psychological at once. Humans don’t merely misjudge what will satisfy them; they’re trained by sin and habit to confuse movement with meaning. The getting feels like life because it’s charged with hope, and hope is powerful enough to masquerade as fulfillment. Spurgeon’s rhetorical move is to turn that recognition into a spiritual question: if your heart is built to chase, what happens when you aim it at something that can’t be exhausted - God, not goods?