Jesus Wants To Save Christians Chapter Four
December 1, 2008 · Print This Article
Jesus Wants To Save Christians - Chapter Four: Swollen-Bellied Black Bellies…
“Empires accumulate. And that accumulation has consequences. Blessing and abundance can turn into burden and curses.
The number of Americans taking antidepressants has tripled in the past decade.
If all of this was supposed to make us happy, why are so many of us so sad?
But not everybody is sad. There is another response to accumulation, and it’s called entitlement.
Moses spoke of the need to constantly tell the exodus story, the one about rescue from slavery, “otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increases and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt.”
How does a person forget God? The answer we’ve seen again and again in the Scriptures is that you forget God when you forget the people God cares about. Over and over God speaks of the widow, the orphan, and the refugee. This is how you remember God: you bless those who need it the most in the same way that God blessed you when you needed it the most.
In an empire of indifference, as it becomes harder and harder to understand the perspective of others, it becomes easier and easier to confuse blessing with entitlement.
Entitlement leads to immunity to the suffering of others, because, “I got what I deserve” and so, apparently, did they.
In an empire of entitlement, when the fundamental awareness is lost that this is all a gift, luxuries can begin to seem like necessities. Excess can become normal. And it can be very easy to lose perspective on just how much we have.
In empire, you believe in that which you preserve, you preserve that which you are entitled to, and you are entitled to that which you have accumulated.”
-Ben Nockels
I agree with your shout-out for cause of remembering the poor and defenseless, but I disagree with the order: You say, “you forget God when you forget the people God cares about”, but I think you forget the people God cares about when you forget God. Forgetting God is the cause of forgetting His people. Remembering God’s people is EVIDENCE that you’ve remembered God. But to try to remember God through good works is to bypass God entirely, and leave Him out of the process. He is the goal; helping people is the after-effect. This is the difference between theocentric and anthropocentric worldviews.
But I agree that remembering God and remembering the poor are indeed connected. Thank you for reminding us all of this.