Affluence

It is a little ludicrous to hear a leading presidential contender suggest that we are at the start of another great depression. What he really means is that there are people who are losing million dollar homes because they over bought. There are people who will have to pare down to two cars instead of four. There are people who will have to move to normal cable coverage instead of four movie channels and six sport channels. There are people who will have to wait to buy that 50 inch screen TV. There are people who may not be able to cruise down the Danube this year and wait until next year to go. That is not to say that there are no people who are hurting. Obviously every person has lost a job, home, or 401k is feeling the pinch.
At the same time, we are people who have too much and don’t know it. We have come to accept a standard of living as normal instead of understanding that we have become excessive. If you ever have to stand on the dirt floor of a house which has no running water or electricity, you will begin to see the difference between where most Americans are and where a large portion of the world is.
The answers to this glaring inequity are not easy ones. What each of us can do as individuals is very little, and most of it would be for show rather than to accomplish something meaningful. A hungry person does not understand the person who drives a Mercedes to go for a $50.00 dinner. It does not seem fair to that person. It is easy to sit back and say that what that person needs is a different education and everything will be all right.
A different education will make a major change for a person in many situations, but when the unemployment is at 40 or fifty per cent, an education is not going to change that. That high rate of unemployment such as is true in South Africa breeds an extremely high rate of crime. The person without a job assumes that it is his/her right to rob the person who has too much or in some cases just the person who has more than he/she.
Those are societal problems that need to be faced by the world community with a clear focus on what can be done to help produce situations where the inequities can be corrected.
Our focus in this blog is on a believer in Jesus Christ. What should we be expected to do? Should we sell all that we have and give it to the poor? I think not. The Lord had a very important message for that young man who had a pile of riches standing between him and Jesus. The only way that he could make his commitment to Christ and follow the Lord was to get rid of that stock pile of riches.
It is easy to say that the people need to hear the Gospel more than they need clothes and food. It is true that the most important thing a person needs is to settle a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. It is also true that the pain of hunger and the embarrassment of too little clothing, and the cold felt by a homeless person may all be so overwhelming that the message of the Gospel either seems irrelevant or is not being heard at all.
We have set our goals in such a way that we often walk by the homeless, street people, children, and poor because they really don’t seem to be viable members of a successful church. This is a tragedy when it may not be recognized, but is essential the actual method of operation. We may not be able to reach these people in the same way that we assemble others into a local assembly. Is it possible that we need to think in terms of the development of programs that give people a chance to be assimilated into the world which now seems to shun them? These people do not just need love. They need help. If they didn’t need help they would not be where they are now.
We don’t need and these people do not need a “social gospel.” What they need is a relevant gospel. It is a plan to help them in a caring way that demonstrates the love of Christ by the creative help we provide. People do not need handouts, but something that helps lift them out of the desperate and hopeless situations they are in.
This is not to say that nobody is doing anything, but is a reminder that we need to have a strong focus on people in need. We respond in times of crisis like earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, fires, etc. and that is great. What about the rest of the time. Many times we ride right by people in need and don’t help them for a variety of reasons. We piously say that they are controlled by some kind of mafia so we ignore them. Even if they have been sucked into a corrupt system, is that a valid excuse for doing nothing?
I know that there are thousands of homeless in America, but I am also aware that there are countless numbers of some type of street people in every country I have lived in. I have been criticized for giving help because it was deemed that I had been duped by the needy person. The world is full of con artists who need Christ just as much as any other unsaved person. If the answer is not in giving help then how do we find an answer?
We must be creative in understanding the problem, developing answers, and having the compassion that Christ expects in His children. There are malls in the world that have guards to keep people like this out. Is it possible that we have guards that keep them out of our churches. We should be just as happy to see a homeless person come to Christ as we are when the town’s wealthiest person comes to Christ.