In his book entitled "What on Earth am I Here
For" Rick Warren states:
It is a fatal mistake to assume that God’s goal for your
life is material prosperity or popular success, as the world defines it. The
abundant life has nothing to do with material abundance, and faithfulness to
God does not guarantee success. God is far more interested in your character
than your comfort. He’s more interested in what you are becoming than in making
this life easy for you. Remember, life is a test.
In my first devotion on this, I talked about how outrageous a me-centered message about God is to me. Our focus is on God and how He reaches out to a lost world to save us from our sins, not prosper us in a material sense. This is the second look at this statement:
More over, it seems to me that as I read about those who
are being persecuted for their faith even to the point of martyrdom, I've got
to wonder about the depth of a me-focused faith. I know people who live from meal to meal,
often only getting a few a week and are totally dependent on The Lord for basic
needs of food and clean water while they apply their energies to spreading the
gospel. Who would blame them for crying
out for prosperity? Others pick up their
families and move to foreign lands to minister to others in the name of Christ.
These people all share the same depth of faith that I dont have and so rarely
see here in the US. Scripture tells us
that God allows some trials and difficulties to increase our faith. How
difficult it is to grow deep in faith in a land of excess.
I believe this is the reason we see a decline in the
church in America today. Those few who seek, don't see a difference in us in
the church. We look just like any other charitable organization. We meet
regularly with like-minded people, have a routine agenda, don't demand much of
our members, emphasize helping others who are less fortunate, and cringe when
someone different from us visits. Some congregations
are so open minded that they stand for nothing and others are so narrow minded
they've deviated from the totality of scripture, picked out a few key issues,
and beat them so dogmatically that they lose focus in the centrality of Christ
and everyone's need for a rich and vibrant relationship with Him. These two extremes are leveraged by Satan to
paint the church as out-of-touch and irrelevant.
Our challenge in mainstream Christianity is
to dare to challenge ourselves to go deep. We are to be focused not on being prospered, but on making God Lord of our lives, yielding our own wants and desires to His perfect will. In doing so, we lose our self-centered focus and become focused exclusively on Him, His will, His desires. When we do so, we become more focused on the needs of those around us. We learn to love others as we love ourselves and we cease to be self-centered and learn to become focused on the true needs of others. To be focused in this way is to view all those around me with eternal concern for their eternal prosperity or salvation. Our vertical focus is on God and our horizontal focus is on others - the sign of the cross. THIS is why Jesus died on one. He rose to give us eternal hope, not hope for the self-centered desires of our sinful nature.
I pray that I live with a strategic focus on heaven as
the real prize and not some spiritual Santa waiting to prosper me if I'll
only...
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