Healthy, wealthy and without God

Posted by Gary on February 15, 2007

There are many reasons that people do not seek God. I am convinced that one of them is that we, at least in Amercia, are a little too healthy and wealthy. The simple truth is that our affluence and ease have led us into sinful arrogance, the arrogance of believing that we don’t need God. The Bible makes a direct link between poverty and faith:

James 2:5 “Listen, my beloved brethren: did not God choose the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him?”

Religion has been called, “The opiate of the people”, in sinful man’s eyes people believe in God because they need something to get them through. In particular, the poor need something to hope in and so they choose to believe in God. What strikes me about the verse above is that the Bible mentions God’s choice of the poor, not their choice of Him. Does this mean that the rich can’t know God? No, but let us never forget these sober words from Jesus:

Mark 10:25 “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

I have done enough funerals at this stage of my ministry to have made some observations. I have found that no group seems to be more hostile and unwilling to be confronted in regard to their need of God then men in their forties through early sixties. I can see the contempt on their faces: “Save this God business for children and old ladies…I have all I need and more, I’m going to Florida for on a golf trip and am going to eat and shop to my heart’s content”. I fear for you dear man, your health and wealth are not blessings to you, they are curses and will damn you before they are through.

Sin has done something terrible to us, it has led us to make God’s kindness and gifts our very justification for rejecting Him. Many people are without God because they refuse to see their need of Him. They are well, they have all they need, for now. The scary thought is that God in His justice leaves many men at the end of their lives where they chose to be in the prime of life. They despised God when He offered Himself and they refused and so God gives them over to the hardness of their hearts and they enter eternity lost, when they finally see it is too late.

Are you trying to scare me preacher? This is scary business. Don’t let your health and wealth deceive you, you need God. What Jesus said to the healthy, wealthy church of Laodecia many Americans need to hear:

Revelation 3:17-18 “Because you say, “I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,” and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, I advise you to buy from Me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself, and that the shame of your nakedness will not be revealed; and eye salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see.”