because other people's blogs are more interesting than mine
David Wilkerson of “The Cross and the Switchblade” and Times Square Church fame preached...
What you hear is God wants you to be rich. He wants you to go first-class. C’mon, get in on the game.
Do you know that there are six billion 500 million people on the Earth today? One billion 200 thousand live on 23 cents a day. Two billion people have no electricity. Eighty percent of all the people on earth now live in sub-standard housing. One billion people have no safe drinking water. Every 16 seconds someone dies of hunger. Fifty-seven million people died in 2006. Ten million 500 thousand of these were children less than five years old. Fourteen million children orphaned in the last ten years of HIV-AIDS. Two million children have died as a direct result of conflict in the past ten years.
And then we have those that stand in the pulpit and say ‘God wants you to be rich.’ And I heard a man tell me just today from Israel editor of a magazine in Israel, Israel Today. And he said 'I don’t understand what I see on your television here, Jesus is all in gilded gold.' While the world is starving, Christianity, evangelical Christianity is depicted as gilded in gold!
What does that say in Darfur? What does that say in Africa? What does that say in front of ten million babies that have been orphaned? What does it say to the billions of people living on 23 cents a day or less? God wants you to be rich?
I’m challenged by those words, and have begun to re-evaluate my responsibilities as a citizen of this country and world as a result of that sermon. I don’t plan on joining a commune, or selling everything I have in order to help the poor; I’m not headed for a leper colony on the other side of the world to live and serve in humble squalor, but I do think I have, as a Christian attempting to live a responsible life reflective of the example and guided by the words of Christ, an obligation to be more selfless, and to give more of my time and efforts on behalf of those less fortunate than I.
And I will do what I can to ensure the government that represents me at home and abroad does the same. As an American, I should be willing to give no less than my best in service, and I should expect no less from those who choose to serve.
Posted by Mike Spinney
Doesn't it seem like it's waaaaay past time for us to take some decisive action on Darfur? I *KNOW* it is. Join me in telling President Bush.