The Prosperity Persecution

How many bibles do you have at home?

We have at least 10, not counting all of the Children’s bibles.

I’m guessing you have a few.

Now…. How often do you read them? Even one of them? (and you can’t count Sunday in Church).

Pretty pathetic, isn’t it!?!

I’ve been reading through the Jesus Freaks books by DC Talk and Voice of the Martyrs:

 

As I’ve been reading, I’ve been hit by the lengths that some people go to just to get their hands on a bible or even just a page from it. In some countries you can be jailed just for owning 1 page of the bible.

That persecution, however, only drives them to read and study the Word more. They don’t know whether they will still have a bible tomorrow, it could be found at any time so they hungrily digest as much of it as they can, while they can.

In the western world though, we are the victims of prosperity, and in many ways, prosperity is a worse form of persecution than making it illegal to be a Christian.

Why do I say this – well, look around you.

We are free to own bibles, we are free to read them, to talk about them, to talk about God, to ‘go to church’ and to worship God openly. We are free to evangelize, free to share the gospel  and free to live it openly.

But do we?

For most of us, the answer is no. We are so free that we have no urgency. We are so free that we become overwhelmed by our own freedom and prosperity and God gets pushed to the back of our minds and the need to share the gospel gets lost in our exercise of our freedom.

Prosperity and freedom steal from us our understanding of our need for God. It’s hard to understand how much you need God when you’re sitting on a comfortable chair in a nice warm house with your belly full of good food and drink.

We need to remember that life is not about our own happiness, it’s about God and His love for his creation.

Many people these days preach the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ but we need to start preaching about the ‘Prosperity Persecution’ and start helping people find their way out from it!