Loving Poverty

“He that loveth pleasure shall be a poor man: he that loveth wine and oil shall not be rich.” (Pr 21:17 AV)

The word ‘…loveth…’ here means to have an affection for.  It means to be inclined to possess or experience.  The understanding is a desire that overrides all prudence and discipline.  Pleasure and things are not necessarily wrong to experience or possess.  However, if our lives are organized around an affection for those things, suffering a lack of needs is our result.  This is an old truth.  This is a truth of which we are all aware.  We know this.  Yet, we struggle with it because we live in such an affluent society.  We are bombarded with the idea our lives should be filled with nothing but pleasure and luxury.  We are told the objective of life is to enjoy it.  We are brainwashed into thinking all hardship can be avoided.  We have the idea of comfort and ease preached to us from the time we leave for the office until we rest our heads at night.  Again, our lives do not have to be non-stop misery and trouble.  No one is suggesting this.  However, if we make it our life’s ambition to experience nothing but pleasures and the accruing everything our hearts can desire, we will wind up empty and miserable.

I am deeply concerned for our present generation.  They seem not to care about anything other than immediate pleasure.  All one has to do is observe our addiction to our smartphones.  As our liberties are whittled away on the pretense of eternal physical life, we are completely oblivious because we cannot put our phones down.  Our passion for personal improvement is dulled by the newest app.  We could not care less what freedoms are lost as long as we score the highest score while we save the universe or spell the most words.  We are numb to the draconian executive orders coming off the printing press because we are too busy posting or reading our social media accounts.  It doesn’t bother us we are micromanaged as long as we can fill our souls with the abundance of scintillating stimuli of dancing ions as they mesmerize us unto a stupor.  There was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called The Game.  Commander Riker returns from shore leave with a game one wears and plays.  It is designed to stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain while minimizing higher functions.  It was designed by nefarious aliens intent on controlling all their adversaries.

What concerns me is this same cultural cancer is infecting our churches.  The saints of God are in pursuit of a trouble-free life.  We don’t know what hardship is.  When it is thrust upon us, our first instinct is to get out of it.  What we fail to do is understand why and for what purpose the LORD may have designed such an event.  The very definition of the Christian life is to deny self, take up the cross, and follow Jesus.  This love for pleasure and things is the greatest of all enemies to the cause of Christ and the maturity of the believer.  All one has to do is look at the waistline of this writer and one can easily discern the writer struggles with this too.  We are facing something in our nation and churches that will test the true maturity of the believer.  Will we remain faithful even though we cannot meet?  Will we continue to support the work of God even though we are not assembled?  We watch our own church and pastor while he live-streams, or will we ‘channel surf’ different venues to take in a more entertaining man of God?  We are faced with unprecedented times.  What we love will rise to the surface as we react to severe life changes.  What do we love?  Do we love the LORD more than anything?  Or, do we desire pleasures and things only to be disappointed in the end.