the money that you worship.
These last few weeks I have lived in a tent, on a bare
concrete floor, with no front door. The
village I am in is an hour bus ride from the nearest town. Today, the pastor’s family got their very
first flushable toilet. I have eaten
whatever they have put in front of me, and I am still healthy. I have not watched television. I have not been updated on my favorite sports
teams or MMA fighters and until just now had pretty much forgotten they
existed. I play soccer for sport, read
for entertainment, spend much time admiring the beauty of God’s creation, and
spend almost 100% of my time surrounded by a community of people committed to
love one another. I am single, and the
relationship I pursue is with the God of the Universe.
Open your eyes. You
can live without many of the things you worship. You can live without your beautiful, American
suburbs and carpet. You can live without
eating the foods that you devour for comfort. You can live without professional sports and entertainment. You can even live without sex, but you cannot
live without love and community.
I’ve been there; life according to the flesh is death
(Romans 8:5). God’s two great
commandments are that you love the Lord your God with all of your being and
that you love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:36-40). Man cannot live off bread alone, but by every
word of God (Matthew 4:4).
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you
once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the
power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of
disobedience-among whom we all once lived in the passions of the flesh,
carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children
of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But
God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us,
even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ-by
grace you have been saved-and raised up with him and seated with us with him in
the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show
the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ
Jesus. For by grace you have been saved
through faith. And this is not your own
doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God
prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:1-10)
