I met with a friend of mine in beautiful Colorado this weekend. He is a financial genius and was one of the men who invented the hedge fund. It almost goes without saying that he is highly intelligent, well read, and articulate and is a tremendous student of the psyche of our culture. In fact he used this talent to engineer a marketing plan that he leveraged into building a virtual fortune.
I wanted his opinion on developing messaging for the Jesus Alliance that could drive people to take action and motivate them to actually get involved in saving our country. His answer was that people in this country and indeed around the world have reached a stage of apathy. He said the next step was total surrender and then our nation will be completely lost.
Showing an 8 year old child that has been ravaged by a pedophile, double digit murders daily in Chicago, race riots in Baltimore, Ferguson, and elsewhere, college campus massacres, Planned Parenthood selling body parts of babies and laughing about it over wine and salad, our nation’s highest officials routinely lying to the public, people being beheaded or shot because they follow Jesus, perverted sex being flaunted on every form of media, violent video games, putting needles in Halloween candy, our government taking down the Ten Commandments and establishing sanctuary cities for criminals, the list is long and my friend told me that people have become numb to it. No issue, no matter how shocking or devastating to the moral fabric of our country galvanizes the nation anymore and the masses are primarily concerned with their own lives and getting through the day and nothing much else.
As I mulled it over I mumbled out loud that what the country had experienced in the last fifty years was that it had lost hope and love.
“Exactly!” he said.
I had been to the CBMC conference in Vail Colorado and during a break I walked through the streets of Vail. I happened to observe some young people walking along openly smoking pot, laughing and talking. Aside from me, no one seemed to even notice them. When I arrived at the airport early Sunday morning and walked through it looking for a place to have breakfast, I saw no less than five bars open and full of people drinking alcoholic beverages at 8:30 on Sunday morning.
It is obvious that what we need in this country and indeed around the world is the hope and love of Jesus Christ, but how can we reach them? I remembered the very first revelation that God gave me several years ago. He said very clearly, “The world is ruled by money and not by conviction”. At the time I had no idea what this meant, but lately I think I understand more than I ever did. Government leaders don’t vote their convictions when legalizing marijuana and defunding Planned Parenthood; it’s about money. The same is true with business people, whereby greed trumps real people; people don’t starve to death because there is not enough food; there is not enough love. People don’t become addicted to sex, drugs, and alcohol because they want to be addicted; they do so because they have lost hope.
When you think about it, there isn’t one segment of our culture where this money axiom fails to apply. It’s true even in the church whereby a recent Barna study conclusively proved that the majority of the pastors in this country have high attendance and giving as their primary motivation; they don’t fail to preach the Gospel because of lack of conviction; it’s about money. Why preach that according to God’s Holy Word that homosexual activity is a sin, or abortion violates the sanctity of life that is so precious to our Lord when half your congregation believes otherwise and might quit attending and giving.
Is the one issue that will galvanize our nation to do something one of focusing on the pocketbook of the believers that constitute body of Christ? Will that make them vote for righteous leaders? Will that make them volunteer to do something to change our current course of self-destruction? Maybe Mr. Trump is tapping into this money phenomenon now.
There is a song with lyrics that go something like this: You know the best things in life are free, but you can give them to the birds and bees, I want money! Hope and love are the best things in life and they are free gifts from our Lord and Savior, but society seems to spurn them more and more every day, opting for our “old friend money”.
I think I’m finally beginning to understand the following verse:
1 Tim. 6:10
For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. And some people, craving money, have wandered from the true faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows.
November 2, 2015 – Click here to listen