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Wealth

Don’t Worry

A recent news magazine includes a photo taken on Wall Street.[1]  Amidst business men and women stands a person wearing a white mask.  The person appears to be a woman.  She holds up a sign.  The sign says, “You have every reason to worry.”  The message continues on another sign hung around her neck: “No end in sight.”  In the heat of the economic meltdown, here was one person’s conclusion: “You have every reason to worry.  No end in sight.”  Read More »Don’t Worry

The Gospel Truth About Giving

In Mark 12:41 Jesus and his apprentices are at the temple in Jerusalem.  They’ve gone from the large Court of the Gentiles to the smaller Court of Women. 

The Court of Gentiles is where Jesus ran off the money changers in Mark 11.  It’s also where the early church met initially in Acts. [i]   The Court of Women is the place beyond which women were not permitted.  It was a place of public worship. [ii] 

And there, in the Court of Women were several receptacles where people could give money to the temple and its ministry.[iii] 

Mark tells us, Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. (Mark 12:41a TNIV)Read More »The Gospel Truth About Giving

Is Rich Christian an Oxymoron?

Newsweek magazine once ran a cover story on poverty in America. Their cover featured the face of a one-year-old girl named Faith who had been rescued from a flooded home in New Orleans.  And as Jonathan Alter wrote in his article “The Other America,” Faith, a child in poverty, was a stark reminder of the economic disparities in this country.  As we watched pictures of the poorest of the poor in New Orleans, Alter says those pictures represented a growing population in this country.  In a nation of nearly 300 million people, 37 million live below the poverty line. The average CEO in this country earns 185 times as much as the average worker in this country. Alter argues, as others have before him, that there are two Americas: the rich America and the poor America: 37 million people make up poor America; 263 million make up rich America. Many of us are part of rich America.Read More »Is Rich Christian an Oxymoron?