Serving Others

A friend let me borrow Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper and I finished reading it a couple weeks ago.  Overall I thought it was a good read, but for some reason it was hard for me to “get into it.”  I’m glad I forced myself to persevere because I thought the last few chapters were excellent.  Maybe I should have just skipped ahead as I have the tendency to do sometimes.

In any case, here’s a quote from J. Campbell White that Piper uses that impacted me.

The effort to evangelize the world presents the speediest and surest methods of saving the Church.  Our material resources are so stupendous that we are in danger of coming to trust in riches rather than in God.  If a man is growing large in wealth, nothing but constant giving can keep him from growing small is soul.  The evangelism of the world is the only enterprise large enough and important enough to provide an adequate outlet for the Church’s wealth.

Maybe it has stayed with me because I recently read this quote from CS Lewis in Mere Christianity:

In the passage where the New Testament says that every one must work, it gives as a reason “in order that he may have something to give to those in need.”  Charity-giving to the poor-is an essential part of Christian morality: in the frightening parable of the sheep and the goats it seems to be the point on which everything turns.  Some people nowadays say that charity ought to be unnecessary and that instead of giving to the poor we ought to be producing a society in which there were no poor to give to.  They may be quite right in saying that we ought to produce this kind of society.  But if anyone thinks that, as a consequence, you can stop giving in the meantime, then he has parted company with all Christian morality.  I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give.  I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.  In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc.., is up to the standard common among those with he same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little.  If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small.

Maybe my family budget will look different this year.  I am praying that it does.

God Bless,
RJ
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