The Danger of Prosperity

Thinking through the implications of Jeremiah 22.21 this morning. I spoke to you in your prosperity, but you said, "I will not listen." The Hebrew word translated "prosperity" ‏בְּשַׁלְוֹתַ֔יִךְ is one that means "a time of ease or unconcern." So God is saying, "when things were going well for you, I tried to get your attention, but you would not listen." This is the danger of prosperity, the danger of having it too good. When all of our needs are met; when we are not in a crisis, we tend to forget God and rely on ourselves. It's no use damning the people of Judah if we do not bother to search through our own hearts and ask, "Lord, is this me?"

My own heart is prone to wander in prosperity; prone to forget about God, or, as the songwriter put it, Prone to wander, Lord I feel it; Prone to leave the God I love. Just so. What can keep us faithful? What can keep us obedient? My own theory is that saturation in the word of God is the first key, because it exposes our heart again and again as the Holy Spirit uses it—it is, after all, sharper than any two-edged sword (Heb 4.12)—to get at our heart and motives and remind us again and again how essential it is to obey God's word.

Are you saturated in the Word of God? If not, you are treading a thin plank indeed.

Solzhenitsyn on Sacrifice

This is an excerpt from Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize lecture. It is an astounding lecture.

The spirit of Munich has by no means retreated into the past; it was not merely a brief episode. I even venture to say that the spirit of Munich prevails in the Twentieth Century. The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a sickness of the will of successful people, it is the daily condition of those who have given themselves up to the thirst after prosperity at any price, to material well-being as the chief goal of earthly existence. Such people - and there are many in today's world - elect passivity and retreat, just so as their accustomed life might drag on a bit longer, just so as not to step over the threshold of hardship today - and tomorrow, you'll see, it will all be all right. (But it will never be all right! The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.)

He was, unfortunately, absolutely correct. Prosperity breeds inevitably a lack of will because all we want is to be comfortable, to avoid trouble. There are some things more important than my own personal peace. Or as Kevin Costner's character put it in Open Range: "There's things that gnaw at a man worse than dying."