Money

Let me know what you think about this – agree/disagree/why

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The Christian presented with an opportunity to make great wealth is obliged to take it; in what clearer way could God say, “You will be the financier of my kingdom.”

Regained Sensitivity

Lately I’ve been thinking about how sensitive people and history have been to their own impurity. Even the history of the word “sin” has a striking moment in one of Sophocles play.

Read Oedipus. You know, the guy who killed his father and married his mother. Notice at the moment the full weight of his mistakes is made perfectly clear to him, he twists in a common word we’ve heard so many times and he screams out, “I have sinned such sins that even strangling cannot punish.” This is one of the earliest uses of the Greek word “Harmatia” as a reference to moral wrong and notice how closely it is philologically linked not only with punishment, but with the idea that the acts are so vile they can’t even be fully punished.

In Luke, when the tax collector stands before God in the temple he doesn’t even dare to look towards heaven and he cries out, beating his chest, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Paul writes of himself as the chief of sinners, as a wretch, as the least of God’s people.

The prodigal son, when he returns, does not have the audacity to saunter back home as a son. Knowing the gravity of what he has done he comes back with the intention not of being received as a son, but as a mere servant.

What saddens me is that I don’t know if I always have this same sensitivity or brokenness over my sin. Not that I want to be burdened with melancholy over my weaknesses; no, I simply want to desire purity with a strong passion and yearning. More importantly, I want to worship God more intimately as I more fully come to understand exactly what I deserved verses what he has so kindly given me.