Rich People Need The Gospel, Too.

Before I start, allow me to just clear something up.  Everyone needs the gospel.  There isn’t a group of people on the planet that doesn’t need the gospel.  There isn’t a single person on the planet that doesn’t need the gospel.  With that said, why are we only focused on the poor?

Christ makes it pretty clear that it will be very difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.  I can name off the top of my head many local and national ministries aimed at helping the poor, and that’s great.  But I can’t really think of any ministries aimed at sharing the glory of Christ to the wealthy, and that’s not okay.  I think it’s become to the new cool thing to help and love the poor while we hate on and ignore the rich.  They have more stuff than else, so we don’t need to help their souls find Jesus.  It makes us bitter and not any better than the wealthy we criticize.  I was told recently that “true christians” are more concerned with poor people then any other group.  Not sure how accurate that is.

More than likely you are thinking of the poor person as the guy who has to go to the soup kitchen for a meal and the rich guy as the person in the 7 bathroom/5 bedroom house who has 4 cars.  Perhaps you are thinking of all THOSE rich people who need this message…hold on…if you are reading this… on a computer… in America, you are rich by any objective, historic, Biblical definition.

We are rich.  By any objective historic standard, everyone and all of us would be in the category of rich by the Bible’s standards. We have more than most people in history: more stuff, more food, more shelter, and more transportation than anyone in history. MIT economist Abhijt Banjerjee in his book Poor Economics maps out by city and country the population where 75% or more of the residents live on less than $2.00 a day.  It’s staggering.

My overall point, everyone needs the gospel.  Rich, poor, white, black, short, tall, etc.  EVERYONE needs the gospel.

_________

Next on Theory of The Phil: Why KONY 2012 is a load of crap no matter what your pastor says.