7.10.13

Proverbs 18:23 The poor plead for mercy; the rich answer with insults.

 

My Thoughts

I thought there are so many ways to be poor besides money. We can be poor in spirit, the Bible talks about that one. Or we can be poor in education. We can be poor in knowledge that we get from a formal education or from a life education. We can be poor in health or poor in our image of ourselves. We can be poor in friendships. Some people are poor in nutrition. We can be poor in our ability to dream and we can be poor in choices because of our surroundings. The list of way to be poor are probably endless. We can be rich in our knowledge of science while we are poor in our knowledge of God.

 

The thing is so often when we are rich in something it is our of where we started, what our surroundings were as we grew up, our beginnings. In the broad picture of this we can use a country as the start in life. In America each little life has a chance for a good start, even the very poor have government assistance and education is provided by the government. But there are poor, poor places in the world where people are so busy scratching up something to even eat that they can't think far beyond that. We can see pictures of them and wonder as we sit in our houses why they don't do this to help themselves or why they don't do that to help themselves, but the truth is we have no idea how hard it is for them... how impossible it is for them to think beyond their hunger.

 

Someone that has grown up in church, with parents that taught the Bible in their homes... who had parents who knew how to depend on God can so often look at the person in the pew beside them at church and wonder "why" they don't understand God. They can wonder why they don't act in this way or that way. They can send down their judgment from a rich perspective of God without ever taking the time to understand that the person next to them has grown by leaps and bounds compared to where they started and they are doing really good, even though they don't have it all yet..they have grown. They are growing and they have come so far.

 

Then there are the people that are rich in health that quietly send down judgment on the sick with remarks like, "If they would just try they could do more." "They are able to do what they want to." Without ever stopping to realize that sometimes the sick can do only 5 of the 20 things that they can do... 3 of those are things they must do...the other 2 are the only choices they have left over because beyond that they can't move their bodies even if their house was on fire.

 

The thing is ... we are all rich in some things...and we are all poor in other things. We all have the things that come easy to us... and the things that come hard to us. That is why we are called to help each other, to love each other. Imagine how much the world would change if we sent out a helping hand in the things we are rich in....and got a helping hand in the things we are poor in? Instead of feeling all puffed up by our abilities and insulting the people that can't do what we can do or don't have the things that we have? We must learn not to answer with insults on the things we are rich in..we must learn that God made us rich in what ever we are rich in... and He gave us those riches so that we could share them... use them to be a blessing...not use them as a way to be "better than!"

 

What are you rich in today? Is there a way you could use it for good? I challenge you to be bold enough to recognize when you are standing on high ground and throwing out insults. Taking the step in recognizing our haughtiness is our first step and stretching out our hands and helping! But it takes such courage to see ourselves in that light... to say to ourselves "I are acting like a butt!" Then changing enough that others can see what we saw in ourselves.