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Comfortable, not callous


Amos 6:1

How horrible it will be for those who are at ease in Zion,

for those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria,

and for the heads of the leading nations,

to whom the nation of Israel comes.

Thought for the day – Comfortable, not callous

Jesus tells a challenging account of a poor man called Lazarus. He lives outside the gates of a wealthy man in abject poverty. He dies and goes to heaven, the rich man dies and ends up in hell being tormented. Jesus is making a point about money and what it reveals about people’s hearts. A point bought home in 2018 when a homeless person in Liverpool, woke up to find someone who had been out partying, standing over him urinating on him. An echo of an incident in New York in the 1970s, when a millionaire was photographed urinating on another homeless man. What both of these demonstrate is a callousness to the plight of those considerably worse off.

I don’t think God doesn’t want us to be comfortable. And I do think we as a church need to have a conversation about money, wealth and where it fits in with God’s plan for our lives. Something someone called Gabe Bult has really been influential in shaping my thinking about (I’ve put a link to his website in the episode notes). But as a good Methodist I also can’t help but think of John Wesley’s saying: ‘Earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can.’ So how do we relate to money and wealth?

Let’s face it, our lives can become a place where we are warm, well-fed and perfectly content while the world outside the door is falling apart. So the question comes to mind: ‘Do I still grieve over what grieves God? When did I last lose sleep over somebody else’s trouble?’ Because it’s when our money removes our ability to acknowledge and care for those less fortunate that it becomes a problem. It when we start becoming callous that we slip into the behaviours like the two mentioned earlier.

This blog post is part of the Walking the Way Podcast series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

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