FOR RICHER OR POORER
Two texts come to mind right now. There’s Exodus 23:2 that insists we are not to “follow the crowd in doing wrong” and then there’s Deuteronomy 8:10-20 where God warns a blessed people against forgetting (8:11-14), “Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God...Otherwise when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down...then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God.”
It’s hateful the way we can be seduced into the lynch-mob mentality and sometimes even justify it with verses from the Bible. And it’s both hateful and sad to see how we both create and are shaped by an evil environment so that we take evil for good.
But blessing has its awful dangers too, doesn’t it? There’s something about a “spoiled” kid that really irritates us.
[A “spoiled” adult is only a little harder to recognize because we’re shrewder and disguise it with words and acting. Though you might have noticed how some gifted Bible student swaggered or was irritated by someone who won’t agree with him just because he says it’s so. You might have had the misfortune of knowing some popular preacher who was envious if one of his colleagues was richly praised for a job well done.]
It’s often the case that the spoiled kid isn’t sufficiently aware that he’s being obnoxious so he does no acting and you don’t need to be Columbo to spot him. But his lack of hypocrisy isn’t enough to keep him or her from getting under our skin. A spoiled brat was terrorizing the people in a doctor’s waiting room and his overly indulgent mother remarked to one victim of his abuse. “I don’t know what to make of him.” The man with the hurting shin murmured, “How about a nice rug?”
That’s part of the reason that it’s marvelous to see an unspoiled child. A kid who loves life and who even at an early age has learned to live happily but not at he expense of those around him, not on the misery of others. And it’s even more striking and inspiring to see an unspoiled child grow into an unspoiled adult. I’ve come across a number of those down the years. I don’t want to come across as “too sweet to be wholesome” but I have come across such people and if there is one there can be a hundred and if there is a hundred there can be thousands and if there are thousands there can be millions and no doubt are. God is at work in the world; at work in the lives of multiplied millions who don’t as yet know the Lord Jesus, people who haven’t heard the gospel of God in Jesus Christ! We need to acknowledge loveliness when we see it, wherever we see, in whomever we see it—it’s the work of God!
For all his flaws—and there were many, some of them raw and crass—Scotland’s favorite poet remains Robert Burns. Had God not been at work in his life [as in ours] there would have been nothing of a wholesome nature in him [or us]. It’s said of him that when he became famous and courted by the lords and ladies and the cream of society that he never forgot his roots. In public, in conversation with the elite, he would immediately and sometimes abruptly end the conversation to run across the road to laugh and blather on for a long time with an old friend. Say “bah humbug” if you will but I know personally the deep pleasure of being warmly greeted and treated by those who rose in the world. If you’ve had the good fortune of such an experience, to be received as a friend by someone way out of your social position you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
In R.D. Blackmore’s book Lorna Doone Lorna was stolen away from her aristocratic family as a little girl and was raised by a community of robbers and brigands whose character matched their status. But John Ridd met her unexpectedly and finally fell in love with her and she with him. Nothing about her wicked company and environment seemed to have affected her and her love for the plain workingman was open and sincere. Later she was rescued and taken off to London, back into the highfalutin circles of the rich and powerful, away from John. The crass evil of the Doone society couldn’t destroy the fineness of her character but would her position and the power she now wielded change her?
It’s a serious question in real life because haven’t we known people who lived gloriously through tough times only to take a moral nose-dive when blessing and prosperity came their way? That’s what troubled the lonely John Ridd who finally made a trip to London, somehow managed to make his way into Lorna’s company, guarded and fawned over as she was. Had she changed? Not a bit of her! She was still the lovely girl that John Ridd had come to know and love; she was still the girl with rich character and tender loyalty. Unspoiled by harsh and immoral surroundings and unspoiled by prosperity, acclaim and luxury she could never have dreamed of earlier.
How the world needs such people. How individuals need such people. And how desperately I need such people! And, more, how desperately we need to be that kind of person.
But whether you or I are one of them and even if were true that there was no other, believers know One! As a child he grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and men and he grew into a young man like no other. Believers call him the King of Kings, the Savior of humanity, the Conqueror of Sin and Death—and many other astonishing things.
His mother and his adopted father called him Jesus and his followers sing such things as:
Jesus thy name I love
All other names above
Jesus my Lord
O thou art all to me
Nothing to please I see
Nothing apart from thee
Jesus, my Lord!
