Financial Crisis – What’s A Christian To Do?
WE have all seen the headlines: multiple bank and business bailouts, rising home foreclosures, jobs lost and firms downsizing, 401Ks and IRAs dropping in value, rising utility, grocery, and gasoline prices. What are Christians supposed to do when we’re hit by a national or personal financial crisis?How we weather a financial storm depends mostly on our attitude about who the money belongs to in the first place. Do we view our money as just that, ours? Or do we view it as coming from and belonging to God? If we see our income as being from the Lord, it makes…
Veeranjaneyulu is the grandson of a Hindu mystic who was buried alive as per his wish. Veeranjaneyulu followed his father’s tradition of being a Pujari for Hindu gods. In 1992, he participated in the Ayodhya Procession along with his uncle who was a VHP representative from Rayalseema. Yet when the Lord Jesus Christ called him, he and his family left everything and suffered excommunication and humiliation to follow the one True God. Veeranjaneyulu shares his life transforming story with C Stephen David.
The older and more mature in the Lord I become, the more I have learned to simplify my life and personal goals. Years ago my personal mission statement, vision statement, and goals were about two pages long. Now they are all one short sentence: “Love God and love people.” In my opinion, many of the popular self-help teachings in books today are for people that don’t know themselves or God very well. The more you mature in the Lord the less you rely on these “training wheels.” Many self-help teachers and motivational speakers get into things that are very practical, but without the leading of the Lord it is often akin to humanism.
Most of the early years of my life, I lived a life of illusion trying to cover the vacuum in me through food, friends, entertainment, education and work. My conscience knew for the most part what was right and what was wrong. Yet I leaned towards doing what is wrong. I was never able to prevail against the power of sin. I tried to beat the shortcomings in my life, but to my dismay all the contending was in vain. I knew my life was being led in a way opposite to where my own conscience accused me. But I was stubborn and made all excuses and justifications to lead my life the way I wanted. Gradually my conscience started to get hardened and I found myself spiritually estranged and in bondage to all kinds of evil deeds. I used to wonder if there was ever a way out of the burden some, monotonous cycle of life's misery.
In our humanity, we find a ‘false richness’ in the many things that surround us. We find our fulfillment in the words of encouragement from our friends; we lust for pleasure and comfort; we run after things that we think really matter; we find ourselves in the secular game of being fashionable and relevant and ‘well-put-together’. In his words Jesus asks us to embrace our poverty. We are the frail and worn, the weak and needy, the sick and wanting, the hidden and poor. Through our unique walks of life, we encounter our own poverty. We are the poor, not the rich. When Jesus speaks of poverty, He does so to imply that on our own we are capable of little. We are vulnerable to weaknesses in our flesh, weakened by the gross sinfulness of the world, and powerless to fight the attacks of the enemy. On our own we do not amount to much. At the end of the day, we are possessors of nothing.