Friday 6 August 2010

Get the right people off the bus...

and into their neighbourhoods where they can make all the difference.

One of the supreme ironies of American life is that the society that has talked and written most about the fulfillment of the self shows the least evidence of it. People obsessed with the cultivation of the self, the good life, the abundant life, have little to show for it but a cult of selfishness. The highest standard of living in the world has produced a bumper crop of obesity, anxiety, boredom, and meanness. (Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove)

It's no different in the church either. Maybe something is broken?

Romans 8:5-8
Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn't pleased at being ignored.

1 comment:

Linda said...

What you believe is the relationship with focus on self and degree of affluence?