Luke 4:18 — “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed”
According to the latest research (Giving information), only five percent of Christians give a weekly ten percent tithe to the church, eighty percent give two percent, and fifteen percent give ZERO! If you play the law of averages game, that means that right now the giving rate in the church is two point five percent per capita. To be honest, we should be convicted of our lack of Christlikeness in the area of giving and taking care of the poor.
I can hear it now; but, John, the economy is so bad; the Sequester; I lost twenty percent of my income with the furloughs; football season is coming and I really needed a new TV.
I’ll bet those aren’t the only excuses. There are probably a lot of excuses being used to justify the greed, selfishness, and hoarding that has been going on in the church, but the TRUTH is, they are only excuses.
By way of comparison, the giving ratio of believers during the Great Depression was three point three percent per capita, and I don’t think anyone would debate that we as a whole are far better off than the people who lived then.
Unfortunately, the bad news doesn’t end there, because directly related to the tragedy of selfishness in the church is the explosion of federal spending. In 2012, the Federal Government spent sixty-two percent of its budget in what are now called Entitlements (a conversation for another day, but who said you were entitled to this?). Forty-four percent of the entitlement spending is on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid with another eighteen percent spent on Obamacare. Those figures don’t take into consideration the eighty-five billion in food stamps, forty-four billion in disability, fifty-one billion in housing assistance, and five-hundred-twenty billion in Unemployment Benefits (Federal Budget Breakdown).
In other words, our country is in major financial trouble, and it is also the second sign that the church has lost her moral authority.
You see, the failure of the church to do what Jesus has commanded it to do has directly affected the spending of our federal government. I think what is even worse than our failure to give is our failure as Christians to live up to the standard that Jesus set. Jesus took care of the poor, and we point our finger at the federal government for doing our job!
