Success?
A friend of mine shared a note from Ravi Zacharias and I want to summarize it. My friend has left the business community to go into ministry with YoungLife. This makes the second good friend I've had to leave the "world" and join YoungLife. I love YoungLife - of the ministries I support, I get the most out of my support of YoungLife. YL goes into the world of teenagers to love them on their own turf. It truly is the Gospel in action. I am impressed by my friend's (both of them) passion for the Lord that they would give up all that the world expects to hang around with and minister to teenagers. In so doing, they have given up on what the world defines as "success" in order to seek success in their relationship withe the Lord.

To the Zacharias note...

He talks about the distress he used to feel over the starving kids of Africa. "If they were starving, he wonders, why did they look so fat?" While they look fat and full, their distended bellies are a sign of their severe malnourishment.

Just as he misinterpreted their swollen bellies, Zacharias believes it is very possible to misjudge the health of our culture and society. The abundant evidence of material prosperity in our country belies the spiritual poverty of the West.

Everything is "up" in America - real income, longevity, home size, cars per driver, phone calls made annually, trips taken, highest degrees earned, IQ scores, just about every objective indicator of social welfare has trended upward on an upward basis for two generations. Many subjective indicators are trending higher too - personal freedom, women's freedom, reductions of bias against minorities, etc.

Yet the trendline for happiness has been flat for 50 years. The number of people who consider themselves "very happy" has been trending lower for the past 50 years. Yet we mask our unhappiness like a starving child covered in designer clothes. America isn't the first society to mask spiritual starvation with material excess.

Jesus warned the church at Laodicea of this very thing: "For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you were wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked." Rev 3:17

Zacharias says that wealth in an of itself isn't wrong but it is possessive. Wealth will possess us if we are not careful. He encourages us to ask God to evict the love of the world from our heart - so that we may prepare ourself to taste and see that the Lord is good.

Soar!