$149 million dollars is so much money, most of us could not even fathom the amount. If you have a $50,000 per year income, that's about 3,000 years of income. Three thousand years.
Friends, the point I'm trying to make is this: even though we cannot even begin to fathom how much money 149 million dollars is, there are 164.8 million suffering or dying children in the world. If you had 149 million dollars, it would not even be enough to have one dollar for each child. Did you get that? Can you wrap your mind around that? Are you beginning to understand? Even at your very worst, when you are very sick or uncomfortable, you are SO much better off than any of these kids, and there are 164.8 million. Right now, 164.8 million real lives are suffering and dying. This is not a guilt trip, or a sad infomercial. This is reality. This is real life. The truth is that if you have a house, clean water, and food, you are among the world's wealthiest people. You cannot sit in your extreme luxury and ignore the millions who are hurting and call yourself a Christian.
"Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." James 1:27
Katie Davis says:
"The truth is that the 143 million orphaned children and the 11 million who starve to death or die from preventable diseases and the 8.5 million who work as child slaves, prostitues, or under horrific working conditions and the 2.3 million who live with HIV add up to 164.8 million needy children. And though at first glance that looks like a big number, 2.1 billion people on this earth proclaim to be Christians. The truth is that if only 8 percent of the Christians would care for one more child, there would be no statistics left." (Emphasis mine)
Now that I'm pretty sure I've given you a picture of the need, here's the solution: YOU. You, whether you want to believe it or not, are extremely, unbelievably wealthy. You literally have before you the choice to give life to hundreds of people or not to. It may seem easy to ignore them, but they are just as real as you, and they are just as human as you are.
The thing with Satan is that he doesn't operate in extremes. He would never come to you with the idea of spending all your money on worthless things so you no longer have the ability to bring life to God's people. Instead, he convinces you one item at a time. Just this one coffee, this one concert, this one soda, this one pair of shoes, until suddenly the offering plate is being passed and you have no money. One coffee becomes a caffeine addiction, one concert becomes an obsession, one soda becomes a frequent craving, and one pair of shoes leads to another. Soon, our entire budget is nothing but indulgences, and we can't even see anything wrong with it.
It's time to stop. This is real. In the The Hunger Games series, there's two kinds of people: the poor, oppressed, starving, dying districts, and the fashion-obsessed, wealthy, extravagant, uncaring, and oblivious Capitol. Even though the heroine is a part of the districts and everyone wants to identify with her, does this situation not sound like first world and third world countries? Should we not more identify with the Capitol, who could care less about the districts as long as they have their entertainment, lush homes, extravagant food, and high fashion, even if it costs the districts in order for them to have it?
If you want some real perspective on this issue, I suggest you read The Hunger Games books. While I'm not sure that this is what the author was trying to portray, she did an excellent job of it.
The point of this long post is to call you to action. I encourage you to question every purchase you make. Is it wrong to buy things for pleasure? No. But the real question is, is it okay to make a habit of buying things only for pleasure when so many people die every day without experiencing Jesus's love?
