LAZARUS OUR BROTHER

Powerful Comment - by 'Hindsfeet'.

... The visible "priests and prophets" boast over and over about
how rich they are, how blessed they are, how they don't suffer for
lack of anything.

Yet the beggar Lazarus lies right outside our very own gates.
These imposters trip over him every day and in their blindness
walk right past him....

I was raised on the American Dream - nice middle class family,
comfortable middle class prosperity. But in a very bizarre series
of circumstances we suffered a God-ordained financial reversal
and I have lived in the ghetto now for the past eight years.

It was the worst kind of culture shock both in the natural and in
the spirit. The very neighborhood I used to avoid (or if I had to go
through it was with windows up, doors locked and at lightning
speed) has become the place God has poured out His refining fire on me.

I cried and cried to Him as I witnessed crack deals, gang murders,
and hookers setting up shop on the wall of my side yard. "Oh
Lord! WHEN are you going to get me OUT of here?" And then He
asked ME a question. "When are YOU going to learn to love your
neighbor as yourself?"

The scales instantly fell off of my eyes and I repented HARD that
I was the rich man in that story. And now I wouldn't trade the
transformation of my heart for any of the comforts this American
culture has to offer.

I listen to the prosperity preachers now (as well as their echo in
the local churches I've attended) and I see that they have
exchanged the Voice of the Blood for the hawking cries of the
money-changers. I see a "body" that has received a strange
transfusion - the veins that used to flow with the Blood of Jesus
now spurt gold.

I am ashamed of the greed and the lust for comfort and money
that is the heartbeat of this country. American...Laodicean...
Babylonian - one common denominator: Jesus is OUTSIDE the
door just like the beggar Lazarus.