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Three Dollars Worth of God

May 8, 2017

Wilbur Rees once wrote the following describing the average man’s view of God:

“I would like to buy $3 worth of God please, not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep, but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don’t want enough of him to make me love a black man or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation; I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy $3 dollars worth of God please.”

Disturbingly familiar isn’t it? We want to believe that there is a good and gracious God who loves and accepts all people, but suggest that this same perfect Being might also be moral, Holy, righteous and pure; or that He may ask something of us in return and suddenly our enthusiasm to know Him begins to wane.

The call of God for each man and woman is to a changed life. He is bidding us to come to him, to embrace Him – all of Him, and having been with Him to go forth from His presence and be an agent of change in the world.

We change the world by being part of His church, His instrument for global transformation. His church is not a social club, a convenience store, or a spa, it is an army, a family and it is His Body reaching out to the world. We, the church, His body are His only means for global transformation. We are His feet, His hands, His voice, His heart; to care for the lost, the broken, the rejected and the weak.

Perhaps this revelation, that we the church are His only option for reaching the world, is so uncomfortable, that we would prefer the $3 dollars worth of God instead. Three dollars worth may be comfortable, but it is not what we, the church, were made for!