Man's Deepest Need

You might say that my only goal is to just get people to heaven. You might be right. But I’d rather just see a thousand people go to heaven and few get their needs met than see a thousand go to hell and only a few get their needs met. Why must our ideology be so small? I’d rather see a thousand people go to heaven and be discipled well on earth and meet their own needs and the needs of others and thereby bring into the fold all the more. Boy, am I glad that the person who witnessed to me didn’t want to try to meet my needs first. Or maybe I am coming at it wrong. Maybe he was trying to meet my absolute deepest need. Why have we got our priorities all mixed up? Where would I be without my savior? Oh I don’t want to think about it! Look at what He did for me! And to say that I ought to build someone a house before I tell them what Jesus did for them? Oh, they need a dwelling of righteousness that the Father might see Jesus’ and not their own. You see I’m quite ignorant. I am hopelessly incurable. I will never relinquish my belief in the power, the adequacy, the supremacy of the unadulterated gospel and its power to save, to renovate, and ensure future glorification by the power and sealing of the Holy Spirit. You say that I don’t care about the needs of the poor, the destitute and the oppressed. You couldn’t be more wrong. Well I don’t understand because I have been raised without want, without hunger, privileged beyond the vast majority of humanity. And you are right. I won’t even claim to know what its like to live in poverty or sickness. I won’t even self-righteously say that I know that I would, if given the opportunity, sell all my possessions and give to the poor. But how sad someday to see all the people for whom we did random acts of kindness being thrust out of the presence of God because they were found with only a righteousness of their own. Did we glorify God? Did we? Or did we glorify ourselves. I think it much more glorifying to God to deliver the life saving message and to be scorned by the world because we only care about the souls of men, something they don’t even believe, than to try to fit in with humanists. I think a lot of people today are ashamed of the gospel for this very reason. Colossians 2:4 says, “But just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not as pleasing men but God, who examines our hearts.” If someone dies without Christ then nothing you did for them in this life mattered. Nothing. They will spend an infinite amount of time in hell, receiving the punishment Jesus already paid for. And He entrusted us with the spreading of the good news! That Jesus paid for sin! We have been given the cure for death, physical and spiritual. We haven’t been given the cure for poverty or disease. Those are the side effects of our fallen condition. And the curing and easing of those evils is a side effect of the Gospel. The Gospel should not be a side effect of human rights activism. The Gospel plays second fiddle to nothing.

1 Corinthians 9:16
For if I preach the gospel, I have noting to boast of, for I am under compulsion; for woe is me if I do not preach the gospel.