The Rich Family in Church

By Eddie Ogan

I’ll never forget Easter 1946. I was 14, my little sister Ocy was 12, and my older sister Darlene 16. We lived at home with our mother, and the four of us knew what it was to do without many things. My dad had died five years before, leaving mom with seven school kids to raise and with no money.

By 1946 my older sisters were married and my brothers had left home. A month before Easter the pastor of our church announced that a special Easter offering would be taken to help a poor family. He asked everyone to save and give sacrificially. When we got home, we talked about what we could do. We decided to buy 50 pounds of potatoes and live on them for a month. This would allow us to save $20.00 of our grocery money for the offering. Then we thought that if we kept our electric lights out as much as possible and didn’t listen to the radio, we’d save money on that month’s electric bill. Darlene got as many house- and yard-cleaning jobs as possible, and both of us baby-sat for everyone we could. For 15 cents we could buy enough cotton loops to make three pot holders to sell for $1.00. We made $20.00 on pot holders. That month was one of the best of our lives.

Every day we counted the money to see how much we had saved. At night we’d sit in the dark and talk about how the poor family was going to enjoy having the money the church would give them. We had about 80 people in church, so we figured that whatever amount of money we had to give, the offering would surely be twenty times that much. After all, every Sunday the pastor reminded everyone to save for the sacrificial offering.

The day before Easter, Ocy and I walked to the grocery store and got the manager to give us three crisp, $20.00 bills and one $10.00 bill for all our change. We ran all the way home to show Mom and Darlene. We had never had so much money before. That night we were so excited we could hardly sleep. We didn’t care that we wouldn’t have new clothes for Easter; we had $70.00 for the sacrificial offering.

We could hardly wait to get to church! On Sunday morning rain was pouring. We didn’t own an umbrella, and the church was over a mile away from our home, but it didn’t seem to matter how wet we got. Darlene had cardboard in her shoes to fill the holes. The cardboard came apart, and her feet got wet; but we sat in church proudly. I heard some teenagers talking about the Smith girls having on their old dresses. I looked at them in their new clothes, and I felt rich.

When the sacrificial offering was taken, we were sitting on the second row from the front. Mom put in the $10.00, and each of us kids put in a $20.00. As we walked home after church, we sang all the way. At lunch Mom had a surprise for us. She had bought a dozen eggs, and we had boiled Easter eggs with our fried potatoes!

Late that afternoon the minister drove up in his car. Mom went to the door, talked to him for a moment, and then came back with an envelope in her hand. We asked what it was, but she didn’t say a word. She opened the envelope and out fell a bunch of money. There were three crisp, $20.00 bills, one $10.00 and seventeen $1.00 bills. Mom put the money back in the envelope. We didn’t talk, just sat and stared at the floor. We had gone from feeling like millionaires to feeling like poor white trash. We kids had such a happy life that we felt sorry for anyone who didn’t have our mom and dad for parents and a house full of brothers and sisters and other kids visiting constantly. We thought it was fun to share silverware and see whether we got the spoon or the fork that night. We had two knives that we passed around to whoever needed them. I knew we didn’t have a lot of things that other people had, but I’d never thought we were poor.

That Easter day I found out we were. The minister had brought us the money for the poor family, so we must be poor. I didn’t like being poor. I looked at my dress and worn-out shoes and felt so ashamed—I didn’t even want to go back to church. Everyone there probably already knew we were poor! I thought about school. I was in the ninth grade and at the top of my class of over 100 students. I wondered if the kids at school knew that we were poor. I decided that I could quit school since I had finished the eighth grade and that was all the law required at that time. We sat in silence for a long time. Then it got dark and we went to bed.

All that week we girls went to school and came home, and no one talked much. Finally, on Saturday, Mom asked us what we wanted to do with the money. What did poor people do with money? We didn’t know. We’d never known we were poor.

We didn’t want to go to church on Sunday, but Mom said we had to. Although it was a sunny day, we didn’t talk on the way. Mom started to sing, but no one joined in and she only sang one verse.

At church we had a missionary speaker. He talked about how churches in Africa made buildings out of sun-dried bricks, but they needed money to buy roofs. He said $100.00 would put a roof on a church. The minister said “Can’t we all sacrifice to help these poor people?” We looked at each other and smiled for the first time in a week. Mom reached into her purse and pulled out the envelope. She passed it to Darlene, Darlene gave it to me, and I handed it to Ocy. Ocy put it in the offering.

When the offering was counted, the minister announced that it was a little over $100.00. The missionary was excited. He hadn’t expected such a large offering from our small church. He said, “You must have some rich people in this church.” Suddenly it struck us! We had given $87.00 of that “little over $100.00.” We were the rich family in church! Hadn’t the missionary said so? From that day on I’ve never been poor again. I’ve always remembered how rich I am because I have Jesus!

Jesus Meek and Mild?

By David Hobbs

We all know the classic stereotype of the church—how God the Father is this vindictive tyrant of the Old testament, commanding His people to fight wars of bloody extermination and penalizing the gathering of sticks on the Sabbath with death (Num. 15:35). Jesus, on the other hand, is the meek and mild version of God seen in the New Testament. Jesus is the lover of mankind, the gentle Savior who forgave the woman caught in adultery, who will not break the bruised reed nor snuff out the smoldering wick (Mt. 12:20). Yes we all know the stereotype, but how many of us know the truth!?

Back when I first got saved, I wrote to the minister of the liberal church I grew up in, telling her about the glorious thing that had happened to me when I met Jesus. She wrote back saying that she loved Jesus too, that it was so wonderful how He came to bring “peace on earth” and “good will toward men.” [Luke 2:14, KJV]

But by this time I had gotten into the Bible and what it really said, as opposed to what we’ve been led to believe. I had to write her back, saying that the King James Version’s translation of that verse was misleading. Instead of “good will toward men,” referring to a generalized peace to everybody, it more accurately reads “Peace on earth to men of good will.” Not just to everybody, but to men whose hearts are right with God. As The Message puts it: “Glory to God in the heavenly heights, (p)eace to all men and women on earth who please him.” And how do we please Him? By accepting His gift of Christ our Savior.

But I had to go on from there to quote Mt. 10:34+ which deals directly with the idea of Jesus coming as this gentle influence wafting peace over the earth. There Jesus said,

"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law— 36 a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’"

Well that kind of dealt with those stereotypes, and I didn’t hear from her again.

Then there’s a parable in Luke 19 which we’re familiar with: the parable about “12 a man of noble birth who went to a distant country to have himself appointed king and then to return.” Jesus went on to say, “14 But his subjects hated him and sent a delegation after him to say, ‘We don’t want this man to be our king.’”

Most of the parable deals with the nobleman (Jesus) giving out money to his servants to be put to work until his return. And how one turned a mina into 10 minas, another into 5, etc. We get so caught up in the drama of the servants and their money that we tend to miss the subplot of the citizens who sent the delegation to express their opposition to his kingship. In the very last verse of the parable, after Jesus is finished dealing with the money and the servants and their stewardship and the lessons to be learned, there is this one, almost throwaway line: "27 But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them—bring them here and kill them in front of me.” Whaaaat?? You want to say that again Jesus? Kill them. In front of you? My stereotypes are spinning! Meek and mild Jesus? “Kill them in front of me.” This sounds an awful lot like the God of the Old Testament, as in Deut. 7:10 (NKJV)—“ [God] repays those who hate Him to their face, to destroy them. He will not be slack with him who hates Him; He will repay him to his face.”

I mentioned this verse to a Christian friend of mine, the editor of a Christian newspaper, and he said he’d never heard it before, and had no idea it was in the Bible. But it is in the Bible, in red, just like John 3:16.

Yes, meek and mild Jesus. The same Jesus that in Rev. 19 “treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty” and slays the armies of the antichrist with the sword that comes from His mouth; the same Jesus who slew Ananias and Sapphira for lying to the Holy Spirit, the same Jesus whom the evil spirits many times begged not to torture them (Luke 8:28).

Friends, the Bible has a lot to say about the fear of the Lord: that it’s the beginning of wisdom; that it’s clean, enduring forever; how the whole duty of man is to fear God and keep His commandments; how God accepts men from every nation who fear Him and do what is right; etc. etc. But how can we fear a God of “sloppy agape grace” as we have made Jesus out to be in the New Testament? If there is nothing to fear about such a God, then we have none of the benefits given to those who fear God either!

We need to get back to the whole counsel of God as taught in the Bible, and abandon our modern church stereotypes. Yes He loves us with an everlasting love, but it’s a love not to be trifled with!