“But Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked: thou are waxen fat, thou art covered with fatness; then he forsook God which made him and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation” (Deuteronomy 32:15).
Prosperity has wrought great evil in the body of Christ through slothfulness. A lesson from the children of Israel after they had become secure in their promised land. God’s chosen people became heedless sluggards, comfortable and fat-necked, like us, who from the gluttony and robbery and silent oppression of the American century have been passively enriched by the rapacious greed of financial oligarchs. We take the money. We boast in the freedom that is not free, and we well know that the costs are the lives and freedoms of global others. We are all complicit.
Yes, even the church has been caught up in the post-WWII flood of mammon. And because credibility and blessedness have become tied to monetary wealth in the absence of any true demonstration of the Holy Spirit through obedience and true holiness, without which no man will see the Lord, and the deception of technology and television programming that has elevated digital magic over the power of God, dulling the imaginations of men to the spiritual reality of God’s sovereignty and grace, the church began to judge the anointing of God by the accoutrements of the flesh, bought with the wages of witchcraft. Capitalism breeds competition. Competition demands a winner. If a winner, so a loser. And so, both leader and lay Christian have been lulled into a false sense of eternal security through their own spiritual ignorance, by which they now define blessedness by the acquisition of carnal fruit rather than by the spiritual fruit of faith and good works. Now, the people of God are merchandised by the leaders of the church. Conferences abound. But what of the gospel?
Conversely, Christ’s advent was at the height of Roman power and prosperity. Yet He lived as a homeless nomad, blessed above all. He was born in a manger and placed newborn into a feeding trough. He hailed from wretched Nazareth. Was raised in evil Egypt. He was in the world but not of it. We, the church, have forsaken His example. He said, “The servant is not greater than his master.” Yet we have sought to be richer, more accepted, more connected, more entrenched, more loved than even Christ himself was. And we have called that perversion of His ministry “blessed”.
theblackdostoyevsky 
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