poverty on wilderness

God—Father, Son and Spirit; You are a God of compassion and love. Like the Israelites in the wilderness, we’ve known Your love, and experienced Your care and provision. Repeatedly You’ve answered our ...

The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.

Extreme poverty anywhere is a threat to human security everywhere.

In our modern materialistic world, it is easy to lose sight of that sense of longing. In her wonderful collection of essays Teaching a Stone to Talk , Annie Dillard speaks about that growing void...

The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.

Here then from both James and Paul is a central witness drawn from all of Scripture: God has sovereignly chosen to work in the world by beginning with the weak who are on the ‘outside,’ not the powerf...

Any transformational development that is not guided, empowered and made effective by the Holy Spirit will not prove sustainable. Furthermore, expecting and praying for supernatural interventions by th...

It is cheering to remember that Jesus Christ wandered this earth with no place to lay his head. “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his h...

The Spirit wants to make you threatening to all the forces of injustice and apathy and complacency that keep our world from flourishing.

The world says: "You have needs — satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This ...

The world is poor because her fortune is buried in the sky and all her treasure maps are of the earth.

Poverty is no sin

The claim here is not that the poor are inherently more righteous or sanctified than the rich. There is no place in the Bible that indicates that poverty is a desirable state or that material things a...

Lord, high and holy, meek and lowly, Thou hast brought me to the valley of vision, where I live in the depths but see thee in the heights; hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold thy glory. Let me lear...

God welcomes all who come to him. In weakness or strength. With much, or with little. Seek the Lord, while he can be found Call on him while he is near And be confident that Jesus will look upon you w...

The marginalized and downtrodden receive special insights. They are the ones who can see the pain and the injustice that are killing the world. It is to these voices that we must turn

Poverty is the absence of linkages, the absence of connections with others.

For most of us, it’s a personal experience of poverty that helps us transcend our often narrow experience of the world. In this excerpt from theologian Marva J. Dawn, the former Regent College profess...

A true prayer is an inventory of needs, a catalog of necessities, an exposure of secret wounds, a revelation of hidden poverty.

Though the West’s efforts through international aid have been well-intentioned, they have often done more harm than good. By focusing on what the poor lack, instead of what they have, the underlying m...

A missionary friend of mine once said, ‘Things were simple before I went to Africa. I knew what the African’s problem was, and I knew the answer. When I got there and began to know him as a person, th...

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.

These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught.

When I was in college I sometimes visited Bel Air Presbyterian Church, as did many of my friends. At that time Bel Air was known for being a place celebrities liked to visit. (This was not my favorite...

Many years ago, I watched a documentary on the remarkable ministry of Mother Teresa among the poverty-stricken people of Calcutta. At one stage there was a moving exchange between her and the commenta...

The beatitudes paint a comprehensive portrait of a Christian disciple. We see him [or her] first alone on his knees before God, acknowledging his spiritual poverty and mourning over it. This makes him...

While American society is rich in goods, it is extremely time-poor. Many societies in the two-thirds world, by contrast, are poor in material possessions, by our standards, but they are rich in time. ...

Anyone wanting to proclaim the glory of Christ to the ends of the earth must consider not only how to declare the gospel verbally but also how to demonstrate the gospel visibly in a world where so man...

The Bible insists that the best test of a nation's righteousness is how it treats the poorest and most vulnerable in its midst.

Where you live should not determine whether you live, or whether you die