Speaker: The Rev. Mark Galloway

The Rev. Stomberg and the Rev. Galloway discuss the love of money and how Christians should handle their wealth. The conversation also covers wealth, generosity, capitalism vs. socialism, immigration, the principle of subsidiarity, circles of influence vs. concern, and more.

The rich man in Jesus’ parable about Lazarus isolated himself in his wealth, never inviting the poor and the lowly to join him. The rich man’s greed separated him from Abraham across a great chasm in the afterlife, which could never be crossed. Christians living in 21st century America should be careful to consider how we, like the rich man, might be allowing our own arrogance to prevent us from loving God and our neighbor.

In our sinful nature, we naturally seek personal gain and prosperity over the Word of the Lord. We are tempted to fool God into thinking we are perfectly good (when we are not), just as we fool other people into thinking we are more righteous than they. But God will not be fooled by our human deceptions, and we cannot escape our own hypocrisy except through the Grace of Jesus Christ. Prosperity will always disappear, but the Word of the Lord stands forever.

We live in a time of great arrogance. We are an arrogant people, and arrogance comes from pride. Pride was not created for human beings; pride comes from the Fall in the Garden. Pride is the unwillingness to accept the truth out of our own insecurity. One defense against these temptations is humor, for it requires us to be poor in spirit, and embrace humility. Humor for the Christian is a serious virtue, for it teaches us to laugh at ourselves.

We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. Do we hear them cheering for us? But what are they cheering for us to do? It isn’t for us to mope through life. It is for us to run the race with endurance. This is what we are called to do as disciples of Christ, in the good days and the bad. Our lives are filled with the endless, useless noise of sin. Only by cutting through the noise, and focusing on the call of the Lord and the cheers of the Saints, can we run the race with endurance.

Our earthly lives are fleeting, and most people have great difficulty with that – a lament which is echoed by the author of Ecclesiastes. To cope with our mortality, so many of us resort to vanity – pride in our own achievements or appearance, and devoting our lives to worthless things. We pile up possessions on earth which we cannot take with us when we die. But our most prized possession should in fact be God. As the famous hymn says, “we are rich in things, but poor in soul.” But as Luke’s Gospel challenges us, we must instead be rich towards God.

If we don’t do what we ought, and if we don’t give due diligence to doing the things we should, then we are going to fall down, susceptible to the powers of sin. There is a fatigue currently affecting believers to do this due diligence in the midst of a culture of increasing opposition to the Gospel. We can only overcome spiritual fatigue by trusting God at His Word and resting in his Son Jesus Christ. Listen as the Rev. Galloway instructs us to overcome spiritual fatigue by following in the example of the Good Samaritan.

The Day of Pentecost is one of the most widely misconstrued events in Church history. Contrary to popular belief, the Day of Pentecost is about far more than the gift of speaking in tongues – it is about the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Church, empowering Christians as God’s chosen people to go forth and renew the face of the earth.

Jesus told his disciples, “Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34). The Rev. Galloway challenges us to examine how far we fall short of this commandment and reminds us that love does not mean saying things people want to hear – it means telling the truth.