Miracle Cures
Non-profits, such as churches, seem to be particularly prone to the belief in miracle cures. While God does sometimes perform miracles, far more often He works through the mundane. It’s very easy to look favorably upon grandiose projects. It’s easy to want to evangelize the world, or to eliminate poverty. But, try as we might, we can’t. Only God can.
Each of us must ask himself: Where do I fit into God’s overall plan? In what detail can God use me and my church to His ultimate purpose? What specific thing does God want me to do for Him? We need to have reasonable objectives and realistic goals.
Otherwise we will fall into the same traps that have snared a million others. Their goals become self-evident moral absolutes, rather than obtainable targets based on moral objectives. Their programs become the embodiment of goodness. Any suggestion that they try something different, to get better results, is an attack on their raison d’etre. They lose their sense of balance. They waste their resources, fail to slough off yesterday, and let new opportunities slip away.
To give just one example, how many of us know of The Partnership for a Drug-Free America? I guess it wouldn’t be quite so euphonic to name it “The Partnership to Minimize the Damage Done by Drug Abuse.” Yet, if ten million people have to die in the war against drugs, will it have been worth it? Is any price too high, as long as the objective is eliminating drugs, rather than helping drug addicts? And the failure to meet that objective, far from indicating that the objective is wrong, is only an excuse to redouble efforts. And waste more resources. What would happen, I wonder, if small-time inner-city missionaries got the money wasted by anti-drug zealots? As the War on Drugs fades out of vogue, what will happen to the Partnership for a Drug-Free America?
Tomorrow’s churches and inner-city missions will have to pick up the slack. Are we prepared for the opportunity? But more on that some other time…
Governments are non-profit institutions, too. If citizens organizations can be plagued by the disease, how much more so an institution further plagued by the power to compel its will?
I am stymied that christians would seek help from government. Despite decades of political failure. Despite widespread corruption. Despite officially-sanctioned violence against Christians in China, Indonesia, and elsewhere. How many times has Social Security been “saved” by raising taxes and cutting benefits? How many government welfare programs have failed even to reduce poverty? And yet, Tony Blair proclaims that he will not relent until poverty is eliminated!
How will politicians accomplish what God Himself has failed to? How will they find the wisdom and self-control denied to the church? A hundred years of failed attempts have made it clear, government holds no miracle cures.
No, these jobs are much too big for us mere humans to handle. We have to leave them in God’s hands. We have to trust that He will somehow coordinate all the ongoing efforts, in order to reach as much of the world as possible. That He will provide work for the poor, and food for the hungry. If we try to take on the entire burden ourselves, we are doomed to failure.
But God never fails. Nonetheless we need faith to believe it when the world is falling apart around us. We need faith to trust in God. To step out and do what He has given us to do, and to leave the rest to Him. Maybe we don’t understand how God can pull it off. We may never understand. Such is the nature of a miracle.
Government holds no miracle cures. But God does.