What is the Recession For?...Continued from page 2

It means that the most godly people in the world are like a clear glass of water with a sediment of sin hidden at the bottom of the glass. And when the glass is struck?with Job’s suffering, or with our recession?the sediment of sin is stirred up and exposed, and the water becomes cloudy. That’s one of the things that recessions are for.

And it works both individually and socially.

Individually Paul said in 2 Corinthians 1:8-9, “We were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.”

God brought his own faithful servant Paul to the brink of death so that he might learn more deeply to rely not on himself but on God. If that happened to Paul, we may be sure that God is doing that for us as well in this recession. That we may rely on him and not ourselves.

At the bottom of every Christian heart?no matter how advanced in faith and godliness?there is the sediment of self-reliance. Then God shakes our lives, sometimes to the foundations, to show us our self-reliance and clean it out with a new, deeper reliance on him.

Socially, the recession reveals a host of sins that hurt people. The recent Ponzi schemes are one of the clearest examples. Promise people huge returns on their investment when there is nothing to invest in, then pay those returns with some of the next investments in nothing. And keep doing it for years, while you skim millions for yourself. Until a recession makes people want their investments back?and they don’t exist. Recessions have a wonderful power to expose that kind of deceit. What will it expose about you?

And, of course, the recession is especially good at exposing the sin of wasting other people’s money (or our own), and the sin of selfishness and greed in the mortgage business, and the sin of fear when everything starts coming down, and the sin of grumbling and impatience. And on and on. What a gift the recession is in the exposure of sin. May the Lord give us all the grace to repent and receive the forgiveness that God offers in Jesus Christ.

2. To Awaken Us to World Poverty

It’s astonishing how blind prosperity makes us to the miseries of the world. God has some remedies for that kind of indifference. For example, it says in Hebrews 13:3, “Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.”

How does that work? He says that there are people that we should care about who are imprison and mistreated. We tend to forget them. So he says, “Remember!” And he says: “As though with them” and “since you have a body.” So how does it work? It works like this: You have a body and sometimes it hurts. When it hurts, remember that there are people right now who are being mistreated?who are hurting much more than you. Imagine yourself in their shoes, and treat them the way you would want to be treated.