Don’t know if you saw this or not, but Duke has announced they are building a new $800 million cancer
wing, made up in large part by donations from people who want to see a disease cured.
The chairman of our elders, Michael Jongkind, said this, in light of yesterday’s message:
“100 years ago you could walk into any
community and at the center was a cathedral. It was usually a great piece
of architecture that took a couple of generations to build. Today the
architecture that marks the community is the hospital… 800 million bucks worth of
architecture for only one disease state that man has not been able to conquer. What we are proposing is 15 million worth of renovated warehouse space from which to declare the cure for the
ultimate disease, sin. Why should Duke, UNC Memorial, and WakeMed be more zealous to cure cancer than we are to preach Jesus?”
That’s some great perspective. Now, let’s be clear…we don’t begrudge in the slightest the zeal to cure cancer. May they prosper! But shouldn’t the people of God be more zealous for Jesus than the hospitals are about cancer?
Every preventable death is a tragedy. Thank God for what they are doing in Duke. That said, we all eventually die, whether of cancer or something else. But we don’t all live on eternally with Jesus. We, Summit Church, have the one message which makes the difference in eternal life and eternal death. We, the church, are working to prevent suffering… primarily eternal suffering.
God, help us not to simply toss in our spare change to this Believe Project, but may we leverage all of our lives, investing our resources into this mission that reaps eternal dividends! I want you to think, soberly, on what it would be like to stand before Jesus one day, having spent the majority of all that He gave to you on yourself… to build a house(s) or drive a car that ultimately fades away. Invest for eternity!
It’s interesting to note the funding fir the hospital, in large part, was given by people whose lives have been touched, or changed forever, by the disease. In the same way, those if us whose lives have been changed by Jesus are the ones who provide, or, should provide, the funding for church missions.