Christian Entitlement: Confusing Grace with a Free Ride
Everywhere you look today, whether it’s Christians or the unsaved, they all seem to feel like they are owed something or they deserve something. Christians think that because they have faith in God, everything they do will be successful. The unsaved think that they are entitled whatever they may want. Most people believe that there are things that they don’t need to do because it’s “beneath” them. The virtues of humility and meekness are rapidly disappearing from our culture. Christians seem to be missing the entire point of grace.
Christians seem to think that because they have faith in God that everything they do will prosper. One only needs to look at the runaway success of books like the “Prayer of Jabez” to realize how prevalent this false belief is. For those of you who haven’t heard of the book, it takes a single verse from the Bible, and teaches that if you pray to be blessed and prosper, you will be successful and prosperous. This belief sets us as Christians up for failure both in life and in faith.
Our faith in God has nothing to do with gaining prosperity. If you look at the Bible, most Christians had nothing, and were not considered rich by any means. On the contrary, they sacrificed everything they had including their lives because of their faith. The idea that by being Christians and praying for prosperity we can have it has no Biblical backing. While God did allow some people to become rich while following Him, it’s not a guarantee. And it’s not wrong to try to be prosperous. We are supposed to work hard at whatever work we may do, and that may lead to prosperity. Rather, it’s the blind seeking of wealth at the expense of all else that’s wrong. We need to be good stewards of what God has allowed us to have, rather than wasting it on nonsense so that we can seem to be prosperous.
And yet, Christians everywhere pray for wealth; spending money they don’t have to create a seemingly prosperous life, and seem surprised when their debt crushes them as all their plans fall apart. Their feelings of entitlement are destroying them and the lives of their families. However, were we to ask them why they did this and why they made those choices to spend what they did not have, they will say things like “God won’t take it away from me because He wants me to be happy”, or “Satan is trying to attack me”. These people are incapable of seeing that it was neither God failing to make them prosperous nor was it Satan taking it from them, but rather their own foolishness and false feeling of entitlement that is ripping apart their lives and families. If only they had been content with what they had; remembering that God is with them, and with that, what more do they really need? (Hebrews 13:5)
For another Biblical example, let’s look at Luke 12:13-21, the parable of the rich fool. The rich man is convinced that he can be more wealthy than he already is, so he makes his plans to make a larger barn so he can store more grain. Unfortunately, he neglected to consult God with his plans, and he died that night without completing it. Jesus makes a strong statement in Luke 12:14, saying that “A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions”. Our possessions have no meaning to the value of our life. They are nothing. When we die, we “can’t take it with us”, as the old saying goes. Why then do we persist in valuing ourselves based on what we have and what we make? We should be storing up our treasures in heaven rather on earth (Matthew 6:20).
These feelings of entitlement go deeper though than the heretical belief that God wants and will MAKE us prosperous and happy. Christians everywhere seem to think that they don’t need to do things because it’s “beneath” them. They will give money gladly to support missions overseas, but you’ll never see them over there. Or they’ll give money to help hire someone to clean their church, but you’ll never see them scrubbing the floors. They’re too proud to step down to physically help someone with something.
This even carries over to their personal lives. They claim to be unable to find a job, but if you ask, they’ll skip over jobs they could get, because they feel they are “too good for the job” or it’s “beneath” them. What’s perhaps most disheartening is that some Christians move beyond just thinking the job is beneath them to thinking that the people who work in the service industry are beneath them. This attitude is so far from the examples that Jesus set. If Jesus Himself can scrub his disciples feet, how can we complain that a job isn’t good enough for us? Or that cleaning a bathroom to help someone is somehow wrong for us to do? And if Jesus could invite a tax collector to be His apostle, how can we not be polite to the people who serve us? We need to be humble and do the work that needs to be done. Treat people like equals, and not like something somehow less than us. We need to strive to have a servants heart.
What all of this seems to come down to is arrogance. Since we are “saved” we seem to think we’re better than everyone around us, and consequently we seem to feel that we deserve better than everyone else. The Bible says that God was merciful and we were saved by grace not by anything that we ever did. That means we were not given what we deserved, but rather given something that we most certainly did not deserve. (Ephesians 2:8-9)
How can we twist that around to mean that we deserve everything and that because of our free undeserved gift we’re better than the people around us? We expect them to act saved, and then reject them when they sin, rather than living the example that Jesus sent. We expect our lives to be easy and pleasant, even though the Bible is filled of stories of loss and persecution because people’s faith. We have taken the world’s standards of prosperity and twisted the Bible to support it. How can we as Christians justify this?
We as Christians need to take a good hard look at ourselves and make sure that our pursuits are godly. We need to forsake the sole pursuit of prosperity and worldly happiness, and focus on following God’s will in our lives. We need to be serving our fellow Christians and neighbors, rather than expecting everyone to serve us. Let’s see if we can turn the tide of this false entitlement in the Christian world.
