About entitlement

Devotional Guide For the week of June 29, 2008

THIS FREE LAND

About entitlement

To read the Bible in one year today read, Jeremiah 4-6


To Know:

³Open your hearts to us; we have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one,
we have taken advantage of no one. I do not say this to condemn you, for I
said before that you are in our hearts, to die together and to live
together.²(2 Cor. 7:2,3)

When Ronald Reagan died it was generally agreed he was the dominant
president of the second half of the 20th century. At 1 PM on October 29,
1985 Reagan entered a White House briefing room to tell us his thoughts on
the American social welfare system. Reagan began by telling the story of a
woman working to support herself as best she could. The woman, said the
president, staked out a spot on a busy street corner to sell apples at
twenty-five cents each. Morning after morning a certain man walked up to her
stand, put down a quarter, but never took an apple. After a year the woman
reached out to stop the man. He turned back and said, ³You probably want to
know why all this time I have given you a quarter and never taken your
apple.² ³Oh no,² she said, ³I want you to know that the apples are now
thirty-five cents.²

Reagan believed that government handouts generated an attitude of
entitlement. The president spoke to us for half an hour outlining his plan
to make every citizen self-sufficient. Needless to say even the president
could not reverse the direction of a government so massive that it needed
all the money generated by all the people for almost all of the first half
of each year in order to pay itself. What will ruin us as a people is not
the cost to the country in dollars to pay for government, rather it is the
price paid by the human spirit to enjoy an entitlement attitude.


To Do:

The Bible is written from the perspective of an undeserving human race that
receives all that it has from the hand of a gracious God. Those who believe
the Bible ought to live with a spirit of undying gratitude. An entitlement
mentality is the opposite. This attitude breeds a spirit of anger at others
who have what I was led to believe I deserve. This is a spiritual poison now
threatening our culture.



07038$-07038



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