Gladly, The Cross-eyed Bear

My dad had a mondegreen. It was a joke about a song he heard as a child in Church - "Gladly, the cross-eyed bear."

Adrian Rogers bore a great cross and even though he has gone on to heaven the legacy of that cross remains. Literally three crosses that stand tall at the I-40 corridor in Memphis. Your TV and radio broadcast his sermons on Love Worth Finding.

A great ministry like this took a lot of money. So hundreds of thousands have supported him in making this great ministry possible. This is a commendable legacy.

But there is a negative side to this story. Christ said he has a cross for each of us to bear, individually. I don't believe that He meant for us to absent ourselves in "cross bearing" for the sake of another's cross. Neither did He expect us to create a great dependence on others to bear our own cross. I believe that the apostle Paul exemplified this principle. When he received finances he did it for the poor saints in Jerusalem. The ideal of a few great men raising great sums of money for a great world-reaching ministry is not biblical in my opinion. It means that money has replaced the work of the Holy Spirit and the by-product is the wealth and fame that the individual minister acquires. "The laborer is worthy of his hire!"

God does not need your money He needs you. So in the style of my normal "rant" let me say: the Church wants your money and your warm body to fill their seats. They want you to behave decently and orderly and not "split their church." Once you have proved your loyalty they want you to contribute your talents to the continuity of their cross-bearing. The message of today's church is "take up my cross and follow me."

I close because I have to be at work in an hour and twenty minutes in order to finance my cross-bearing.