So often, understandably, we think of poverty merely in terms of physical hunger. However, Empowering Action seeks to emulate Christ by combatting both physical and spiritual poverty.
Robert Watson of the Salvation Army described it like this,
“We don’t consider the two aspects of our mission – to preach and to serve – as separate from one another. We don’t serve people who are hurting only to preach to them. And we don’t preach without offering the example of service without discrimination. To us, the two obligations are inseparable.”
A great verse that captures the essence of someone who has moved from spiritual poverty to spiritual affluence is Psalm 119:20,
“My soul is consumed with longing for your laws at all times.”
19th century theologian Albert Barnes commented regarding this passage,
“The desire to know more of the commands of God acted continually on him, exhausting his strength, and overcoming him. He so longed for God that, in our language, ‘it wore upon him’ – as any ungratified desire does. It was not the possession of the knowledge of God that exhausted him; it was the intenseness of his desire that he might know more of God.”
Spiritual hunger differs from physical hunger in that it cannot be satisfied, but instead produces a continual, ungratified desire to more intensely know God. That is Empowering Action’s goal in addressing spiritual poverty: cultivating in individuals an insatiable desire to know and honor God!
The picture above is from a March training event at EA’s new expanded office, where over 60 leaders, who possess that intense desire to know God personally and share him publically, met to be encouraged, equipped and empowered in our new Abundant Life Poverty Reduction Program.
