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“An otherwise righteous...poor person in a shelter can be off base if he or she judges a middle class or wealthy believer unjustly or a group for not “caring enough” and therefore...”Laodicean”. Of course I’m sure the shoe doesn’t fit you??!! ;)”

First, I was speaking on the whole. That doesn’t mean there aren’t many exceptions, just as when Jesus said about the church in Sardis:

“Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with me in white: for they are worthy.”

I’m sure the church in America is a mix of the types of professing believers described in the seven churches in Revelation.

So, I wasn’t speaking of all individual American Christians.

Meanwhile, I notice you took what you know are often negative traits of (or traits associated with) homeless and low-income people and applied them to me.

The church here is becoming more and more an exclusive club. Of course, the official “rules” say otherwise, but those outside the club often can’t meet the standards. Those are generalities I’ve experienced.

I’ve frequently read of believers in poor countries praying for believers here as they think our wealth is more of a danger to us, and given how faith is on the decline, there’s a lot to that.

And yes, judging righteously is paramount.

And we should be cautious about who we choose to embrace and who we don’t.

In recent years, when I worked at a fast food restaurant, I tried to do all I could to do the job right and to remember that I was working for the Lord and not for man.

Often times, the standards of my co-workers, including managers, were low and laxed — and we were dealing with food that people ingested. So if they were going to insist on, for example, using the toilet plunger that was constantly in use in the men’s room in the kitchen sink, I’d get hold of it first if it seemed like they were going to need it and soak it in bleachy water first. I was constantly intervening against their low standards, often to their annoyance. Literally one of my co-workers brushed his teeth, to the point of his gums bleeding, with a brush I later found was for sanitation of one of the machines. Managers were indifferent when customers brought back drinks with plastic chunks in them and when the ice bins didn’t drain properly. I could go on and on.

One of the managers was a young, part-time Christian pastor associated with a local megachurch. I’m not sure how much he worked with them, if at all, but he did perform marriages on his own. But his standards were those of the other employees, and he was well-accepted by them. Despite being a pastor, he wasn’t above dirty jokes, and one day he suddenly started singing Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” and then told me that that song was about me.

Whom we choose, whom we approve of and advance, we likely choose their company forever — and we’ll be blessed, or stuck with, all of them and all of what they are. Not just the nice parts. So it makes every bit of sense to judge very cautiously and righteously, assuming nothing. It’s easy for starved sheep to be irritable, and easy for well-fed wolves to act like sheep.

And God is a witness to everything we do, including the meditations of our hearts. I’m grateful that He “taught my heart to fear,” and gave me love for Him and appreciation for His goodness and justness. The worst thing that can happen to any believer is to grow bitter towards Him and to come to feel superior to Him — to say, “I’ve been faithful to Him, but He hasn’t treated me well.” I trust His plan.

So God knows that I’ve tried in all situations to do what He requires and to stay faithful to Him, even if it means hardship to me, and even while people looking from the outside assume the worst.

For example: “You must be homeless and low-income because you’re not a good steward of what God has given you. You have an entitled, envious, greedy mindset. You think the whole world is what’s wrong, and can’t even fathom that your big problem is you. You just blame others. If you’d ever develop some true integrity and walk the straight and narrow, and stop trying to get ahead by any means necessary, life would just start working out for you.”

Well, that’s just not how it is. And God knows that as He’s been with me all these years, and *I* know that He has been. I know He’s seen all that I’ve been through because so often I won’t compromise on His standards. I get food stamps presently, and I could sell them for cash as I do have things I really need, but I wouldn’t because it wouldn’t be right, and it would also send a message to the other people I sold them to that doing so was all right (I can, however, be sympathetic to people who do sell them because they actually need things but have fallen through the cracks in the system).

I’m also not only a Republican despite often being told that I “vote against my best interests,” but I spend a lot of time painstakingly researching and then discussing the issues online with other people. God knows that if the work is everywhere around me, and so much of it undone, and I can do it, I’ll do it, trusting Him.

The other day, with nowhere to go, I was walking down a city sidewalk behind a large group of men who seemed to be participating in a convention. We passed an e-scooter lying entirely in the street. They kept walking, but despite me carrying my possessions with me, I carefully stepped into the street and dragged that e-scooter onto the sidewalk. It could cause someone some serious damage to their car, or cause an accident. It was close to dark. You know, mdmathis6, if I see a large chunk of something in the road that could cause such damage or an accident, I’ll try to get it out of there. I can’t even say how many times I’ve done that while determining what I have to do to stay safe myself while doing so.

I know many people from all walks of life adopt an “eff it” attitude. But that, to me, is losing what life is all about — why God created us. It is for us to learn not to say “eff it” when things don’t go right, and to learn to trust HIM more and more, and to do His will — what is right. No matter what. That brings us into closer fellowship with Him, that brings us true reward and benefit.

As the years go by, I’ve been learning to accept that I should expect little from the church in America, which I don’t seem to have any real place in.

But I count on the Lord and have no expectation anymore of “belonging” in the church here as it is. It seems that it will trust and believe in the Beast system as long as it’s good to it, until the Beast fully turns to persecuting it. And it is now starting to come for the middle class. But the persecuting and oppressing it will do, it has already been doing to the low-income. E.g. “beggars can’t be choosers— and that so often includes conscience rights. And now we see that the Beast system is increasingly coming for those conscience rights of the middle class, too. Just as a parallel system was set up to help pregnant women who might get abortions make the choice to keep their babies, those other choices have been needed everywhere in society where the poor and low-income so often are only provided with a worldly option and worldly help. Given all that the Lord has provided for the church in America — so much peace, prosperity and freedom — does it have any excuse for not providing those other avenues and alternatives?

Yet, I keep going to the church and keep trying. I keep some hope for it, in some ways. Why, I keep asking the Lord to correct me if and when I’m being too judgmental towards it. Perhaps what the Lord has made easy for me isn’t so easy for others. And like Joseph, who tried his brothers when they eventually came to him for help in Egypt, but also then helped them and wholeheartedly reconciled with them, while recognizing that his years of hardship in slavery and in prison had ultimately been brought about by the Lord to train him to serve others in a very hard time, what God is accomplishing in the world is what’s most important to me. Maybe I’ll be able to actually come together more with the church here if and when our time of calamity worsens. I only see and have a miniscule part in God’s great work, and I’m certainly very limited in my understanding of it. He is over it all. It isn’t mine, or ours, to second-guess him, and there’s every blessing in not doing so.

I’m also a defender of the church here. The world exalts itself against the church and faith in Christ. I’d like for many, many more people to have what is available to the church — the Heaven of the Lord’s vineyard, the life of faith. But it’s not primarily to the church’s credit that this Heaven exists. The bounty of peace, truth, joy, etc., which the church partakes of is from the Lord.

Recently I read of a woman with Down syndrome who just finished copying out the entire Bible by hand. That sort of work inspired by the Spirit, and from scratch, from the heart, is the work of faith, as Noah built the Ark under the Lord’s direction. The Lord has made so much of that, of His storehouse of spiritual resources, available to us.