The Poor You Have With You Always

We have the best medical care in the world right here. We have some of the best medical equipment in the world here.

I visited with a missionary in Russia once, who told me how grateful he was that when they had to go to the hospital that the doctors agreed to use a new needle with them, because they usually reuse them several times.

Good medical care is costly, and it can lead to poverty.

c. The sins of others -

Children make up 22.6% of the population of our country, but they make up 31.1% of those living in poverty. Is that their fault? No. It is the fault of others.

Other people’s sins can cause poverty. Think of the number of women who have been abandoned, who end up living in poverty. Think of the children living in poverty because their parents are addicted to one thing or another.

6. Changing definition of poverty

6th, one of the leading causes, if not THE leading cause of poverty in the United States is us redefining what poverty is.

Do you remember how Jesus described those in poverty?

There was the woman who had spent all she had with the doctors. There was the widow who put her last 2 mites into the temple offering. That is poverty.

Some of you remember Little Bill. Little Bill lived in Meadowlea and used to attend here before he passed. Little Bill grew up in a home with an alcoholic father. They had nothing. He told me of how great it was when they finally got together enough money to put screens in their windows.

A neighbor down the road started taking Little Bill fishing with him when Bill was 5, just so they’d have some food in the house. That’s poverty.

My mother and her siblings grew up at a time when their clothes were made from feed sacks. The meat they ate either came from the chicken farm they had or they hunted it in the woods. Once a year a neighbor down the road would bother a hog and they would get some. They got 1 pair of shoes a year when school started, and that pair had to last them until school started the next year.

I have pastored folks who grew up as sharecroppers. Mr. James Bailey told me of picking cotton as a child. He was too young and tool small to pull a cotton sack, so his mother made his first one from a pillow case.

Back then, it was beans and biscuit for supper, and the same for breakfast. You’d get meat once a week if you were lucky.

Mrs. Fortner, the wife of one of my former Ag teachers, told me that her family moved here from Mississippi, so they could pick strawberries. They would live on the strawberry farms, and they would pick the berries during the season when they were ripe. They didn’t get summers off. Their school was closed during the berry season.

One reason you’ll have the poor with you always is because every generation redefines what it means to be poor. They keep raising the bar. I can remember using hand-me-down TVs. 1 year when I was a child, we didn’t have a TV so my bother and I would go to a widowed neighbor and watch TV with her in the afternoon. We didn’t eat out. We had 1 vehicle.

The poor you have with you always because we keep raising the bar.