Yesterday I wrote about John Oliver’s piece on televangelists. We can all agree that taking advantage of someone’s genuine faith for personal gain is deplorable. We can take comfort in James 3:1, which says:
Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.
As someone who teaches on a regular basis, I take this passage very seriously.
I do not know how seriously Creflo Dollar takes this passage. He was highlighted in John Oliver’s piece and I even wrote about him a few months back. Dollar came under fire when he started a fundraising campaign to purchase a G6, which is a private jet.
Just this past weekend, before the most recent episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Dollar addressed his campaign to buy a jet in his sermon. You can watch the video below.
He said, “‘What does a preacher need with an airplane?’ They don’t know. They’ll never know because they’re not looking through the Word. They will never know, never, never know.” He was trying to make the point that people don’t understand why a preacher needs a private jet because they’re not looking through the lens of the Bible. I’ve read the Bible, I’ve studied it rather extensively, and I can find no justification for a preacher owning a private jet.
What’s more disturbing is that Dollar said that he was going to preach out of 2 Corinthians 5:17.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
2 Corinthians 5:17 is one of my favorite passages. It succinctly states the reality of the gospel: that we can be completely transformed. I didn’t see Dollar’s entire sermon, but I imagine he may have said that when we’re transformed we have the correct lens through which to see the world. Apparently being a new creation allows us to see why a pastor needs a private jet.
Again, I’ve seen Christ’s transforming work in my life and I still don’t know why a pastor would need a private jet. In my original post about Dollar I did some math. The $65 million for the G6 could be spent on 46,428 round-trip tickets for mission trips or sponsoring 11,000 World Vision children for 14 years. I don’t know why a pastor would need a private jet when that money could be used in so many better ways.
I think I’m done piling on Creflo Dollar and his deceptive contemporaries. If they’re willing to lead people astray, then it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they’d twist scripture. Talking about their lies and deception helps bring them to light, but living out an authentic faith and being truly obedient to scripture shines an even brighter light.
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