What is our Bottom Line ... Is our God

There was a profound betrayal in the phrase. Unhappiness with our Chaplaincy recycle system and therefore not that bothered to comply with it, an American visitor rebuffed our efforts with, “well we have deemed recycling as not being cost effective.” In the last two words lies the secret of the ecology debate among Christians. Recycling and care for the environment will depend on the bottom line. It could be suggested that whatever your bottom line is could be deemed as your “god”. Without thinking America has fallen for the bottom line of profit. Why hold them culpable alone. It is a western capitalist disease. Capitalism has many good points and should never be dismissed security lock, stock market and oil barrel as many do. Yet, we need to be careful. All of the best things humanity knows have the potential of ending up the worst things by just a margin of error; God is a case and point!

What our American friend revealed was the motivation to act. If God is our bottom line then that will effect the actions we take. If it is God there will be many situations when profit will be relegated to a minor concern. If it is profit then God will become someone we sing to and even pray to, know abit about and display by some symbol on the back of our cars but in reality He just nices up our lives and ironically vindicates our idolatry.

If God made the earth and we dare to call Him Father then that will be the bottom line in how we use the earth. That will be a huge alarm bell when we make decisions to dig it up, pollute it, destroy it. For the recycling scenario, it will have me who prays “Our Father who art in Heaven…Thy Kingdom come they will be done on earth as in heaven…” it will be His art that I will have as my bottom line when I throw out my newspapers, plastic bottles or whatever else might cause his creation to get damaged.

Profit as the bottom line is actually the curse of the modern world. It will decide much more than whether we can be bothered looking after God’s good earth, it will be the decisive factor on whether to give drugs to Africans who need them, whether we bring justice to the world of trade and whether we will dare to make poverty history. Doing those things might mean that our profit margins will drop, we might not be able to change our car as regularly or afford the conservatory or the brand new Apple Mac. Whether we prefer people dying for the sake of our luxuries will depend on whether profit or God is our bottom line. Jesus did warn us – “You cannot serve both God and money.” It is time to decide. Actually, it is time to repent and decide again. Now what is the bottom line as we decide...

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