Daily Devotional For February 13, 2025
And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These things says the First and the Last, who died and came to life. I know your affliction and your poverty, nevertheless you are rich. . . . Rev 2:8-9.
Commentators widely agree that the poverty in this passage is literal, while the riches are spiritual. The Smyrnians were poor in this world’s goods, but they were rich in the goods of the gospel, rich in the things of the Spirit.
In practical terms, there is a big difference between poverty and riches.1 People who are born rich have an entirely different mentality than the average person. For most of us, nearly every decision we make is affected by financial limitations. We choose inexpensive restaurants for lunch. We buy our clothes at Walmart or Penney’s instead of Nieman-Marcus or Gucci. In our free time we go to a public beach instead of a tropical vacation at Club Med. Every decision we make is constrained by our lack of unlimited money.
Compare this lifestyle with that of the mega-wealthy. If you want to go skiing, or even shopping, in the Alps at a moment’s notice, head straight to the airport and grab the next available first-class seat. If the weather is too cold, head for the tropics or the other hemisphere. If you don’t feel like washing clothes, just hire someone to buy a new designer wardrobe for each day. If you want a new speedboat or sports car, hire someone to buy it and deliver it to the place of your choice. While most of us are limited in our daily decisions, the super-rich have the world at their fingertips, they can do anything and be anything they want whenever they want to. And the rest of us tend to watch enviously from a distance, thinking of everything we are missing out on.
But the church at Smyrna discovered a different kind of riches, a kind that the rich rarely attain (Matt 19:24). Those who know Jesus are liberated from enslavement to money. They realize that the true riches of life are found in loving relationships. To have a clean conscience, to be able to forgive and to be forgiven is to be truly rich. It is far better to know the Word of God than to be able to rush from one empty round of entertainment to another.
The truth is that the wealthy have a hard time with relationships. They never know who they can trust. Everyone wants to “be their friend,” not because of personal qualities, but because being a friend of the rich is a path to wealth and power of one’s own. The rich avoid relationship with Christ, sometimes because they are too distracted and busy and sometimes because they fear the call to “sell all you have” more than poor people do. The truest of all riches are found in Christ, not in material wealth.
Lord, turn my affections to the true riches You offer in Christ.
1 Ronald E. Dorsey, Jr., “The Tarnished Spoon,” Adventist Review, November 20, 2003, 8-11.