God is a good father who gives good things to His children. As children of God, we can trust and rely on Him to provide for us. However, we often turn down and ignore God’s invitation to put our faith and trust in Him and to provide for us, simply because we’re too busy providing for ourselves. It is also because it is easier to trust ourselves than to trust God to care for us. We are too focused on our own needs and wants. Sometimes, it is also because we are comfortable with our own lives, we want to enjoy them the way they are.

However, in Matthew 22 God makes it clear that He does not want us to be self-reliant and that the idea itself is very offensive to Him. In what is known as The Parable of the Wedding Banquet, a king prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent out messengers to invite guests to the banquet, but they refused to come. Some even mistreated and killed the messengers. Furious at this, the king sent his army and destroyed the murderers and burned their city. Then he ordered the messengers to invite anyone they could find on the streets, including the poor and the outcasts.

This story can also be seen in the early history of the Korean church. When Protestantism first came into the peninsula, the rich and the successful rejected it and blocked it from entering the country. Later in the late 1800’s in Shenyang, China, with the help of a bankrupt ginseng merchant, John Ross, a missionary from Scotland, began to translate different books of the Bible into Korean. The merchant and the others Ross had recruited later began to take the copies of the Bible into Korea. Before the missionaries came from America, John Ross’ Bible had already been distributed to 15,000 Koreans. A great quantity was distributed to women and by women. The Bible was not written in the difficult Chinese characters but in the Northern dialect of the Korean language allowing even for the lower class to read it. It was neither the rich nor the powerful who responded to the invitation, but a poor merchant who had nothing whom God then used to do great things in Korea.

As we can see from the parable and the Korean church history, it is not the rich and powerful, but the poor and insignificant, even outcasts, who responded to God’s invitation and are used to do great work. Likewise, God sends us to share our bread not with the wise, successful, and self-sufficient, but with those who are left out or those seemingly worthless people.

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