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Showing posts with label wealth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wealth. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Trapped by Mammon

Photo: epicprofessionals.com
What exactly is mammon, I'm wondering? Whatever it is, it's important enough for God to talk about it:
No one can serve two masters. He will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.--Matthew 6:24

Well, whatever mammon is, it's opposed to God. That's probably important.
The Greek for mammon, strictly speaking, is money. So I can't love both God and money. OK. I get that. But look at the context....the verse cited above falls in a section that discusses far more than only monetary wealth.

Do not worry about your life--what you eat or what you drink or for your body, what you put on...Which of you by worrying can add one moment to His life? ...Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.--Matthew 6: 25, 27, 33

So it's about more than money. It's about everything around me, all the props of my life.
Seek first the kingdom of God, He says. Not anything or anybody else.
OK. I get that, too. But how hard can it be? I know God is more important than anything else, don't I? I can get by without a lot of money, or a closet full of clothes or even a long life. No problem.

Not, at least, until I think about the one thing I can't get by without.
Me.
I am why I want all that stuff in the first place. 
I am taking care of me. I am finding security. Security outside of God.

And that's the problem.
It never was the stuff. It's me.
If I have that stuff, I don't need to depend on God. I get to depend on me.
All the stuff of life, all the money and everything else, make good servants of God, but poor masters. And the same principle applies to my own body, my own desires.
If I give them up, I'll shortly become hungry or cold or bored, but if I'm honest, it's not the hunger or boredom I mind so much. It's the weakness. It's the vulnerability. It's the loneliness. 
I mind that a lot.

Why do I do this? Why do I spend so much effort taking care of myself, using the stuff around me to build a big wall of protection?
I know this--if I'm protecting myself with my stuff, that means that I am not trusting God to do it.
Period.
There's no other answer that makes sense.

I have to learn to trust Him. Him alone. Without the stuff.
He challenges me to this:
Test me in this, says the Lord Almighty, and see whether I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be enough room to store it.--Malachi 3:10
And there's only one way to learn this.
To stop protecting myself. That's what the stuff was doing in the first place. It was shielding me from hurt or want or disappointment or failure, but that's the problem. It is in only those places that God can show me His power. In depending on everything else, I'm preventing God from doing the one thing I want Him most to do.

But without my stuff, I panic.
I have spent all my effort in building my own reputation, paying my own way, bearing up with my own shoulders.

St Francis taught us a prayer that can help strip away our layers of protection:
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.


In the end, this is what God wants me to say:
The Lord has become my protector.--Psalm 18:19
But He hasn't become my protector, has He? I have been my only trusted protector. Otherwise I wouldn't care about stuff so much.
Me. My stuff. My own. I have to, somehow, come to the end of it. And when I do, if I have no more strength, maybe I can, finally find God's.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

What I Am Not Thankful For

Photo: www.mostphotos.com
I know what to do on Thanksgiving.
Count my blessings.
And it's not hard at all.
Life. Faith. Health. Family. Safety...So, so much.
Thank You, God.  Thank You so much.

Wait, God says. 
You are thanking me for the wrong things. 
Try looking at blessings from my point of view.
My blessing isn't comfort and confidence.
Blessed are the poor in spirit.--Matthew 5:3
My blessing isn't happiness.
Blessed are those who mourn--Matthew 5:4
My blessing isn't ability and confidence.
Blessed are the meek.--Matthew 5:5
My blessing isn't plenty and a full belly.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.--Matthew 5:6
My blessing isn't safety and the comfort of friends.
Blessed are those who are persecuted or my sake. --Matthew 5:10

Of course, good things, things I like, come from God, too.
But those things I call good, the comfortable, happy circumstances of my life, look like goodness from my point of view, not God's.
God sees a very different view and, if I truly want to be more like Christ, I need to look at blessings that way, too.
I don't want to be thankful for poverty, hunger, or persecution, but God is. 

So tomorrow, when we bow our heads at a table groaning with plenty, I need to be thankful not only for what is before me, but for what in my life is denied, is sad, is painful.
Thank you God. Thank you for it all.

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

What God Does Not Want

Photo:grist.org
Possession is serious business to God.
The whole earth is mine.--Exodus 19:5
The silver is mine and the gold is mine.--Haggai 2:8
I own the cattle on a thousand hills--Psalm 50:10

Everything God made belongs to Him. Everything.
Because He loves us, he gives us some of it and, from that portion, we are to give some back, and thus worship and honor Him.
He is not joking about this either:
Bring the whole tithe into storehouse...and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.--Malachi 3:10

He's designed a perfect system, really.
He makes stuff; He gives to us; we give back, and so on unto infinity.

But there's one catch.
Some of what we have, He does not want.
Jesus said,
Bring me a denarius. Whose inscription is this? Repay unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.--Mark 12:11-12
God does not want us to give Him what did not come from Him in the first place.

WAIT A MINUTE!
Doesn't everything belong to God?
Yes, it does. Everything He made.
But didn't He make everything?

Hmmm... Think about it. What you have that did not come from God?
Actually, the list is quite long:
Pride
Selfishness
Apathy
Ignorance
Poverty
Ambition
Greed

Should I go on?
As it turns out, we have plenty of things that God did not make, does not own, and does not want. We cannot ever dedicate those to Him. He will not accept them.
And His response to our attempts to do so looks like this:
Unanswered prayer
Rejected requests
Ignored pleas
Wrong turns
Trouble, trouble, and more trouble.

It's all about motive. Just ask Cain and Abel.
God says, Give back my best and I will give you even more.
Try to give what is not worthy and you will be stuck with it.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

We, the Needy

OK, so you aren't rich.
Most of us aren't.
Or are we?  I mean, rich compared to who?
We might not be rich compared to Bill Gates, but how about compared to someone living in the Middle Ages, who feared plague or walked in cow dung every day? Or in Renaissance Europe, when courtiers carried perfumed hankies because people and places stank so badly? Or modern Ethiopia, where starvation kills thousands of people every day?
We are, in fact, richer than we ordinarily think.

Admit it.
We live in a place and time of comfort and privilege.  No one dies of starvation here.  We do not wake to the sound of gunfire. Our lives are luxuriant beyond that of ancient kings.

But are very poor in one way.  We can no longer see God.
We are the ones Jesus spoke of when He said,
Blessed are they who have not seen, yet believe.--John 20:29

We have not seen.
Moses, Abraham, and Noah have long ago died. The burning bush is extinguished.  The voice on Sinai is silent. Jesus does not walk among us.  We cannot, by word of mouth, learn of something He did just yesterday in the next town.

We need one thing those poorer people did not.
If we are to know God, we must have faith.
No earthly privilege will bring it.
No wealth can buy it.
We will not stumble upon it hanging on a cross in the town square.

Still, God made us for this time.
Faith is part of our intended destiny and, indeed, it is our privilege.
Because we cannot see, we must believe.
My Lord and my God!--John 20:28
The Lord is near to all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth.--Psalm 145:18