1/11/2017
AWANA Journey
“Life, Liberty and Property”
Our world is obsessed with money and material things.
A famous movie in the 1980s had as one of its most memorable lines:
“Greed is good.”
Designer labels and overpriced athletic shoes are status symbols that
impress many people.
New cars, big houses (and massive indebtedness!) advertise to others “I
am SOMEBODY.”
Bumper stickers commonly boast: “He who dies with the most toys wins.”
People stand in long lines to throw away hundreds and thousands of dollars
on lottery tickets when the jackpot gets into the hundreds of millions
of dollars, though the odds of winning are astronomical, and the
consequences of winning are often disastrous.
Money and possessions are realities of life. But they are the means to an end,
not an end in and of themselves.
As my ole Pappy used to say regarding money: “You can’t take it with you,
but you can’t go anywhere without it.”
And as my father-in-law said: “I started with nothing, and I still have most of
it left.”
The perspective of many professing Christians to material possessions
have been greatly corrupted by the modern “name it and claim it” (or “blab
it and grab it”) movement, which is nothing more than thinly disguised
GREED, which transforms God into a celestial “Santa Claus” whose only
reason for existence is to gratify our lust for things, things, and more
things. Contrast I Tim. 6:6, 8; Heb. 13:5; Phil. 4:11; Luke 3:14
Property and Possessions
The 8th and the 10th commands (Exod.20:15, 17), recognize the existence of
private property rights.
Acts 2:44, 45; 4:32, 34-37 (compare Acts 5:1-4) was a voluntary and
temporary sharing of material resources, neither a command, nor a
permanent practice among early Christians.
Attempts to deny “private property” in favor of “community ownership of
property” (communism) always ends in failure, because that which is
“everybody’s property” is nobody’s property and so is badly neglected and
abused.
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Furthermore, the leaders of such communist states always manage to
accumulate vast quantities of the very wealth they denounced in others
(Castro died with billions of dollars’ worth of personal assets).
Some zealous but misguided professing Christians have attempted to
renounce all material possessions, but ended up merely becoming beggars
(“mendicant friars”) dependant on others for their material needs.
That money and possessions are in and of themselves of earthly use only,
and are not to be our obsessive life’s focus, does not mean that a person is
not to plan ahead, “save for a rainy day,” improve his financial standing in
the world, or accumulate resources for retirement expenses--Prov. 6:6-11
(Proverbs has almost 50 express statements regarding work and laziness,
productivity and material resources)
The greater our personal resources, the greater our help can be to
others and to the cause of Christ.
We enter the world with nothing (Job 1:21; I Tim. 6:7; though some are born into
wealthy circumstances) and we depart with empty pockets. All possessions are
of use only in this life. And wealth possessed in this life can quickly disappear
(Prov. 23:4-5. “Money talks, but all mine ever says is ‘good-bye’!”). Example:
the sudden poverty of J. C. Ryle’s banker-father.
Among the most mis-used Bible verses: I Timothy 6:10 (another, Matt. 7:1; and
non-verses often quoted: “God helps those who help themselves”; “Cleanliness is
next to godliness”; and “Every tub has to sit on its own bottom.”)
Notable Biblical texts regarding money and material possessions:
Matt. 6:19-21, 24-34
Luke 12:13-21
Luke 16:13, 14, 19-23
I Tim. 6:8-10, 17-19
James 2:1-9
God NEVER condemns the possession of riches per se, and there are numerous
rich and godly people in the Bible, not a few of whom are expressly said to have
been given riches by God:
Abraham, Gen. 13:2
3
Job, 1:1-5 (and note his attitude: 1:21); 42:12
Joseph of Arimathea, Matt. 27:57
Lydia, Acts 16:14-15
All we have, we have by God’s grace and provision. We are under
obligation to use our financial means as He deems fit--Prov. 3:9-10
(And it must be added, on the other hand, that there is no inherent virtue in
poverty, which is not always but is often enough the result of bad life choices-drug and alcohol abuse, greed leading to gambling or speculation, laziness,
immorality, neglect of education, self-indulgence, etc.)
There are likewise many examples of godly wealthy believers in church history,
who employed their wealth for the sake of the Gospel-Lady Huntington
William Colgate
Henry Parsons Crowell
H. J. Heinz
C. T. Studd
William Borden
Lyman and Milton Stewart
R. G. LeTourneau
And the examples of Charles Spurgeon and George Muller, who were the
conduit for the distribution of literally millions of dollars to Christian causes.
--Tell me what you spend your money on, and I will tell you what you value most in
this life.