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DATE |
CHURCH |
SUBJECT |
PREACHER |
BIBLE
REF. |
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23.09.07 |
All Saints Church |
You Cannot Serve Both God and Money:
Has
anyone got any savings with Northern Rock? Anyone with a mortgage
from Northern Rock? Testing times this week if you have, or had. |
Rev.
David Tate |
John 3:17-8 |
|
"You Cannot Serve Both God
and Money"
Has anyone got any savings with Northern Rock? Anyone with a
mortgage from Northern Rock? Testing times this week if you
have, or had.
If anyone has the same general ongoing interest in finance you
may have been aware of Northern Rock’s operation. It seemed
always to offer the best savings rates and attractive mortgage
terms. Not that I thought that it was going to end like this.
Whatever the fall out I shall be interested in the bonuses
earned by the Directors and Chief Executive at the end of its
financial year.
The incidents of this week made me think that those who set the
Lectionary readings have some foresight, with the Gospel for
today [Luke 16:1-13].
Some of you may have read a remarkable short story sometime
during your school years by D. H. Lawrence titled, “The
Rocking‑Horse Winner.”
It is a haunting tale about a family living above its means. The
mother is considered by friends and neighbours to be the perfect
mother, in spite of the fact that deep down she knows she has
difficulty loving her three children. It’s important to the
husband to keep up the pretence of success--the large house,
staffed with servants--but they are living on the edge, just
like many families today.
“And so the house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase:
‘There must be more money! There must be more money!’
I
wonder if there are any homes in our community today that are
haunted in that same way: “There must be more money!”
Let’s talk about financial freedom. Jesus said on one occasion:
“No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one
and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise
the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.”
Here is the challenge for today: We want to break the grip money
has on our lives. We want to affirm that Yahweh, the God of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is our god, and our only god. We want
to affirm that the God who manifested Himself in Jesus of
Nazareth is our god. This is who we are. That is why we are here
in this room at this time. “Thou shalt have no other gods before
me . . .” We want God to be our god, not material possessions.
Still, we live in a materialistic society. Fairly or unfairly,
people judge us by our possessions. And it costs SO MUCH to live
nowadays. But we know we don’t need everything we have, much
less everything we want. It troubles us. Like the rich man God
called a fool, we keep needing bigger and bigger garages to hold
all our stuff!
How do we extricate ourselves from this vicious cycle?
Let’s begin by noting that Jesus was not anti-money. He
understood the place of money in our lives.
Jesus told a strange little parable about a manager who was
accused by his boss of wasting the boss’ possessions. “What is
this I hear about you?” asked his boss. “Give an account of your
management, because you cannot be manager any longer.”
So there this manager was. Given his notice. What in the world
was this poor man going to do? If any of you find yourself in
his situation, I hope you do not do what he did. The manager
said to himself, “What shall I do now? My master is taking away
my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg--I
know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will
welcome me into their houses.”
He spent the last few days of his employment defrauding his
employer of thousands of dollars. How do you imagine his
employer responded?
Here’s the shocking conclusion to Jesus’ parable: His employer
commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.
I
have to wonder if some of these debtors were not deadbeats.
Maybe they were usually very slow paying their bills, if they
paid them at all. Maybe what the business owner was praising was
his manager being able to collect as much as he did before he
left.
Jesus doesn’t explain. And he doesn’t need to. A parable only
has one point and he explains the point like this: “I tell you,”
said Jesus, “use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves,
so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal
dwellings.” “Use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves .
. .”
He seems to be saying there is a place for money in our lives.
It would be foolish to imagine that we could get by without
money in a society like ours. There are some things only money
can do.
Put a roof on our heads, put food in our bodies, fill up our car
with fuel, and maybe provide some health care. Try to do it
without money. Impossible. There is a place for money in our
lives. Jesus knew that. He was a most practical man. He knew
that there are some things only money can do.
Jesus is saying, however, that we are in deep trouble if money
has first place in our lives. Money is a nice servant but a
terrible master.
We are in danger of contracting the modern disease called “affluenza.”.
Affluenza. Think about that term. Affluence turned into a
disease. “There must be more money. There must be more money.”
A
church member came to his rector’s study one day. The rector
could see that the man looked deeply troubled. The man said,
“Pastor, I need to talk. I feel so empty, so dried up inside,
I’m scared.” His voice began to quiver just a bit. He said
“Pastor, I have just come from the doctor’s office, and he told
me that I have only six months at best to live. After I left the
office, I realized that I have no spiritual resources, no inner
strength to cope with this. There is nothing to fall back on, to
lean against. Many people would be surprised to hear me say
that, for I have made lots of money, and people think I am a
success not only at making money, but at being a strong,
powerful person.”
He then fell quiet, and the pastor waited in silence for him to
go on. Finally the man said, “You know I’m poor in the things
that count the most. I see it now. I’ve put my faith in the
wrong things, and the truth is I am destitute, spiritually
destitute. I could pick up the phone and call any bank in
Houston and borrow any amount of money to do whatever I wanted
to. Just on my name, Reverend, just on my name! Do you
understand? I could borrow it on my name only.”
The man then leaned forward and put his head in his hands, and
said softly through tears, “I guess there are some things you
can’t buy or borrow.”
This man’s material bank was full to overflowing, but his
spiritual bank was empty. Is that your situation? Then you are
serving mammon and not God.
The dishonest steward at least understood that money is a means,
not an end. He didn’t take his boss’ money for himself. He
didn’t hoard it up. He used it to buy favour with his friends.
He didn’t want to be all alone and unemployed in that harsh
world when people were fortunate if they could eke out even a
subsistence living.
A
big question that our text for the day raises is, do you own
your money, or does it own you?
But to my mind the greater question is “How do we serve God?”
HOW DO WE SERVE GOD?
Papillon, the French prisoner Henri Charriere, who was condemned
to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, was disturbed by a
recurring nightmare. Repeatedly, he would dream that he stood
before a harsh tribunal. "You are charged," they would shout,
"with a wasted life. How do you plead?" In his dream he would
reply, "Guilty, I plead guilty."
How do we avoid the feeling that our lives have been wasted,
that there was really no point to them all? Is there a way
whereby we can know that our lives really do matter? Is there
some secret source of power upon which we may tap to put more
life into our days?
I don’t believe that anyone would have charged the Apostle Paul
with having wasted his life. He was charged with many other
things. He was beaten and thrown into prison because of numerous
confrontations with political and religious authorities, but
never could he have been charged with wasting his life. Few
people have ever made the contributions to human existence that
St. Paul made.
It was St. Paul who took the gospel to the Gentiles. It was St.
Paul who gave us the most beautiful description of love very
written in I Corinthians 13. It was St. Paul who gave us the
definitive statement on life after death in I Corinthians 15.
St. Paul was certainly one of the most influential men who ever
lived. Ironically, he would receive much more credit for his
contributions if he had not been so effective in convincing us
that he was but an instrument of the risen Christ.
The secret to his purposeful and powerful life is contained in
these words from I Timothy 2:5 -7. "For there is one God, and
there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,
who gave himself as a ransom for all....For this I was appointed
a preacher and apostle...a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and
truth."
"FOR THERE IS ONE GOD...." You and I take that great truth for
granted. The writers of the Bible could not. They knew what a
struggle it had been for their fathers to declare the unity of
God. Their neighbours worshipped many gods.
It was these stubborn Jews who maintained that there was but one
God, Yahweh, and that there could be no other gods before Him.
They declared the unity of God, and they declared the
universality of God. Yahweh is the God of all creation. Indeed,
He is the creator of all that lives and moves and has its being.
Who could doubt the truthfulness of that proposition?
The children of Israel declared his unity, his universality, but
even more importantly, they declared his unique intimacy with
the world he had created. Yahweh was no remote god who had
created a world and then forgotten it. He was involved in the
life of his people in a very personal way.
"AND THERE IS BUT ONE MEDIATOR BETWEEN GOD AND MEN, THE MAN
JESUS CHRIST, WHO GAVE HIMSELF A RANSOM FOR ALL...." Our Muslim
friends declare that there is but one God. Our Jewish friends
declare that there is but one God. Most thinking people in the
world today declare that there is but one God, but it is the
unique claim of the people called Christians that there is but
one mediator between God and human beings, the man Jesus.
The early disciples believed with all their hearts that there
was but one mediator between God and humanity. There was one
way, one truth, one life, one shepherd, one door and that was
Jesus.
"There is one God...there is one mediator..." writes St. Paul.
"For this I was appointed a preacher and apostle...a teacher of
the Gentiles in faith and truth...."
What does all this have to do with St. Paul’s sense of power and
purpose? St. Paul’s life was grounded in his knowledge of God
and his experience of Christ. That knowledge and that experience
had two effects on St. Paul’s life. We may call the first effect
the focal effect and the second, the funnel effect.
We know now that great accomplishments in this world are made by
persons who are totally dedicated to a single cause. St. Paul ™s
great cause was to glorify God whether he was making tents or
writing letters to young churches, or preaching on street
corners, the object was the same. He did all things to the glory
of God. And, my friends, that is your task and mine as well. To
do everything we do whether it be in an office, on a
construction site, in a classroom, at home or wherever to do
everything we do to the glory of God.
We are concerned in our land right now with the pursuit of
excellence. Here is the key: We need to center in on everything
we do and ask ourselves, Is this something I can do to His
glory? If it is, we ought to give ourselves to it with total
abandon. That is one secret of a super, successful life to have
a focal point for our lives that we can believe in without
reservation and to give all we have to it. That is the focal
effect.
The second effect we may call the funnel effect. St. Paul saw
himself as a funnel through which God’s purpose and power could
flow. Someone did a study of the lives of great people and they
discovered that invariably these monumental achievers did not
consider the path of greatness as leading FROM them but rather
as leading THROUGH them. The source was somewhere other than
themselves. Have you ever completed a task and looked at it and
thought to yourself, "Wow. I couldn’t have done that!" And felt
that behind your work was an unseen hand? St. Paul believed that
about his life. He was but a channel through which God’s power
flowed.
No, St. Paul could never have been accused of wasting his life.
That great scholar Augustine once said that there were three
things he would like to have seen:
Jesus in the flesh.
Imperial Rome in its splendour.
St. Paul preaching.
It is no wonder. St. Paul preached as he did everything else to
the glory of God. St. Paul believed that divine energy flowed
through him. That is what a renewed faith in God and in Christ
can do for unit can give us new power, new purpose for the
living of our lives to the extent that men may see our good
works and glorify our Father which is in heaven.
David Tate |
