(Slide 1) As I do most of the time when I begin to write my sermon, I do a bit of research as a means of prayerfully considering what the Lord would have me say. Sometimes it is hard to do focus my efforts because what I feel led of the Spirit to preach has many different angles to it and I am not sure where to start. This is true regarding today’s sermon because there is no lack of information on the subject of money. Where to begin, and more important, where the Lord wants me to begin, is the challenge.
(Slide 2) This morning is the second in our series, ‘The People’s Choice Sermon Series’ and it is about money and what does the Bible have to say about it.
(Slide 3) What does the Bible say about money? The Bible says a great deal about money. Here are a few examples of what both testaments say when it comes to money:
In Proverbs 30 and verse 7 we read, “…give me neither poverty nor riches! Give me just enough to satisfy my needs.”
Jesus is quoted in Matthew 6:24, “You cannot serve both God and money.
Finally we read Hebrews 13:5 that indicates, “Stay away from the love of money; be satisfied with what you have.”
(Slide 4) When I began to look at and for illustrations for this sermon I found that I had to choose from several different sub-categories of illustrations about money.
For example, here is an illustration from Frank Gallagher about the very real issue of greed. (4a)
He writes, “A few years ago, I was watching David Letterman, and he was broadcasting his show from Las Vegas. He was doing his opening monologue and he told this joke.
He said that he was standing in front of one of the casinos, and a man came up to him looking desperate. "Please!" the man begged frantically. "Could you possibly spare $500? My wife is very sick, and I really need the money to take her to the doctor and to buy her the medicine she needs."
Dave looked at the guy suspiciously, and he asked the man, "Wait a minute! If I give you $500, how do I know you won’t just go into one of the casinos here and gamble it all away?’
The man quickly responded, "Oh no, I wouldn’t do that! I’ve got gambling money!"
Then I found this thought provoking illustration on the always hot topic of (4b) tithing from Jeff Strite.
He notes, “Mrs. Baughman was a Sunday School class teacher in my 6th grade class. One morning she brought a pan of brownies to our class. As the goodies sat tantalizingly over by her chair she gave each child a slip of paper marked with a household expense: house payment, phone bill, credit card bill, entertainment, and so forth. My slip had "car payment on it."
Before long, Mrs. Baughman picked up the tray of fresh brownies and began naming the expenses named on the papers. As we gave her our expense slips, she redeemed each one for a brownie from the pan. Finally, the last brownie had disappeared. But one boy named Donald still held his unredeemed slip. "God!" called Mrs. Baughman. Donald came forward, hoping the teacher had one more brownie hidden somewhere.
With a knife, Mrs. Baughman scraped the crumbs from the bottom of the pan into Donald’s napkin. He got a pretty raw deal, I thought - just the crumbs.
"The brownies represent your money," the teacher explained to us. "If you don’t give God his share right away, he probably won’t get anything at all except maybe crumbs."
We never forgot that illustration from our 6th grade Sunday School class. It was the day my friend Donald got only brownie scrapings, and I learned that God should have 1st rights to everything I have. In the years since, I have struggled with giving and priorities, but whenever I recall that "crummy Sunday morning lesson", I know who must come first in my life.
Then there is this troubling (4c) statistic from a 1999 James Dobson newsletter article in which he reported the following report from the Boston Globe newspaper.
“The Boston Globe documented how the lottery saturates poor Massachusetts neighborhoods with outlets. For example, Chelsea, an economically struggling community, has one lottery retailer for every 363 residents. By comparison, the affluent suburb of Milton has one for every 3,657 residents. Chelsea residents, many of whom are on welfare, spend nearly eight percent of their incomes on lottery tickets.
… a store owner [in Chelsea] told [the paper], “The lottery is no good. It robs from my neighbors. People lose a lot of money. The government has no business being involved.”
Then we learned that when the social security and welfare checks arrive, local residents line up outside the store and down the sidewalk hoping to parlay their meager subsistence into instant wealth.”
Money is a spiritual matter. I think that outside of sex, money is the most spiritually charged issue there is.
And we simply have to go to our main text this morning to realize the truth of how spiritually and emotionally charged this issue is. For in our main text this morning is a phrase that is central to our understanding what the Bible says about money that has been misquoted more often than not.
(Slide 5)
We often hear it quoted as follows (5a): Money is the root of all evil…
But that is not what the text says, does it? It says what? (5b) ‘The love of money is the root of all evil!’ What does this mean?
What is implied in ‘the love’ of money? One thing comes to my mind (5c) – GREED!
Before we do a closer examination of this passage which I believe is central to a Biblical understanding of money there is an issue that the Bible addresses that needs to be acknowledged because it is a critical financial issue for many people.
(Slide 6) It is the issue of debt.
What does the Bible have to say about debt? Well, when I engaged the search feature of my Bible software with the word ‘debt’ 16 verses popped up.
The list started with (6a) Exodus 22:3 which talks about an interesting way to pay off the debt of thief unable to repay what was stolen. ‘“A thief who is caught must pay in full for everything that was stolen. If payment is not made, the thief must be sold as a slave to pay the debt.” (Whoa! How many of us would like that?)
The list of verses ends with (6b) Romans 15:27 that describes a debt of gratitude that is paid through a generous offering to someone else. Starting with verse 26 we read, ‘For you see, the believers in Greece have eagerly taken up an offering for the Christians in Jerusalem, who are going through such hard times. They were very glad to do this because they feel they owe a real debt to them.
(6c) But in Romans 13:8 we read, ‘Pay all your debts, except the debt of love for others. You can never finish paying that! If you love your neighbor, you will fulfill all the requirements of God’s law.’
And then in Matthew 18 we read the story of the ‘Unforgiving Debtor.’ We start with verse 27 and read through verse 34.
“…the king was filled with pity for him, and he released him and forgave his debt. “But when the man left the king, he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars He grabbed him by the throat and demanded instant payment. His fellow servant fell down before him and begged for a little more time. ‘Be patient and I will pay it,’ he pleaded. But his creditor wouldn’t wait. He had the man arrested and jailed until the debt could be paid in full.
When some of the other servants saw this, they were very upset. They went to the king and told him what had happened. Then the king called in the man he had forgiven and said, ‘You evil servant! I forgave you that tremendous debt because you pleaded with me. Shouldn’t you have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?’ Then the angry king sent the man to prison until he had paid every penny.’
Now the unforgiving debtor (ungrateful is another descriptive word) has just been spared jail time and has a debt of millions of dollars that he has just been released from. But he goes and demands that a debt be repaid from someone who owed him far less money than he owed.
Can you feel the emotional intensity that is present in this story? Debt does that to us, doesn’t it? It increases the pressure on us to pay and places a cloud over us that colors our views and affects our relationship. The main point of this story however is about forgiveness.
(6d) Now in the Old Testament there was a practice given to the Israelites as part of the covenant called Jubilee. It is interesting to consider if maybe this was the reason for the motivation of the rich man to forgive the debt. It was to be celebrated every 50 years and we read about it in Leviticus 25. Its purpose was to cancel debts, return property to the rightful owners, and freeing slaves.
But, what does this say to us, if anything about the issue of debt? (6e) “Is,” and I think that this is a big question, debt a sin?
In Deuteronomy 23: 19 and 20 we read, “Do not charge interest on the loans you make to a fellow Israelite, whether it is money, food, or anything else that may be loaned with interest. You may charge interest to foreigners, but not to Israelites, so the Lord your God may bless you in everything you do in the land you are about to enter and occupy.”
There are other similar passages in the Old Testament which say the same thing. So is debt a sin? Probably not. This passage as well as the setting of the parable that we have looked at indicates that taking out a loan is not a sin. But, the Bible also indicates that failure to repay is a sin and that debt can cause financial, relational, and spiritual problems. We read in Proverbs 22:7, “Just as the rich rule the poor, so the borrower is servant to the lender.”
Some of us this morning may disagree with me. I understand that. Maybe we need to ask the question, “What is “necessary” and “unnecessary” debt?”
I recall a story that my father-in-law recently told me regarding his grandfather, Susan’s great-grandfather. It seems that when water and sewer service became available to him that he refused to have it installed because he could not pay for what he used in advance.
There was a time when you paid the doctor with fresh produce or bartered for his services. Not today, now we fill out a large number of forms and wait until our insurance, if we have it, reviews the claim and then pays whatever they pay and perhaps within 90 days you get a bill to pay.
We live in a different economy these days. We are moving toward a cashless society. Credit seems to be easier to obtain and payment by plastic is preferred to check or even cash. (Think of the current credit card commercial.) But the principles of cautious and Biblical financial management are the same. Debt can be a great problem for us.
Before I continue, I want to express appreciation to the person who asked for this sermon. It got me digging into the Bible and really looking at this timely topic. A couple of times as I prepared I found myself in prayer asking for God’s help and wisdom to help me do a better job in this area of my life.
As I studied, prayed, and dug through scripture, I began to believe that the most important teaching of scripture regarding money has to do with our attitude toward it.
This brings me back to our main text for this morning. It addresses what I believe is the key Biblical attitude to have when it comes to money (7): contentment.
(7a) We read in I Timothy 6:6 “true religion with contentment is great wealth.” I have noticed, quite frankly in my life and in others as well, that when there is discontentment one of the ways that we deal with it is by spending money.
How do we then deal with discontentment? Let’s look
(8) Discontentment is a very difficult thing to subdue (and we are taught, through our advertising to be discontent) but it comes as we read in 8, by learning to be content with enough to live on because, as we read in verse 7, “we didn’t bring anything with us when we came into the world, and we certainly cannot carry anything with us when we die.”
(8a) All of my possessions and the wealth that I will have when I die will mean nothing to me. It will cease to be a factor in my afterlife as it will in yours.
(8b) Another way to deal with discontentment is to be very, very aware of the “foolish and harmful desires” all of us are subject to in order to become rich. This doesn’t mean that we refuse to live reasonably well with our essential needs being met. It means that we need to be aware of the many temptations to make wealth our god and in doing so, compromise our faith.
This leads us back to that misquoted verse and the importance of understanding (8c) the power of greed because greed is the attitude behind the spiritual battleground of hearts and lives when it comes to money. “For the love of money is at the root of all kinds of evil. And some people, craving money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows.”
What does money do to you? That is a critical question to ask and answer because we have to face the question and decide our answer to it for the simple purpose that money is a spiritual matter of great significance and consequence. What is your answer?
I conclude with a story that I told several years ago but I believe illustrates the power of money to be used to honor and obey God. It is a true story, not fabricated to make a point. (I checked it out several years ago to see if it was true.)
A sobbing little girl stood near a small church from which she had been turned away because it ’was too crowded.’ "I can’t go to Sunday School," she sobbed to the pastor as he walked by. Seeing her shabby, unkempt appearance, the pastor guessed the reason and, taking her by the hand, took her inside and found a place for her in the Sunday School class.
The child was so touched that she went to bed that night thinking of the children who have no place to worship Jesus.
Some two years later, this child lay dead in one of the poor tenement buildings and the parents called for the kindhearted pastor, who had befriended their daughter, to handle the final arrangements. As her poor little body was being moved, a worn and crumpled purse was found which seemed to have been rummaged from some trash dump.
Inside was found 57 cents and a note scribbled in childish handwriting which read, "This is to help build the little church bigger so more children can go to Sunday School."
For two years she had saved for this offering of love. When the pastor tearfully read that note, he knew instantly what he would do. Carrying this note and the cracked, red pocketbook to the pulpit, he told the story of her unselfish love and devotion. He challenged his deacons to get busy and raise enough money for the larger building.
But the story does not end there! A newspaper learned of the story and published it. It was read by a realtor who offered them a parcel of land worth many thousands. When told that the church could not pay so much, he offered it for 57 cents. Church members made large subscriptions. Checks came from far and wide. Within five years the little girl’s gift had increased to $250,000.00 - a huge sum for that time. Her unselfish love had paid large dividends.
When you are in the city of Philadelphia, look up Temple Baptist Church, with a seating capacity of 3,300 and Temple University, where hundreds of students are trained. Have a look, too, at the Good Samaritan Hospital and at a Sunday School building which houses hundreds of Sunday scholars, so that no child in the area will ever need to be left outside during Sunday School time.
What is the Lord saying to you about this issue? Be open to Him and respond as you need to respond. Amen.
Gallagher and Strite quotes are from sermoncentral.com
Dobson article is from sermoncentral.com
Power Points for this sermon are available by e-mailing me at pastorjim46755@yahoo.com and asking for ‘011407slides’ Please note that all slides for a particular presentation may not be available.
