For years, this topic of financial stewardship and the Christian have been rumbling around in my heart and mind: sometimes heating up and bubbling to the surface with little explosions into my practical world, at other times, cooled down by my own weakness, fueled by the temptations to succumb to the baubles of the world in which we live. My bookshelf is stocked with "Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger", "Living More Simply", "Living More with Less", "Escaping Materialism" and the like. They've all been read - at least once - and all marked up, underlined and podered, prayed and even agonized over.
It wasn't for nothing that Jesus said you can't serve both God and Money, or that He told the rich young ruler to sell all his possessions and give to the poor, or that he warned his disciples about the difficulty of a rich man entering the Kingdom of Heaven - He knew, He knows, what has the power to hold our hearts and captivate us, and the corollary power of letting it go!
My money matters because it has the power to enslave me, when in reality, I am already spoken for - I belong to Christ - no longer my own life, but His in mine, and all I have is His, even my very life. Money matters because I need to know that Jesus is my first love, and that nothing money can buy is better than Him.
John Piper, in his excellent book, "Don't Waste Your Life" (and also in "Desiring God"), uses the phrase "wartime life-style" or "wartime mind-set". Piper says that it reminds him "that there is a war going on in the world between Christ and Satan, truth and falsehood, belief and unbelief. It tells me that there are weapons to be funded and used, but that these weapons are not swords or guns or bombs but the Gospel and prayer and self-sacrificing love
(2 Corinthians 10:3-5). And it tells me that the stakes of this conflict are higher than any other war in history; they are eternal and infinite: heaven or hell, eternal joy or eternal torment (Matthew 25:46)".
I so appreciate Dr. Piper's disarming humility and honesty in what he says next, because it reminds me that I am not alone, and that others are also being moved by the Holy Spirit to consider the ways we spend our money, and challenging me, challenging all of us, to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2), and to re-direct, in this war-time, funds to the front lines of reaching the unreached for Christ, of caring for the poor, the orphans and widows, for bringing hope to the hopeless, to the Church doing it's work through Compassion, or other streams of God's love - for God's glory! We'll talk in another post about how to go about this, but for now, I leave you with a few more of Piper's words on the subject:
"I need to hear this message [that there is a war of eternal consequences being waged] again and again, because I drift into a peacetime mind-set as certainly as rain falls down and flames go up. I am wired by nature to love the same toys that the world loves. I start to fit in. I start to love what the others love. I start to call earth "home." Before you know it, I am calling luxuries "needs" and using my money just the way unbelievers do. I begin to forget the war. I don't think much about people perishing. Missions and unreached peoples drop out of my mind. I stop dreaming abou the triumphs of grace. I sink into a secular mind-set that looks first to what man can do, not what God can do. It is a terrible sickness. And I thank God for those who have forced me again and again toward a wartime mind-set."
Amen, brother Piper!
