Looking forward 5 - Our attitude to money and possessions

Readings Deuteronomy 8 and Matthew 6

If you had to list the top 10 priorities in your life I wonder what they would be.

For most of us – we just have to look at our diaries to see what our priorities are – how much time we spend doing things from our church life to our families to our sports and recreations to friends.

The amount of time we spend on something and to a certain extent the amount of money we invest in something shows a great deal about what are priorities are.

Today we come to the sharp end of our looking forward series and start to think about money – we have seen in the leaflet what the needs of our church are so today I want to start us thinking about our attitude towards money and see it in the sense of a review of our priorities.

So my teaching today may be challenging to us in sense of our attitudes to money and next week I want to think a little more about money in the sense of how we can use money to invest in God’s work before we have our gift day in two weeks time.

I suppose when I come to talk about money here I have to admit to being a little embarrassed, after all like most of us I was brought up to not really talk about money in public.

And I have to say I have found it over the years quite challenging to teach on money as I can’t remember too many talks from the pulpit about money either.

So we don’t like to talk about it – but it is a necessity of life and it is a necessity of life in the church and I want us to think about it in terms of our attitudes which leads us to set our priorities.

So what is a Christian response to money? And I want to start as we address that question to go back to the passage from Deuteronomy which to me speaks so clearly about attitudes to possessions including money.

We see in the passage from Deuteronomy how the people had been led throughout the dessert in to the promised land.

They spent 40 years in the dessert, and yet God took care of them amazingly.

We see how he provided them manna from heaven to eat.

He enabled their clothes to survive those forty years.

Now I’m sure they may have been fed up of their clothes after 40 years- some of us myself including like to change ours a little more often than that - but never the less, God provided for them the necessities for life.

God provided for them what they needed to survive in the dessert.

God knew what they needed and he provided.

Now we know that the dessert was a time of testing.

It wasn’t an easy time, in the passage it says how God had used the time in the dessert as a time of humbling for the people. The passage says:

“God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments.”

But at the same time in the midst of this difficult time they had the promise that God was bringing them into something better.

He was bringing them in to a land flowing with milk and honey, full of vines and olive trees, pomegranates, a land where bread is not scarce.

It’s difficult to imagine how this hope would have felt for the Israelites in the dessert.

Having lived on manna and quails they are now faced with the prospect of all these good things.

I don’t know whether you have ever been deprived of anything for a time.

But if you have you’ll know how eagerly you anticipate getting that thing back.

I remember spending when I spent a year in India at around 18.

What I missed most, wasn’t the food, but it was having a good bath.

All we had to wash with were buckets of water which you heated with an electric element each morning so we did have warm water.

How eagerly I anticipated the first bath on my return, and I know I spent a considerable time in the bathroom.

Those Israelites must have eagerly anticipated many things which they had been promised.

And yet God knew how they could react to this.

He knew that when they had plenty they would have a tendency to forget what they had been given.

He knew that when they had plenty they would see themselves as behind all the good things they had.

When they had only what they needed, they would acknowledge that what they had had been given to them.

That God had provided their needs.

When they had plenty, they would forget God and exalt themselves.

I think this is a stark reminder to us as affluent Christians today.

Do we exalt ourselves, like God said the Israelites would? 

We may pay lip service to everything coming from God but in our hearts and minds have we let that sink in.

Because we earn a wage we naturally think that what we have done has got us the privileges that we have – our homes, our clothes, our holidays, our treats.

Of course we have earnt it – BUT is this thinking at the detriment of seeing our dependence upon God.

It is only through his graciousness that we have these things. It is only because he has provided them for us in the first place.

It’s really difficult thinking for us but if we are not careful then we can fall into the same trap as God warned the Israelites about – that they would forget his provision to them.

You see if we do think only that we have got what we have got because of ourselves it is obviously going to affect the ways we view money and our possessions and of course our priorities with our money.

But if we begin to get a sense of God’s provision to us then we begin to see what we have in a different way and our priorities may change.

If we do the latter this is surely going to affect the way we view our money and possession.

Some Christians working fulltime in some form of Christian service choose to live by faith.
They do not take a salary but are reliant on God to provide things for them through other people.

They have that real sense of God providing for them.

I have to say I admire these people greatly and it is a challenge to me to think if I would be able to do the same thing.

I think it is a disease of affluence – perhaps affluenza that we have lost that sense of God’s provision for us and view ourselves as earning our right to our possessions and our lifestyle.

Do we view our possessions as a result of our own effort, or God given?

Jesus said in the passage from Matthew.

“Do not worry about what you will eat, or what you will drink, or about your body what you will wear. Is life not more than food, and the body more than clothing?”

For the God who clothes the lilies of the field with such glory will clothe you.

God know our needs, and he will provide for them.

All that we have is a gift from God.

So if this is the case how then do we respond to this?

How do we as Christians cope with what we have been given?

Should we all give up all we have and go and live by faith?

I’m not sure that’s what we are all called to do.

But I do think that the biblical teaching is quite radical and is something we all need to work out for ourselves.

In the early church in Acts we see the Christians sharing all they had in common with each other.

They were called not to hold back for themselves anything, and perhaps you know the story of Ananias and Saphira who when they did hold the proceeds of a sale of land back from the church, they were struck down dead.

The sharing of all goods in the early church continued into the third century.

We also see in Acts 11 the early church taking up collections for famine relief.

They were serious about their money.

They acknowledged that it was part of their faith and lived accordingly.

Within the early church there is also an emphasis on giving sacrificially as a response to the grace that God has given us.

It isn’t about giving what you can afford, but giving more than that.

I think as a church we may have lost that sense of sacrificial giving.

That we give of what we have because we have been given so much.

When the demise of corporate living happened, there was an onus of keeping only what you needed and giving everything else away as alms for those in need.

How far have we come away from this?

I think it’s interesting to see how money came to be separated from faith.

It was with the development of the monastic movement that ordinary Christians saw that bit of their faith taken care of.
That those in the monasteries who had taken vows of poverty would deal with the giving of alms. All they needed to do was give the monasteries a bit of money occasionally.

Of course when the monasteries were closed down after the reformation even this ended.

So how can we get back to seeing sacrificial giving as an integral part of our faith?

Because giving sacrificially shows that God is high in our list of priorities.

I want to suggest some factor we may want to consider in our attitude to money and giving.

Throughout the bible there is an emphasis on caring for those in need, in particular the widows, orphans and aliens.

If we look at the world we can see the gross inequalities between the rich and the poor.

I heard a statistic that said if all the Christians in America tithed 10% of their income, then we would alleviate third world poverty.

If we in England were to do this we too would make a drastic difference to the lives of many individuals.

Are we as wealthy Christian really helping the poor and needy?

And then there is also a question of the exploitation of those in the third world.

Can we help to combat this by buying fair trade goods?

And what about our attitude to our money and possessions.

I know I have been told since I was young to possess things wasn’t wrong as long as you had the right attitude.

I’m sure this is probably right.

But do we use this as an excuse to excuse ourselves from taking our attitude to sacrificial giving seriously.

Do we appease our consciouses by saying that we hold our possessions lightly, and yet don’t give more than we have too?

Next week we will be looking at giving as investing in God’s work but I want this week to leave you with a challenge to think about your own attitude to your money and possessions. With some questions to ponder.

How do the words of Jesus in Matthew 6 strike you – do not worry about your life?

Does God’s warning to the Israelites bring you up short in your own attitudes to money and possessions?

And how does your spending reflect your own priorities in life- and where does God fit in to this?

Let’s pray that God would continue to challenge us all in our thinking.

Amen