Luxury, poverty...

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The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them anytime you want…but this 52 inch plasma set is on sale only through Saturday.

The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them anytime you want…but Apple’s iPhone goes on sale June 29.

The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them anytime you want…but 0% financing on this new Dodge Durango won’t last forever.

The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them anytime you want…but there are huge sales THIS week at Guitar Center, Best Buy, Lowes and Gander Mountain.

The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them anytime you want…but there will never be a good time to do it. You’ll never want to.

Today we continue our series on Luxury…with Jesus and Justice (as in a fair shake for the poor). This week I read through the red letters in the Gospels – that is, I read through the words that Jesus actually said, and pretty much skipped everything else. It’s an interesting thing to do, to let yourself focus on the words Jesus actually said. I was looking for the words he spoke about poverty, about helping the poor. And one of the best known things he said was: The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me (Mark 14:7).

Out of a desire to bless our own materialism, we act as if that was the primary teaching Jesus handed down about poverty. The poor you will always have with you. What good will it do to help them? Sure, throw them some scraps every now and then, just to prove you have a heart. But don’t try to change the nature of things.

The other message Jesus gave us about the poor that we want to make into his primary message is when he said:

You might think I’m misquoting Jesus. Didn’t he actually say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”? He said that, but in Matthew 5. This is Luke 6, a different occasion, and he said:

LK 6:21 Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.

See, if the poor are so blessed, why would we want to mess that up for them? Why ruin their blessed state by making them less poor?

So Jesus said: The poor you will always have with you. And BTW, blessed are the poor. So, two reasons not to bother, if we take those reasons out of context. But we DO have to take them out of context to make them say what we want them to say, to make them bless us for neglecting the poor.

When Jesus said “The poor you will always have with you”, he was giving a blessing to a woman who had anointed him with incredibly expensive perfume as a preparation for his impending death. It was an act of worship on her part, and if I were to put his meaning in a nutshell, it would be: Sometimes you need to take a break from the mission for awhile to worship God, to offer HIM your sacrifice, even to give Him an extravagant sacrifice of worship.

LK 6:24 "But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.

LK 6:25 Woe to you who are well fed now,
for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.

I doubt that we'll take those as anything other than a warning to get our priorities right, and if we hear him correctly, we'll get busy blessing the poor with the talents and resources he's given us.

Well, as I read through the words of Jesus this week with an eye for what he has to say about poverty and money, I discovered again four familiar principles that I want to be found living when the Lord returns and I have to give my final account to him...

1. Money isn’t worth the trouble we put ourselves through to get and keep it.

When Jesus was tempted by Satan to turn stones into bread, he said this about material things, even essential ones like food: MT 4:4 Jesus answered, "It is written: `Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.' "

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gave us this gentle passage which comforts and corrects us at the same time:

25 "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?

28 "And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (Matthew 6:25-34)

Now I'm a realist and maybe even a pessimist. I know that everyone needs money to survive. We are living in a material world, after all. But do you notice how Jesus takes two states of mind – FAITH and ANXIETY about possessions – and CONTRASTS them? He makes them opposites, saying: “Don't you know that your Father knows what you need? Why race around and worry yourself to death as if you were in control?

From Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness: “Economists and psychologists have spent decades studying the relation between wealth and happiness, and they have generally concluded that wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class, but that it does little to increase happiness thereafter. Americans who earn $50,000 per year are much happier than those who earn $10,000 per year, but Americans who earn $5 million per year are not much happier than those who earn $100,000 per year. People who live in poor nations are much less happy than people who live in moderately wealthy nations, but people who live in moderately wealthy nations are not much less happy than people who live in extremely wealthy nations. Economists explain that wealth has 'declining marginal utility,' which is a fancy way of saying that it hurts to be hungry, cold, sick, tired, and scared, but once you've bought your way out of these burdens, the rest of your money is an increasingly useless pile of paper” (pp. 217-18).

It's liberating therefore to put our trust in God with regard to money. But let's remember that putting our trust in Him isn't just a state of mind, but of action. If I trust, I obey, and if I don't obey it is because I don't trust Him.

Jesus once told a story about a man who stored up such a bounty of crops that he had to tear down his old barns and build bigger ones to hold it, a story I think about whenever I see a new storage facility open up. We'd call that man a success. Jesus called him a fool, and God told him: This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself? Then Jesus concluded with: "This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God. (Luke 12:20-21) – which seems like a common malady these days. But so much of the teaching of this One we call “Lord” comes back to this lesson: Money isn’t worth the trouble we put ourselves through to get and keep it.

2. Giving to the poor is a vital spiritual discipline – regardless if it “fixes things” or not.

Also from the Sermon on the Mount: MT 6:1 "Be careful not to do your `acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

MT 6:2 "So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Where I trip up: When I give, I want to see my money put to good use. That's not all bad, of course. Good stewardship means using God's resources wisely. Besides, earlier in this study on poverty when we went through Proverbs, we saw that there ought to be a connection between hard work and receiving money, and we'll see it again before this study is through. But the problem is that when I give money to help the poor, I want to see their lives straightened out and therefore they should never ask me for money again.

It's rarely that easy. But besides, Jesus talks in the Gospels about his followers as if they'll be the type who give money to the poor and who do it consistently because it is the right thing to do before God. They won't announce it in the synagogues and they'll learn to hide from the fickle praise of people too and they'll give to the needy because (as a good spiritual discipline) it frees them of their bondage to money and helps turn their heart toward God.

Reading the red words in the Bible is good as an occasional discipline, but there is one weakness in it. So much of Jesus' teaching about the poor came not in what he said but in what he DID and who he did it with. And that's in the black letters. If you don't read the black, you don't see that Jesus gave to the poor the minutes and hours of his life. It's in the black letters that you read that Jesus healed “a blind beggar” or someone with leprosy who was an outcast from society and the productive labor that would earn a living, or a man who couldn't walk. IOW for Jesus and for me, actions speak alongside of words to reveal what we believe, and Jesus believed that giving to the poor is a vital spiritual discipline.

3. Our actions toward the poor are our actions toward Jesus. Same with inaction. Matthew 25:31-46 – The sheep and goats.

We quote this so often, you may actually get tired of hearing it. But as I compare the amount we're willing to spend on ourselves vs. the amount we redistribute to the poor, we need to keep hearing it. READ.

Is it any wonder that Jesus said in Matthew 19:23-24 - "I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

LK 12:32 "Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom. 33 Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. 34 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

LK 14:12 Then Jesus said to his host, "When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. 13 But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, 14 and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."

I have to confess that I love material things. I know they don’t satisfy and I see through their lies eventually, but I still waste a good bit of money on them first.

I have to confess to a little resentment too, when I see all the ways people here find to spend their money that don’t include the Kingdom of God, serving the poor, developing missions, supporting the local ministry of this church, and all the other things we say are important.

And I have to admit that my resentment is partially a cover for the knowledge that I often do the same thing on a smaller scale, and I would probably do it on a larger scale if I had more money.

Morrison Hill Christian Church
P.O. Box 59 - 1008 E. Race St.
Kingston, TN 37763 (865) 376-5205