The Christian and Money - Part 3

The Gospel and Money
The Sermon on Mount is teaching for believers, it is extended teaching about the values of the kingdom. In Matthew 6:25-34 Jesus says that being in the kingdom, knowing God by grace liberates the believer from worry and anxiety. We’re freed from keeping up with the Joneses, from earning security and status for ourselves because we are given security in Christ, and relationship with God as our Father.

In 1 Timothy 5:8 Paul clearly teaches that we are to provide for our families, he says that not to do so makes us worse than an unbeliever. We trust God to provide and recognise his provision is found in the position in which he has put us. In Chapter 6:6-10 Paul exhorts Timothy to be godly, reminding him that he is saved for contentment, that the believer lives with the awareness that we brought nothing into this world and we can take nothing out of it. That realisation should free us from the hoarding mentality. In contrast Paul calls him to be content with food and clothing (8).

Such Contentment is radically COUNTER CULTURAL, especially as we live in a world which bombards us with advertising whose very aim is to make us discontent, to make us want something which we do not have, to make us feel like we need it and must have it. Yet Paul calls Timothy to be content with food and clothing as part of radical discipleship. Are we content? At root the issue is to recognise what my real needs are. Do I need sky TV? – no, do I need a 60” Plasma? – no. None of those things is wrong to possess in and of themselves but they are not needs. Not to have them does not mean God is not meeting my needs. We can and must learn to be content without them.

In 2 Corinthians 8:8-9 Paul calls on the Corinthians to give to alleviate the needs of fellow believer’s elsewhere. His instructions are telling, he does not demand a set figure of them he does not set a total and send them a big wooden thermometer with gradations up the side and a tin of paint to mark their progress. As he exhorts them to give and give generously it is grace that calls them to give. God has been generous to them and to us and they and we mirror the love and generosity shown to us supremely in Jesus Christ.

Having been made God’s children by his grace and mercy we adopt the fathers values. This means that we love God with all our heart, soul, strength and love our neighbours as ourselves. This love will inevitably impact what we do with our money. See a need meet a need. Tellingly it is lack of love for God shown in lack of love for others that leads Amos and other prophets to make known God’s stinging rebuke to the people of Israel for their failure to provide for the poor and willingness to trample the weak.

As Gospel people we mirror gospel attitudes, God held nothing back from me therefore I hold nothing back from him.

The question is how can we live like this?
In Luke 16 Jesus tells the parable of The Shrewd Manager. This man knows he is going to lose his job so he radically cuts the debts of those who are debtors to his master (v3-4). The shock in the passage is the way this man is treated by his soon to be former boss. His master commends him (v8). We need to recognise what it is he is commended for, he is not commended for dishonesty, he is not commended for being righteous but he is commended for “dealing shrewdly”. In other words this man sees the future and acts accordingly.

The call (v9) is to see the future and act now in light of it. It means that we are to use what God gives us with an eye on eternity. What we do with what God gives us reveals where our heart and hopes really lay. And (v13) makes it clear that we either serve God OR Money. The impossible application of that is to say that I am the one exception who can serve both God and money, but we would never make that impossible application would we.

How can we live as the gospel calls us to do with our money and possessions, recognising God has given them to us but that they are ours to steward for God’s glory and in the light of grace? We recognise that we are to live now in the light of eternity.