Money Post (Pt 4)

What’s my point in writing all these posts about money?

My point is this: We don’t need as much of it as we think we do and we need to stop looking at what the perceivably rich people have and gorging ourselves over their apparent wealth and our apparent poverty. There’s a word for all this you know, “Coveting.”

Let’s just rebrand this whole “Inequality of Wealth” deal in America to either a) “We’re Babies and Want the Other Kid’s Legos” or b) “Selfish Coveters Who Are OK with Demanding to Have Your Stuff.” Take your pick. Folks the grass is always greener somewhere else (sound familiar? Like your mom said it when you were an incapable child?).

Take what you are given, what you earn (by the extravagant grace, mercy and love of God who let you live, allowed you a job, and set you in America) and use it wisely and shrewdly.

Remember that it is God who gives and takes away and that those enormously wealthy people will have a hard time coming to the fountain of grace because their money will hold them back. Remember that you too are one of the 1% of the world by living in America and that to those to whom much is given much will be expected. Remember to thank the Lord for his great provision in your life and give to him your tithes and offerings. Remember God is King and you; you are not. Remember that it’s free grace that saves our damnably wretched souls and it is free mercy that rains down in our heart to make us even notice God. Remember our biggest problem is our sinful rebellion against God NOT the lack of some odd little trinket that will lose its entire luster in a week.

Our Constant Need

Do you know that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach? The one that feels strangely similar to hunger but isn’t hunger at all? Maybe yours is that feeling in your heart, when it seems to free-fall to your toes? Or perhaps yours is the fogginess of the brain, where the simplest thought is the hardest of struggles? What do we need in these moments, what must we have?

Jesus. Not a man to give advice or a woman to listen to the issue, we need Jesus. We do not need to understand the nuances of the deepest theology we just need Jesus.

We need him… I need him to have lived a perfect life. I need him to have been beaten far beyond recognition as human. I need him to have been nailed to a torturous cross. I need him to have yielded up his spirit. I need the blood and water to flow. I need him to have been buried and more than that to have risen from the grave. I need him to be seated at the right hand of the Father on high interceding on my behalf.

Saying, “His debt I have paid and his heart I have won. I have loved him before the foundations of the world were set when You, my Father, gave him to me. He is mine and I will not loose him.”

More than self-help and self-worth and self-love we need to hear of Jesus, the perfect God-Man, doing what none could do and willingly dying for wretch’s sins.

And this we will always need, even when our stomachs feel the way they should and our hearts are stationed in their proper places and when clarity of thought is a breeze. We can never or will ever outgrow our need for the astoundingly simple yet infinitely complex beautiful gospel of Jesus Christ our Savior.