May 17 - Love of Money

May 17 - Love of Money - 1 Timothy 6:3-10

Diane says:
What does a false teacher look like? Paul is finally going to make it very clear in these verses. I am going to read these closely so that I can be assured I don't do these things. But we see these people even within our churches. People that stir up controversy around scripture or even the orthodox beliefs of Christianity. There are those that speak maliciously within our congregations of one another and bring up evil suspicions and cause constant friction. And there are those who believe that godliness is a means to financial gain.

Paul speaks very clearly of our ultimate gain. We will take nothing with us. We have food and are clothed and should be content. A desire to be rich draws us into temptation and causes many to be foolish which will lead to destruction. The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil and has drawn people away from the faith.

False teachers and an unhealthy love of wealth. Ruin and destruction will soon follow.

Rebecca says:
A few days ago I told you about a pastor of mine who drove luxury cars, lived in a gated community and sent his kids to private school. I have been biting at the bit to get to this passage to tell you the rest of the story.

What I didn’t tell you was that this church was in the dead center of a ghetto. It was a common occurrence on my drive home from there to see houses barricaded off with yellow caution tape and police cruisers out front because of a shooting. Drug dealers would wade onto the property; prostitutes freely roamed the streets out front. One of the reasons the Pastor's children went to private schools was because he wanted to live among his congregation yet did not want his 3 girls to go to a school that had a higher rape statistic than most American towns.

His gated community was on the outskirts of the town and since he spent 7 long days a week at the church, he did not want to have to worry about the safety of his family while attending to his Fathers work. They moved to this place after a few stragglers from the community showed up at their door unexpectedly putting his wife in an awkward and terrifying situation because of who she was married to. He was in fact impeding their main source of income - drug trafficking.

The luxury cars might seem extreme but he was known to drive to communities as far as Georgia and North Carolina frequently to help start churches in some of the worst neighborhoods, and I presume an 8 – 10 hour drive was a little more tolerable in a Mercedes than in a Honda. I could see the logic in that.

I didn't tell you that he staffed the church with locals with no experience and felony records, who couldn’t find jobs anywhere else. He kept the church open with air conditioning every day and night staffed with security just in case someone needed a place to go due to a crisis. He built a gymnasium with two bowling lanes, a computer lab and a full size basketball court to keep the kids off the streets and he offered free tutoring services to anyone that needed them of any age and G.E.D classes for the drop outs.

On Sundays, buses picked up the elderly and made the rounds to the local homeless shelters in case someone wanted a fresh Word. After church he served them a hot meal on a table dressed with linens and a centerpiece, offered them haircuts and let them pick out a fresh change of clothes before driving them back to the shelter.

I could list a million more things that man did with the money that he was blessed with in that church. This was not all funded by the tithes of the church, he put in his own money from books he had written and speaking engagements he took to help build all of these things and keep them staffed.

He did what he could to rid the community of controversies and strife. His goals had little to do with ambition, and he kept himself far from quarrels that polluted that community, and rarely had time to go after financial gain. Though he had abundant money and was obviously blessed he was not a lover of it and seemed to utilize it and give it away as quickly as it came into being.

I saw lives transformed by the Spirit of Prayer in that place; I sat next to people who tasted bitterness in life and watched them cry out to God week after week by the petition and leading of this man. He was at the 5 AM prayer service, the midnight vigil and more than once on a Sunday he set aside his sermon in order to worship because he felt that it was more important for us to commune with God in the Spirit than it was for us to listen to him talk.

The power of a pastor or leader that loves God more than money or knowledge or power is a sharp and fiery sword. When he is able to set aside quarreling and schemes designed to lure him away and know none of that matters, that breathtaking display sets my heart on fire!

Money is not evil, nor is knowledge or power. Picture your hand laid flat and in the palm a stack of money 14” tall. Now picture walking with that hand in the air palm up. How quickly do you think it would fall? How long could you balance? The physics of that stack tells us that it cannot be held in place by just your hand at the bottom. You may grip tightly but in order to stay put it must also have a support bracing it from the top.

The lover of money will choose to use his own hand as that brace. He may keep it in place for a while, tiptoeing everywhere, keeping his eye focused on that stack constantly to be sure it is secure. But inevitably by his own internal pressure which squeezes too hard it will eventually collapse with a very large smack as those hands come crashing together.

A lover of God will keep his hand flat and allow God’s unwavering hand to be the hand at the top and will go on with his life with ease and freedom. He knows that if his pile dwindles or grows it was under God’s hand that it did so and it is out of his control. And even if the entire stack disappears then all that means is now he will be left walking hand in hand with God which is not such a bad proposition.

That stack of money can be replaced by anything such as knowledge, which is the root of those insane doctoral quarrellings that happen in church or power which stirs up arguments. Control tricks us into believing that we get to decide what goes with us. The stack is anything that would cause us to be led astray, money just happens to be the leader of that pack. But every good and perfect gift is given by God, and as long as we let His omnipotent hand control that stack, we will be vessels that are inexpressibly eager to use it all. We will share everything held in that stack so that we can get to the bottom of the pile. Because when it is all gone we can finally feel the hand of God in our own. And then we will leave this earth the same way we came in - hand in hand with God and everything else in between is just stuff!