Sermon from December 10, 2006
Originally supposed to be preached November 19, 2006

Arthur Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University, just published a new book called Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism. Toward the end of the book Professor Brooks draws the following conclusion about charity and politics. "On average, religious people are far more charitable than secularists with their time and money. Religious people are more generous in informal ways as well, such as giving blood, giving money to family members, and behaving honestly," (Who Really Cares, 177).

The spiritual roots of Christian compassion draw on two conclusions: 1) money should serve spiritual purposes, and 2) Wealth is God's provision. Let me begin with a personal anecdote. I remain haunted by the image of the Church with its hand always out, asking for money. When I was a seminary student, a men's clothing store in Dallas offered a discount on suits to seminary students. I went to the store, and when it came time to ask for the discount, I couldn't do it. I felt embarrassed and beggarly. I didn't do it, and I promised the Lord that I would never use my position as a pastor to ask for personal financial favors. I'd pay the going rate like everyone else, or I would do without.

I thought then, and I think now that the Church ought to adopt the attitude of Abraham, when he said to the king of Sodom: "I have raised my hand to the Lord, God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth, and have taken an oath that I will accept nothing belonging to you, not even a thread or the thong of a sandal, so that you will never be able to say, 'I made Abram rich,'" – Genesis 14:22-23.

I am sure that my attitude about money has frustrated board members I have served with through the years. I am not at all sure that I have always been right in how I lived out this conviction. But I have reason to hope that insofar as people think about BVBC, they don't picture it as a church with its hand always out to get; you have the reputation of always having your hand out to give. You are truly a generous people.

Bill Parsons, our Administrative Pastor, came across evidence of that. BVBC belongs to the fellowship of churches called the Baptist General Conference. As of last year, there were 1,034 BGC congregations in the United States. BVBC gave more money per person than the other 1,033.

So, even when we take into account the mistakes I made, there is wisdom in the way we do things here. I still need to become wiser about God and money. The Phase III project has been a catalyst for rethinking what I thought I knew about God and money. As an act of accountability as well as an act of pastoral care, let me share what I am learning about the spiritual purposes of money and about God's provision.

Seeing with Both Eyes
The place to start is where we are. Most people (I include myself here) have ideas about God and money that are comparable to thinking the earth is flat. I have to address those distortions in myself or else injure my spiritual growth. For example, here is a distortion that symbolizes all the distortions.

How often have you heard someone say, "Money is the root of all evil?" The person will swear on a stack of Bibles that the Bible says that. Turn with me to the relevant text: 1 Timothy 6:10. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. There is a world of difference between those two statements.

If I say that the love of money is the root of all evil, then the problem is with me, with my disordered desires, and my heart needs to be changed. On the other hand, if I say that money is the root of all evil, then the problem is with money, and having money is bad. God must not want me to have money.

We reinforce this distortion, and pastors help us reinforce it, with powerful scriptural quotations. Jesus said, "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," – Mark 10:25. So, what do you say to a Christian billionare? Well, you don't say anything. But what do you think?

Jesus said, "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God," – Luke 6:20. A little further on, as if to magnify our discomfort, He said, "Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort," – Luke 6:24.

How did these verses come to have such a hold on our imaginations? Well, we like to moralize. We especially like to moralize from a distance. If we don't have much money, the rich make a juicy target; and the Bible, as we just saw, is a quiver full of arrows to shoot at the rich.

But there is a more fundamental reason that we have distorted ideas about wealth. The pastors and theologians of the Church often fail to appreciate the Bible's habit of placing opposite sides of an issue in tension with each other. It does it with human free will and divine sovereignty; it does it with losing your life as a way of saving your life; it does it with the imminent Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the delayed Second Coming of Jesus Christ; and it does it with money.

We miss it. We pay attention to the verses that make money seem bad, and we miss the opposite verses that create the tension within us that helps us find the truth about God and money. Let me illustrate the other side of the tension by asking you to turn back a page to 1 Timothy 5:8. If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he is denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

Now, let me ask you a question. Are you counting on your children to provide for you financially in your old age? Have you considered taking this verse around to your children and saying, "If you don't provide for me financially in my old age, you have denied our holy faith, and you are worse than an infidel"?

I don't think so. So, how will you be provided for financially in your old age? Do you have any idea how much money you will need at retirement to live somewhere near your present standard of living? How far do you think Social Security will take you? Have you priced nursing homes lately? By the way, Medicare doesn't pay for long-term care in a nursing home. Where does all this money you will need at retirement come from? The poor are surely blessed, but a 401k would be nice in your golden years.

The first moral of that story is: money can be a curse, and money can be a bleessing. Living with that tension is difficult, but if we do it well, we can make money serve spiritual purposes without having our souls devoured by greed and worry.

Money as Servant
How might money serve spiritual purposes? I quoted Jesus' words earlier to illustrate what reinforces our idea that God does not want us to have money. So, it's good to let Jesus' words show us again the other side of the tension in Luke 16:1-12. This is the story of a manager who was being fired from his job, and who slashed the debts that people owed to his boss. You can see it in verses 5-6. He called in each one of his master's debtors. He asked the first, "How much do you owe my master?"

"Eight hundred gallons of olive oil," he replied.

The manager told him, "Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred."

Pastor Mark preached on the first eight verses of this parable earlier this year. He showed us the psychology of the manager's action that made it shrewd and successful. By slashing the debt he made his master look generous in the eyes of the debtors. He had already fired the manager, and now he couldn't berate him publicly without hurting himself. As verse eight points out: the master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.

The point of the parable is not that Jesus was recommending dishonesty as a way to be shrewd; he was calling His followers to be honest and also be shrewd with their money for the eternal purposes. Verse nine: "I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings." What does this mean?

Ed Rowse told me the story of how a Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor in Baghdad, Iraq, did what Jesus was talking about. The Iraqi pastor had known his share of death threats at the hands of the Muslim. They had also threatened to burn down the building where the church met, which has a big sign that says, "Jesus is the light of the world."

Two Christian women in Korea, who deal in chocolate, had sent him an $8,000 gift. As he wondered how to use the gift, an unusual idea came to him. He took the gift and went to the Imam of the mosque nearest him.

He said, "I know you have a lot of poor and suffering people in your mosque. I wanted to give you a gift to help relieve their sufferings." And he gave the Imam the entire gift he had received from Christians in Senegal. The Imam was stunned and wanted to know why. The pastor explained that he did it as an act of obedience to God.

When the Baghdad pastor was formally ordained to Christian ministry, that Imam came band brought eight other Imams with him. They sat on the front row. Of course they saw Christian worship and heard the gospel proclaimed. That was using worldy wealth to gain friends, who just might welcome that pastor into heaven, because they heard the gospel and believed in Christ.

Have you ever used your money as a way of influencing someone to consider believing in Jesus Christ? We shy away from that, because it sounds like manipulation. Of course, it can be manipulation. Jesus' challenge is to avoid manipulation but to use money to advance the kingdom of God. Give it a try.

Money as Evidence of God's Provision
I have one more reflection that has grown out of my experience with our Phase III project and that helps me to sustain the proper tension we need as we grapple with a responsible use of money. This one takes us to Psalm 37:25-26.

I was young and now I am old,
     yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken
     or their children begging bread.
They are alwyas generous and lend freely;
     their children will be blessed.

My reflection on this verse takes the form of a personal testimony. I have never in my life known want. I didn't get everything I wished for, but I have always had everything I needed, and I was happy. I remember my mother occasionally saying that we were going to the poor house. I'm not sure what was rhetoric and what was reality.

My mom and dad both worked, and they provided for me and my mom's mom, who lived with us in a two-bedroom, one-bath house and had no income whatsoever.

Carole and I have lived on one salary throughout our married life. My salary the first year we started ministry was $125 a week. I never made $50,000 a year until we came back to BVBC in 1991.

By 1991 we had put our two oldest children through ten years of private, Christian school and four years of college, and our youngest daughter had been in private, Christian school for six years. She did that for another five and a half years, then spent a school year in a Bible institute and then went on to become a university graduate. While she was in college, her sister earned a seminary degree, which she asked me to help pay for. They all graduated with no school debts. They each bought a house, while in their twenties with help from us, which they paid back.

Carole and I bought our first house when I was 29 years old. Paul Chubb of our congregation made it possible through the Board of Deacons and this congregation for us to buy the house this church owned. When we moved, we sold that house in a seller's market and bought in a buyer's market in Portland. When we moved again, we sold that house in a seller's market and bought in a buyer's market in Wilmington.

I'm just trying to say with the psalmist: I was young and now I am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread. I also want to say that from day one of our marriage, we have given away at least one tenth of all our income to the church, often more. I am still amazed at what we pledged to Phase III.

Money has been evidence to us of God's provision. We have been disciplined in how we spent it, how we saved it, and how we gave it away. But what we spent and saved and gave away was God's provision.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
What I find hard to express adequately is how much joy we have found in giving. I think it started with a certain attitude. When I made $125 a week, we had the attitude that my salary was $112.50 a week. We should live on that. The first $12.50 belonged to the Lord. We didn't debate that. Giving it away became part of us, and we can rejoice.

But something more important than personal joy is at stake. In our market-driven, consumer society the repeated message is that this world is all there is to life; you better get what you can while you can. Giving your money to the cause of Christ is a powerful way to say: "This world is not all there is to life. There is the Kingdom of God. I need to give to that all I can while I can."

Giving has more to do with priorities than with income. So, what about you? Why don't you give away a tenth of all your income? Why don't you develop a plan for doing that within two years? Here's a way to start for some of you. If you gave $1,000 or less to BVBC last year, make it your goal to give at least $1,000 in 2007. You know, Jesus got it right when He said: It is more blessed to give than to receive – Acts 20:35.