Episode 1. The Tyranny of Wealth
Listen to the radio broadcast
Download audio file
In many respects – money makes the world go around. At least the economy. Can’t live without it. And yet as good a servant as it is – it’s a brutal master. And so many, many people …
In many respects – money makes the world go around. At least the economy. Can’t live without it. And yet as good a servant as it is – it’s a brutal master. And so many, many people live under the tyranny of wealth. So what if anything does God have to say about setting us free?
The Root of All Evil
I don’t think that there’s a single person on the planet who is not affected by money or at least what money represents: value, wealth. Most of the time it seems that we don’t have quite enough. Some, in fact, many of the people listening to this programme today, around the world, simply don’t have enough to feed their families, or provide for their basic needs – a safe home, education, health services … Yet in the affluent west where we have so much money compared to most people in the world, there’s so much middle class debt that it’s become a pandemic. People are drowning in personal debt, credit cards maxed out.
The cry of a whole generation is that we don’t have enough and yet by any objective measure, we have more that enough. Sure, economies fluctuate, interest rates go up and down and inflation strikes, unemployment, house prices … all those things effect people’s disposable incomes but why is money such a big issue and why do so many people who have enough, feel as though they don’t?
That’s why today we are kicking off a teaching series called, “Money Matters – a Kingdom Perspective”. Because God’s wisdom in the area of money (as counter-intuitive as it may seem to you and me) is powerful, it’s effective and it sets us free from the tyranny of wealth.
Now we all, to a greater or lesser degree, are products of our environment. Our circumstances, our culture and wealth in most cultures is a big thing. Not all, but most. It goes with position, power, status, recognition, comfort … let’s face it; they’re all pretty seductive things. Who doesn’t want to live in a nice house? Who doesn’t want to drive a nice car? Who doesn’t want to wear nice clothes? They are all pretty much universal desires, even though they work themselves out in quite different ways in different countries and cultures.
There is a basic premise; a central thesis around which our societies and cultures operate. If my needs and wants are met, then I’ll be at the very least nine tenths of the way to being happy and contented and satisfied. This is the central tenet of advertising, it makes the economy go round. If people in the West didn’t want expensive clothes, shoes and handbags, people in developing countries wouldn’t have jobs.
All this leads to trade and commerce and that’s a good thing, and to an extent, that’s true. We need trade and commerce, otherwise there would be a lot of unemployed people around and that’s not good.
But this central tenet of happiness – me being able to have everything I want and do anything I want – also brings a lot of trouble into this world. It’s why people argue and fight and have conflict; it’s why countries fight wars; it’s why people rob banks (well, maybe you and I don’t rob banks so much), it’s why people tell little lies on their tax returns. That brings it a bit closer to home then.
It’s in fact why we need governments, laws, police forces, court houses and jails. It’s why we need armies and air forces and navies, because ultimately we can’t all have what we want, so there have to be mechanisms for dealing with the conflict between individual wants and needs and the social good; the broader good.
That’s what all these institutions are about; balancing out selfishness in the context of society. We can’t all have what we want. It doesn’t stop us from trying of course. I want, I want, I want, I want to win. And so, because money or wealth are powerful, powerful components of winning, all of a sudden it’s as though we have become enslaved to them.
Why does a family of four need a house so big that they can live in the place and almost never see one another? Why do we need a hundred thousand dollar car when a twenty five thousand dollar car would admirably do us, say to get us from A to B? Because we all, to some extent, covet wealth and what goes with it – comfort and recognition. We want to win. It becomes an obsession, people working so hard to keep up appearances; to conform to what appears to be the social norm in their people group. All of a sudden wealth becomes a tyrant, which is something we are going to look at later in the programme.
Jesus said this in Luke chapter 12, verse 34. He said:
For where your treasure is there your heart will also be.
But God doesn’t have a problem with money, per se; in fact, He has a whole bunch of good advice about money. He has no problem with people working and earning money and enjoying the fruits of their labours, in fact, one of the wisest men of all time, King Solomon, in the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes, writes this – Ecclesiastes chapter 5, verse 19:
All to whom God gives wealth and possessions and whom he enables to enjoy them and to accept their lot and find enjoyment in their toil, this is the gift of God.
So, does God have a problem with money? Nope, not at all! The problem … the problem lies in our attitude towards the money. First Timothy chapter 6, verse 10:
For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil and in their eagerness to be rich, some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.
See, there’s the problem! And over these coming weeks we are going to start exploring not just the problem so we truly understand it and can identify it in our own hearts, but God’s solution; God’s answer; God’s way of setting us free from the tyranny of the love of money in our lives, the plague of desiring wealth, and turning it back to what it was meant to be. Money is meant to be something that serves us, rather than something that rules us.
So I have to warn you – don’t say I didn’t warn you – that God’s solution, as is often the case, flies completely and absolutely in the face of the wisdom of this world. It lies in an upside down, counter intuitive principle of sacrifice. Listen to this. Luke chapter 9, verse 24:
For those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.
See, it’s a principle about the whole of our lives as well as our money. The more we hoard money, and the more that the love of money runs deeper and deeper in our hearts, then the more we are going to bear the fruit that comes from the root. And the fruit that comes from the root of the love of money, as Paul writes to his young protégé Timothy here, is all kinds of evil.
It causes us to wander away from our faith in God because of our eagerness to be rich and as a result we experience pain. Lots of it. We end up piercing ourselves with many pains – debt, fear, financial insecurity, a maxed out credit card, long hours of work to pay for this financial madness – many pains.
That’s why God’s treatment for this malady is so radical; so upside down; so counter to anything that you or I, who have the propensity to love money, would ever have come up with.
For those who want to save their lives will lose them but those who lose their lives for my sake (Jesus) will save them.
A Brutal Master
We are talking together today and over the coming few weeks about the whole subject of ‘money’. So many people have so many problems with money. Whether rich or poor, money causes so many problems. So many people are deep in debt – up to their eyeballs. So many people are struggling incredibly with their finances and fear and uncertainty and then the economy takes a plunge or interest rates go up or they have too many credit cards to pay.
Or perhaps you have a share portfolio – that’s your saving for your retirement – and you’ve been enjoying watching it rise like a cake in the oven, only to see it collapse as something completely outside your control, spooks the share market.
There seems to me to be a couple of things tied up in all of this. Firstly, we imagine somehow that our wellbeing depends absolutely on the house we have; on the life style we have been accustomed to; the car that we drive. In other words, if we didn’t have those things – if we lost those things – that life, somehow, wouldn’t be worth living. And secondly, because we love money or at the very least, we are prone to loving money and the things that we can buy with it, we are afraid of letting it go.
When you love someone or something, you don’t want to let it go. That’s why parents who have invested so much in their kids, cry when this young adult decides to move to another town to study or to go to work. They love their children; they don’t want to let them go, even though the time has come.
Earlier we looked at this verse. First Timothy chapter 6, verse 10:
For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil and in their eagerness to be rich, some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.
I want to tell you how much I relate to that. Money was always more than“money” to me before I met Jesus. Money wasn’t just “money”, it was wealth; it had a life of its own; it was a symbol of success and ability. It was something to show off so other people would know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I was a clever little fellow. And so here’s what I did: I worked myself into the ground, I ruined relationships, I worked so hard that it made me sick, not just physically sick from time to time, but emotionally sick and spiritually sick and socially sick.
I was driven to succeed and the tangible symbol of that success was money. I know of another businessman who took the sales of a well known retail chain’s computer division from a few million into over half a billion in just a few years. He was the retail guru of the country. Everyone looked at him as the personification of success. He was earning, not surprisingly, big, big dollars.
I have heard him share his testimony a few times – he told me how when the whole world wanted a piece of him; when he was the golden haired boy, not just within his company, but in retailing across the country, he was vomiting up blood in the toilet, hardly sleeping, his marriage was falling apart and he hardly knew his kids.
Let’s just listen to these words of wisdom from the Apostle Paul again and let them sink in. First Timothy chapter 6, verse 10:
For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil and in their eagerness to be rich, some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.
Do you see how true that is? I wonder if you were to just stop for a moment and think of your life and how you treat money. Let me ask you, to what extent has this ‘servant’ become your master? What are the things you are doing to serve this master of wealth that are bearing evil fruit in your life? How is wealth drawing you away from Jesus? What are the pains that you are suffering right now because you just have to have the money? You just have to have the job that’s an hour and a half’s commute away each way, morning and night, that pays ten or fifteen percent more than the other job you could have had that’s much closer to home!
So you don’t see the kids and you get up early and you go to bed late and you’re exhausted and your marriage is at risk and your children barely know you and you have no idea what’s going on in their life – all for what – ten or fifteen percent more? Is it worth it? “Aw, but if I didn’t earn that extra money I wouldn’t be able to pay my mortgage!”
Okay, so what about a smaller house – will the world come to an end? Yeah, it will, because somehow we have all convinced ourselves that it will if we can’t maintain our current lifestyles – each one of us. Do you get it? It is such a sham – it is such a lie! And yet we sacrifice our lives on the altar of this deception, trying to serve the false god of wealth. Hello!
Friend, listen to me! Money is a tyrant; it is a brutal master and if we choose to serve that master it will tear us apart. By choosing to serve that master we are piercing ourselves with many, many, many pains. Now, maybe you have mastered money in your life but many, in fact, most people haven’t. The greatest majority are slaves to money and is it any wonder that as a slave to a brutal master, life isn’t quite what it promised to be.
Money isn’t bringing us the happiness, either because we are working so hard or our expectations are so high that we can’t ever meet them or we are so far in debt and the storm clouds are rolling in on the economic horizon. Jesus put it this way, Matthew chapter 6, verse 24. He said:
No one can serve two masters. For a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
And that “mammon” means the false god of wealth and greed. And the thing with that false god is this: no matter how attractive and enticing it may at first appear, it is a brutal, brutal master to any slave.
The Mastery of Money
Money, as we saw earlier, money is a brutal master that as the Apostle Paul writes, “… can pierce us with many pains.” We chase after this elusive pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but when we sacrifice our lives to it, all we discover is pain and loss. So, what do we do about it? Well, here’s the thing: it’s a question of deciding who is the boss. Who is serving whom?
I have spent so much of my life serving this false god of mammon; this god of wealth. Let’s just go back to what Jesus said about this. Matthew chapter 6, verse 24:
No one … no one can serve two masters for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
Now, I would like to unpack this word “mammon” a bit. It means, Webster’s Dictionary definition:
“mammon” – the false god of riches and avarice; riches regarded as an object of worship in greedy pursuit; wealth as an evil, more or less personified so it looks like a god and not some inanimate object.
The Oxford Dictionary defines it as:
the god of wealth, regarded as evil or immoral. Those who worship “mammon” are equivalent to greedy people who value money too highly.
So Jesus wasn’t saying here: you can’t serve God and money – its wealth; it’s this god of wealth, this desire that happens in our hearts. So please, let’s not get the idea that Jesus is saying that somehow money, in and of itself, is a bad thing. That somehow none of us should have any of it. No, He’s saying that for some of us, we have an unhealthy attitude to it. We desire it too much and it’s become our god, ahead of our God in heaven. That’s what He’s saying!
So, the decision, the very clear decision we need to make is which of these two gods are we going to serve? Because Jesus is quite right, we can only serve the one or the other. If my heart is after God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit – the one true, living God – then as we are going to see a bit later in this series, that’s not a course that always leads us to great earthly riches. It, in fact, can be completely the opposite.
Or we serve the god of this world; the god of wealth; mammon. And we’ll throw all our energy into building up treasures here on this earth. And the reason we can’t serve them both is that wherever we invest our energies and our heart; wherever we store up our treasures, either at the feet of mammon or at the feet of the living God, that’s where our heart is going to be – one or the other, not both.
Let me take you back of the very first of the Ten Commandments, Exodus chapter 20, verses 2 and 3. God says:
I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt; out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.
God is the God who sent His Son to die for you and me and He will not have any other god that comes ahead of Him in our hearts. So it’s the one of the other. Who will be my master; who will be your master? The god of wealth or the God who created the heavens and the earth and everything that’s in them. Have you ever asked yourself that question? Money is a battle ground for our hearts. Our allegiance will either be to self and wealth or to God.
And that’s why I said earlier on in the programme that God’s solution for us is simply not palatable. Luke chapter 9, verse 24:
Those who want to save their life will lose it; those who want to lose their lives for my sake will save it.
That applies to all of our lives and it applies especially to our money. The more I try to build up my treasure here on earth, the more I’m going to lose the life that God had planned. The more I‘m prepared to give it away, on the other hand – not always all of it, but often a pretty fair chunk of it – the more I’ll discover my life.
Oh, I know … I know so many people don’t want to hear that. We will be talking a lot about this over the coming weeks; God’s radical solution to the slavery that comes with wealth, that so many people are under in their allegiance to wealth and perhaps a whole bunch of people are going to say, “Well, I don’t need this stuff, I don’t want to hear this.” Good, don’t! But what will happen is you will continue to be pierced by the many pains that come through the evil that inevitably grows out a love of money – the root of all kinds of evil.
Many, many, many people live their whole lives in those pains. And that’s a choice that God gives each one of us but the alternative – whilst it requires an iron resolve in the short term – is what delivers real life, abundant life, in the medium and longer terms. Jesus again said – Matthew chapter 6, beginning at verse 19. He said:
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust can consume them and where thieves break in and steal; instead store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves cannot break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body.
So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is actually darkness, how great is your darkness! No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
So there it is! There is a decision that confronts us. A dog cannot have two masters, a dog cannot serve two masters, but it’s not that in serving God, you and I can’t have any money – that’s not what He is saying. It’s about who gets our allegiance, God or mammon?
See, if I give my allegiance to the false god of mammon, then I would be prepared to give up the things of God for the mammon that I serve – the wealth, the recognition, the fame. If on the other hand, I choose to give my allegiance to the real God, the living God, then I will be prepared to give up the things of mammon for the living God whom I serve.
And the reason so many people want to have a foot in both camps is they don’t want to give up the things of mammon. Giving away money, oh, ouch, that hurts! I mean significant money, more than just the loose change in our pockets or our handbags when the plate comes around church on Sunday or when someone knocks on our front door for the poor. No, I’m talking real money; something that costs us something. That’s why we can’t have a foot in both camps – you just can’t because these two masters make different and conflicting demands.
I remember when I first became a Christian, the notion of giving away even a tenth of my income – I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. That’s a lot of money, I thought. I was earning a lot of money back in those days. How can they possibly want me to do this? How can God possibly want me to do this? He wants us to do it because He loves us and He doesn’t want us to be a slave to wealth and so many people are.
Now, next week we are going to meet a man who had to make a terrible decision. We are going to see the choice that Jesus gave him and the path that he chose in choosing between mammon and the living God.
Let me bring you back to this question though, which one are you serving? Are you serving the true, living God with all that you are and with all that you have? Or are you a slave to the false god of wealth, this mammon? Which one of these two do you truly, truly want to serve with your life?
Comments