You Gotta Serve Somebody

 

In Luke 16:13 Jesus says that you can't serve both money and God. No problem, right?

So how do we know if we are serving something, what are the measurements of servanthood?

I guess I would start with time. How much time I give one thing verses another might be a way to measure who I am serving. That is not helpful, because most of us spend 40- 60 hours a week doing our work. I don't know anyone who gives God that kind of attention. If we used time of devotion to one or the other, then we come up way short, all of us. We are serving money not God if time is the measure.

What about our heart, isn't that what matters? How do you know if someone loves you? They say words of love to you, they spend time with you, they give you things? This is hard to get our heads around isn't it? If we love God, if we are supposed to serve God more than money how can we measure it so we know we are on the right path, that we have not fooled ourselves into believing that everything is OK when in fact it is not.

What about our thoughts. Maybe we spend our thoughts thinking about God more than money? That is hard to do in the age of advertising.

I think in the end when it comes to money, it is what we do with it. How we earn it is very important, but so is how we spend it. Do we invest in the kingdom of self or into the Kingdom of God? Who is the beneficiary of our wealth, ourselves and those we count as part of our tribe? Or do we invest into the things that God wants us to invest in. We are called as followers to turn our tithe over to the Church. If we do this regularly then we have an opportunity to express our letting go of money and the power that it has over us. If we hand over our tithes and offerings to the church, then we have the freedom of holding onto it loosely.

Sunday we will begin Thanksgiving week with the baptism of two of our friends. As they are in the water the words that will be said to them is that "I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the old is gone the new has come."

Maybe it is time to examine our financial practices. Maybe it is time to take our checkbooks and dunk them in the water for a cleansing. Maybe we need to allow our finances to have a rebirth.

In order for it to take, we need to allow the old way to die on the Cross.

Tough call, but it is not through our own power that we attempt this, instead through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Rom 6:3-7

Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?

4 We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that,

just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father,

we too may live a new life.

5 If we have been united with him like this in his death,

we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.

6 For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with,

that we should no longer be slaves to sin—

7 because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.

 

Peace

Edwin

Whose Money is it Anyway?

My Dad was a generous man.

It was one of the unwritten rules that if he sent me to buy something, I got to keep the change.

Maybe that was a rule that I wrote.

I can remember, I would go meet my friends at the Skate Ranch to go roller-skating and my dad would give me a $20 bill for the $3 entrance fee and $2 skate rental. I would use the rest of the money for a soda and chips. I would not think twice about keeping the change. This was the regular practice for what now seems like forever. Then one day, I am not sure when, I started not only bringing back the change, but refusing to keep it. I guess it was soon after I got my first job and realized how hard it was to earn $15. In those days, it would take me at least 5 hours (minimum wage back then was about $3). I guess I started to appreciate the value of money. Also since I had a job, I all of a sudden had "friends" who needed money, all the time. I got to the place where I was saying no, often. So when there was $15 left over that my dad gave me, it felt like theft when I did not give him his change back. He gave me money for that item and not to put in my pocket.

Now that I am a dad, I am trying to teach my three about money and about fiscal stewardship. We talk about how the money we have is not ours but it is God's. How we as a family give God His tithe and our offerings on a regular basis as a way of holding loosely to that which is not ours. They also know to bring back the change when they are given money for something. These concepts are hard, because they want so many things. The TV, book orders from school, storefront advertising, and their peers constantly bombard them with things that they have to have to be complete. Video Games, toys, dolls, crafts, RC cars and planes, the list is endless, all trying to get their money.

As adults we run into the same problem.

Our Heavenly Father gives us money to steward, for daily bread, for our needs. The rest is for his kingdom work. It is hard, because what we want to do is put the "extra" in our pocket. What we really want to do is keep the change and spend it on ourselves. We want to buy the $50,000 car when the $15,000 car would do, or we go on the $10,000 vacation when a $300 camping trip would be more fun for all in the end. We start placing wants in the needs column and walk away thinking everything is OK. When really, that was not what God had in mind when he blessed us with that job and with the wealth that we had. He had other plans for that money.

We have become like children, placing the change in our pockets. We have written our own rules for the money that is our Father's.

One of the ways we can mature around this issue is to start learning the value of the money we have been entrusted with.

Here are some measures according to World Vision:

    $13,000 can get a deep well drilled providing a village of 300 with clean water cutting child mortality in half.

    $575 can buy two oxen and a plow allowing farm production to increase and allowing children to attend school

    $200 can buy a fish pond sustaining a family and provide them with extra income to send their kids to school

    $140 will send two orphans to school for a year

    $32 will purchase 4 soccer balls and place them in the hands of children in a developing country

 

In Matthew 25 we read about God's economics. How will you spend the Father's money? The passage is clear- we are to spend it on the least of these.

 

Peace

Edwin

The Inner Circle

I had the opportunity to be at the U2 360 Tour at the Rose Bowl on October 25^th. Julie and I went with our friends Ron and Dawn Stueckle. Now I had never seen U2 in concert and was looking forward to it. I got GA tickets for the floor because I figured that at the Rose Bowl, any regular seats would be pretty far away. We arrived at the Rose Bowl at 10am after a friend called and said she got there at 4am, only to be told she was number 632 for admission. We got in line and eventually someone came around and marked us 1607-1610. The deal was that we wanted to be in the inner circle. U2 sets their stage up, then surrounds it with a circular catwalk that they can run around. A select few get to be inside that circle. It was first come, first serve. So we sat in line for 7 hours for the opportunity to be a part of the inner circle. When it was a little before 3pm, security came by and gave us

wrist bands. They told us we would be let into the stadium at 5pm and that we would enter in line in groups of 250. I went to the car to drop off some stuff, when Julie paged me and said that the line was moving. It was not only moving it was running, running to the gate, no longer an orderly line but a frantic mob. I found my group and we were squished with the masses.

We waited and security came by to tell us to go back in line, but no one moved. Finally they let us into the stadium. It was a mad dash to the stage. We hurried down to the front and were admitted into the inner circle. We had made it. It was five o'clock, two more hours for the Black Eyed Peas to come on and three more for U2. We stood, holding our space, claiming our right to be in the inner circle. The problem was that no one was satisfied simply being in the inner circle, they kept inching forward or pushing sideways to get dead center, or get close to the stage. All throughout the show, it was pushing and shoving for a better position or a better view. The inner circle was not good enough, inside the circle there was still something better to go after. And it never stopped, a constant pushing and shoving and arguing.

About halfway through the U2 concert, I had had enough of the shoving and fights that were occurring throughout. We got out of the inner circle to the General Admission area and it was as if someone opened the windows. It was refreshing. There was room to breathe, room to dance, to move around and do whatever we wanted in response to the music. Out there, away from the inner circle, there was freedom and it was perfect. There was one guy who was dancing with his cane, another doing the footloose dance and couples dancing together, it was relaxed and free.

The whole thing got me thinking about social structures in general. So many times we look to the "in" group at work or socially and think that if we could only get there, then life would be great. But what ends up happening, without fail, is that when we get into the inner circle, there is still a jockeying for position, there is pushing and shoving going on, fighting going on, no one is ever satisfied. When we stop striving to be part of the inner circle, but live freely where we are, then we can have fun and do whatever we want to do without fear of condemnation, or worry about what others are thinking. When we stop striving to be popular or cool then we can find freedom to live how we were meant to live.

Truthfully being in the inner circle was fun, but being part of the regular crowd was way more freeing. I guess I now know where I belong. I want to invite you to join me, you can come just as you are and there is a ton of room. Bring your dancing shoes.

Peace

Edwin