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My heart beats for love. I want to be different. I want to be who I am called to be. WORTHY and LOVED!

Sunday, January 24, 2016

“Enough: When Dreams Become Nightmares”

1/24/16 “Enough: When Dreams Become Nightmares” 1 Tim 6:10
Ecc 5:10
Matt 16:26

Money. The topic no one likes the preacher to talk about in church. Yet, a topic that is vitally important. How we spend our money shows what is important to us. And so we need to talk about it. For the next three weeks we will be exploring together the idea of gratitude for having “enough.”
I’m not sure if you notice but we live in a world where we are constantly bombarded with the message that we don’t have enough. Commercials and ads tells us that we need a newer, shiner, car. Need to supersize our meals. Need faster internet. The list goes on and on. And brothers and sisters, those are just messages I get from the billboards driving the roads in this area, since I don’t have cable at the house. We are indicted with the message that we need to have more things that are bigger, better, and faster in order to consider ourselves to be successful. 
But what has the church’s response been to this bombarding? One of two things. Either cricket silence, saying that it isn’t our place to talk about money. Or misquoting scripture to say that money is evil. But scripture does not say that money is evil, money itself is neutral. Scripture tells us that the love of money is evil. We need money to live, but it is how we spend our money that matters. Do we look to money to give us happiness? Or are we grateful to God for the blessings we have? Scripture speaks quite a bit about money, both in the Old and New Testaments, so this is not a topic that we can simply ignore. 
Most Americans live in a constant state of anxiety about money. If there will be enough to pay the bills this month. If there will be enough to retire. We are so worked up about not having enough that we are stressing ourselves out. In fact, the American Psychological Association stated in a study from 2008 that 80 percent of Americans are stressed out about finances. And no one is exempt. Not single people or married couples. Not those with one child or multiple children. All sorts of demographics are affected.
Whenever I offer pre-marital counseling one of the topics that inevitably comes up is finances. How do you handle your finances now and how do you anticipate handling your money once you are married? More often then not the response I get from couples is that they haven’t talked about it and don’t want to think about it yet. It is as if we are embarrassed by our spending habits or our debt, and think that by not talking about it all of our problems will go away. But that isn’t the case. 
Because we live in a world that constantly encourages people to live beyond their means. That wasn’t always the case, but it is certainly true of the world we live in today. We live in a day and time that tells us that we can have things now and pay for it later - everything from big ticket items like cars that we take out loans for to smaller every day items we put on credit cards. Now don’t mishear me, there are certainly times we need spend money. For example, I have a loan from attending seminary. While I received a scholarship that covered full tuition and fees, the financial aid did not extend to housing, which was astronomically expensive both on and off campus in New Jersey. I worked while in seminary to provide money for groceries and utilities, but I still have to deal with this ten year loan now. I’m not ashamed of the loan, but I realize that I need to curb my spending habits because of it. The choices I made about the loan will effect choices I make in the future. All too often, I fear that we jump into spending money without thinking about how it will change our spending habits in the future. Or worse, we don’t change our habits at all, instead, living as if the loan or bill doesn’t exist, and simply charging more and more. 
One of the questions we are asked during the ordination worship is service is a historic question that traces back to the days of John Wesley, are you not in debt as so to embarrass yourself or others? Usually there is a bit of struggle around this question because of the cost of the seven years of education that it takes to become and ordained pastor, but I think that what the question is really getting at is reflective in 1 Timothy 6, are you so in love with money that your spending habits have caused you to wonder from the faith? Do our finances reflect a life of simplicity and generosity?
When we answer that question during the ordination service we do so only for ourselves, not for the person who is standing to the left or the right of us. We are not called to judge how others handle money - we can only examine ourselves. Because only we know exactly how much we make, how much we save, and how much we give away. We can only know the state of our own hearts, not the hearts of others. We are only in a place to ask God to pierce our own consciences about whether we are profiting by the world’s standards or Gods.
And what is the difference between the two standards? The standard of the world around is what has become known as the American Dream - which over the years has morphed into the belief that you can have anything and everything you want materially. This dream is perhaps best summarized in the slogan for Master Card: “Theres some things money can’t buy but for everything else, there’s master card”. The American Dream has lead some people to purchase things on credit that they would never dream of buying if they had to hand over cash. The American Dream has also lead us in this current day and age to live beyond our means, and not save for the future. It used to be that most people put ten percent of their pay checks into savings, now the national average is less than one percent. 
In contrast, we find God’s standards around money which allows us to certainly use the money that God has blessed us with, but also calls for us to be generous in giving to others. God’s standard asks us to seek to live a simple life - whatever that may mean for you and your family - instead of trying to find our worth in how much we can spend or having the “best” new things on the market. God’s standard asks us to prayerfully examine what difference our time, talent, and resources can make in the lives of others and for the sake of the Kingdom of God. 

Brothers and sisters, if most of us were honest this morning we would say that we feel some of the tension we just discussed about money. We worry about it. We sometimes overspend. And we feel trapped between the idea of that we should be able to have everything we want and knowing that there has to be a better way. Would you join me, for the next three weeks, in praying to God to help us reveal to us that better way - the way of scripture to live into our finances in this day and age? Will you join me in examining our heart, especially around the topic of money? Not examine the hearts of others, but to examine our own heart and our own household? Will you join me in asking God to reveal to us what is truly “enough”? Amen. 

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