Greed and Fear
I just love my new church, and my Pastor. During February, Pastor and his wife have been sharing about healthy and godly relationships, and doing a fabulous job of it. As we finish up the series, our focus was turned to our relationship with God, and how to put and keep Him first.
We began with Matthew 6:33, a verse that never gets old. It is so simple, and yet the promise is so complete. Plucked from the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, arguably Jesus' most 'famous' sermon, in some ways this verse encapsulates the core of how we are to live our lives...But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given unto you as well.
It becomes more complicated when we begin to unpack what the verse means, because I think most followers of Jesus spend the majority of our lives trying to understand how to seek first His kingdom and His righteousness. What are all of the things that will be given to us? In the verses that lead up to the 33rd verse in Matthew chapter 6, Jesus is recalling of the things we worry about...
We worry about our life...what will happen to us? We worry about what we should wear, and whether we'll wear the right thing. We worry about what we will have to eat or drink, and whether we will have enough money to make ends meet. We worry, about money; and how to get more of it. We worry about what we'll do with our money, and whether we will run out of money.
On the surface, our obsession with all things external, and the money that is tied to these externals, looks a lot like greed. I don't disagree that greed is part of our story. For some of us, it's a very big part of our story, but for today, I want to talk about what drives our greed. The core state of mind and emotion that shapes greed in us and feeds it's growth.
Fear. Therapists will usually tell you that humans have only a few core emotions. We have dozens, perhaps hundreds of secondary emotions - the emotions we feel safer revealing to other people. But the core emotions, one of which is fear, we tend to cover up with these safer and surface emotions.
God knows this about us. He knows it about me, and He knows it about you.
What is God's mysterious and powerful solution to our fear? Generosity.
The antidote to our fear of lack is giving, because the opposite of greed is generosity. I have heard people say that fear and faith cannot co-exist together, and I think it's because fear occurs when we don't trust God. Fear looks like anger, and greed, and many other unpleasant feelings; but at the root of things, the engine that drives greed and anger is so much more serious. We fear that God won't take care of us. We fear that God loves someone else more than He loves us. We fear we will be left out, or passed over.
In the story of Abraham and Sarah, we watch Sarah take things into her own hands. She is afraid that God won't keep His promise about Sarah having a baby, so she decides to make things happen on her own. Sarah sent her maid Hagar to have relations with Abraham in order to have the child promised by God. Sarah was afraid. Afraid that God would pass her by. Afraid that God would not, or could not keep His promise.
What about God's word on the subject of tithing? Do you believe He can be trusted? God has promised outlandish blessing to those of us who tithe, but do we believe Him? In the Old Testament book of Malachi, He says, "Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this," says the Lord Almighty, "and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it."
I was not brought up as a child to tithe. It was not a commitment I saw lived out in my family's life. You may be in a similar situation, and learning to trust God with your finances may be a very new and scary thing. I believe the majority of Christians who do not tithe are driven by fear. What we see on the surface might look like greed, but the core emotion is probably fear. Let's pray for each other. Let's devote ourselves to this idea that God is trustworthy, always faithful, and will never lie to us.
In Matthew, Jesus tells us that all of the things we need will be added to us, if we seek God and put Him and His kingdom as the first priority in our lives. Even if we have never tithed before, it is certainly not too late.
Today, this very week...it's time to choose trust over fear. It's time for us to know money has never been our provider. Money is nothing really, but we have let it come to represent so much! God is everything - the maker of everything, the provider of everything, our singular source of love and everything else that we need. It's time to believe. It's time to look directly into the face of greed and call it by it's real name. It's time for us to understand that God will never leave us without, and that His call for us to give is a gift - another way to break our bondage to fear and greed. And when we are free to give without fear, will be free indeed.
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