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It's Only Money: What the Bible says about greed
Mike Fletcher
The Bible has a lot of truth to tell us about money and how we are to let it infleunce our lives.
Just when you thought advertisers had made use of every available location, another prime spot has been identified.
Andrew Fischer recognized his forehead was going to waste. Fischer, a Web page designer, decided to auction off the empty space to the highest bidder on e-Bay.
Amazingly, Fischer attracted a great deal of interest. The snoring remedy, SnoreStop, rented the blank space above his eyes. SnoreStop's CEO commended Fischer as "a man who clearly has a head for business in every sense of the word."
Renting out his forehead as a billboard for 30 days earned Fischer $37,375. The things we do for money. They things we don’t do because of money.
God doesn’t want your money. God wants you. Money, as a matter of fact, is often a hindrance. The fact of the matter is that it’s easy to give money for some people. Some people love money so much that they think it is the most important thing in the world and thus, if they give some away, they become important.
But God said we are to give ourselves first. What does that mean?
It means we surrender. It means we tell God that he is in charge. That the lures of the world, power and prestige and fame and riches, mean nothing to us compared to the treasure of knowing him… of being his.
Where your treasure is, there also will be your heart, said Jesus. And you give your heart to that which you treasure most. God wants us.
Never once in the epistles do you ever read of Christians being asked to tithe. A lot of Christians today are taught to tithe, but that is not New Testament teaching. The tithe was a tax levied upon people for the purpose of supporting a priesthood, a separate body of people who did religious things.
When you come into the New Testament you find the priesthood has, in a sense, been eliminated. Now every Christian is a priest. We are a royal kingdom of priests, the epistles tell us, and there is no special collection or tax to support it. It is laid upon us to give voluntarily, as our hearts are stirred and moved by the grace of God.
Loving money makes people forget God.
In her book 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, Suze Orman writes about a time when she was in Mexico. There was a merchant who was selling parrots: they weren't in cages, and they didn't fly away. Orman was fascinated by this.
She asked the merchant, "Do these birds just love you so much they have no desire to fly away?"
He laughed. "No" he said, "I train them to think their perches mean safety and security. When they come to think this, they naturally wrap their claws tightly around the perch and don't want to release it. They keep themselves confined, as if they've forgotten they know how to fly."
Was this hard to do? she asked.
"With little birds it's very hard, sometimes even impossible," he said. "It's easy with the large birds."
She writes: “Suddenly a lightbulb went off in my head. We are just like those poor parrots. We have been taught to clutch our money as tightly as we can, as if our money is the perch of our safety and security. Just like those parrots, we have all forgotten how free we really are—with or without the perch. The more afraid we are, the tighter we hold on, and the more we have trapped ourselves.
When she realized this she asked the merchant how he would go about "unteaching" this behavior. "Easy," he said, "You just show them how to release their grip, and then they can fly as free as they want."
The author is the publisher of the Online Christian Shopper, which offers llifestyle evangelism resources like Christian T-Shirts, Christian clothing and Christian jewelry. |