Why do I have shelves full of books I’ll never read? Cabinets of china and glassware and linens I rarely use? Kitchenware of all sorts, shoes, sweaters, closets full of clothes? I have too much stuff. But there is a limit: I will never resort to putting my stuff into a storage unit, just hoping I’ll use it some day. Therein lies insanity – and given the number of storage facilities disfiguring our landscapes, there seems to be a lot of insanity around.
Jesus begins his parable about the pitfalls of greed by talking of storage units:
Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.’”
Building bigger barns. There’s a metaphor for acquisition fever. Many of us go through life acquiring things and then needing larger houses in which to store it all. The name for that is not success or prosperity – the spiritual name for it is greed. Greed can be defined as having more than we need and wanting more still.
So, are we all greed-ridden? I suspect most of us reading this this have more than we need, and we can all come up with more things that we want or think we need. Such is the human condition. How then are we to receive such a teaching? Hanging our heads in despair and walking away from the Gospel altogether, because we’re not the kind of disciples who leave it all to follow Jesus? That kind of resignation only leads us deeper into the worship of stuff, because then we need stuff to stuff down the feelings of guilt and inadequacy. What might we do instead?
We can put Jesus first, every day. Give God the best part of the day, when we’re freshest and our spirits are most open. As we grow in relationship with God, our priorities inevitably shift. We may still enjoy the abundance we have, but with less fear of losing it and more joy in sharing it. The more we give it away, the less we worry about how to store it.
When the “Purpose-Driven” media empire took off, Rick Warren and his wife decided to "reverse tithe" - to live on 10 percent of those earnings, and give away the other 90. The math works at that level of wealth. Our incomes may be smaller, but If we give away the biblical standard of 10 percent of our income (gross or net, you choose), we still have 90 percent to play with. That’s a lot!
The antidote to greed is generosity. As we excel in giving, we will delight in God’s grace. No need to sock that away - it never runs out.
Building bigger barns. There’s a metaphor for acquisition fever. Many of us go through life acquiring things and then needing larger houses in which to store it all. The name for that is not success or prosperity – the spiritual name for it is greed. Greed can be defined as having more than we need and wanting more still.
So, are we all greed-ridden? I suspect most of us reading this this have more than we need, and we can all come up with more things that we want or think we need. Such is the human condition. How then are we to receive such a teaching? Hanging our heads in despair and walking away from the Gospel altogether, because we’re not the kind of disciples who leave it all to follow Jesus? That kind of resignation only leads us deeper into the worship of stuff, because then we need stuff to stuff down the feelings of guilt and inadequacy. What might we do instead?
We can put Jesus first, every day. Give God the best part of the day, when we’re freshest and our spirits are most open. As we grow in relationship with God, our priorities inevitably shift. We may still enjoy the abundance we have, but with less fear of losing it and more joy in sharing it. The more we give it away, the less we worry about how to store it.
When the “Purpose-Driven” media empire took off, Rick Warren and his wife decided to "reverse tithe" - to live on 10 percent of those earnings, and give away the other 90. The math works at that level of wealth. Our incomes may be smaller, but If we give away the biblical standard of 10 percent of our income (gross or net, you choose), we still have 90 percent to play with. That’s a lot!
The antidote to greed is generosity. As we excel in giving, we will delight in God’s grace. No need to sock that away - it never runs out.
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