Introduction: You have a problem
* God's ways work
I teach how to handle money according to what the Bible says as best I can figure out. I've done that for approaching 30 years now. I've studied the Scriptures. I've had all the arguments. I've had all the criticisms. I have all the people in academia who don't understand. I have all the people with a different doctrine who don't understand, and I get all of that. But at the end of the day, most of us who love Jesus and understand that the Bible is His Word, we get that God wrote us a love letter on how to live our lives; and when we handle money this way, the weirdest thing happens-it works.
When you get out of debt, live on a budget, live on less than you make, and save money, you end up with money. It's the weirdest thing.
But we've got a problem that's developed in our culture, and the problem is that the people who I've taught to handle money well, when they handled money well, it worked. And they ended up with some. Then they're being criticized. Even some of the people who I didn't help with money have won with money, and they're being criticized.
* You are already wealthy by global standards
It's an interesting series of spirits floating around in our culture today, and it's a bit of a problem. Because here's the problem: If wealthy people are evil, you're all in trouble. If you make $34,000 a year, you're in the top 1% of the world. You're a one-percenter.
If you make $11,000 a year, which puts you substantially below the federal measure of poverty, you're in the top 10% of the world. If you have a computer, a cellphone, a television and a car, you're wealthy.
And so if wealth is evil, you've got a problem. And yet there's this spirit flowing through the land right now that's twisting a biblical view of wealth and saying that somehow because you have had some level of success-whether it's $34,000 or $340,000-you've done something wrong.
Open up your iPads, your iPhones or maybe a Bible to Luke 10:38 and John 12:1. If you want to pull them up, you can, or I'll just read them. Those of you who have been Christians since you were knee-high to a grasshopper, you'll know these stories. I didn't grow up in church, so these stories are all still so fresh to me, even though I've studied them for 30 years.
Luke 10:38 says, "Now it happened as they went that He entered a certain village; and a certain woman named Martha welcomed Him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary who also sat at Jesus' feet and heard His word, but Martha was distracted with much serving, and she approached Him and said, 'Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me alone to serve? Therefore tell her to help me.' And Jesus answered and said to her, 'Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things, but one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.'"
Apparently-and we can argue about it in the commentaries-they were probably the same two women in this next story. They were sisters, by the way.
"Then, six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany where Lazarus was who had been dead, whom He had raised from the dead. There they made Him a supper, and Martha served."
There she is again.
"But Lazarus was one of those who sat at the table with Him. Then Mary"-there she is again-"took a pound of very costly oil of spikenard, anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped His feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of oil. But one of His disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, who would betray him, said, 'Why was this fragrant oil not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?'
"This he said, not that he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and he had the moneybox, and he used to take what was put in it. But Jesus said to him, 'Let her alone. She's kept this for the day of my burial.'"
I was reading a friend of mine's book. Robert Morris has such a wonderful book out called The Blessed Life, and he did a drive-by on a subject that really got me to praying, thinking, and studying, because I'm seeing a movement in the marketplace and in our culture in the mainstream and in the church that needs to be discussed here.
It's a wonderful book, by the way. If you haven't read it, it's probably one of the premier books on generosity and giving out there. Robert's a wonderful teacher on that. But he did a drive-by, and I'm going to steal his drive-by and turn it into a talk. In other words, I'm going to finish what he started. He said that there are three spirits around the subject of wealth. There are three people in these stories I just read you that I think represent these three spirits.
The Spirit of Pride: Martha
The first is a spirit of pride. Now, if I'm going to be guilty of one of the negative ones, this is the one I'm going to be guilty of. I grew up in a household where work was a verb. Work is something you do. I believe in hard work; I believe in cause and effect. I believe if I work hard, I should reap the rewards.
I'm not one of these people who don't plant anything then stands back and says, "I sure hope the government planted some corn." I'm not one of those guys, okay?
And so if I'm going to fall in one of these traps, this is probably the one that I'm going to fall in, although I have fallen in both of them. The spirit of pride, where wealth is concerned, is out there. The spirit of pride says, "Wealth comes from hard work."
We're going to let Martha represent that because Jesus was in Martha's house, and you know what Martha was doing? She's vacuuming. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is sitting in her home, and she's doing the dishes. Are we a little performance-based, Martha? Are we a little worried about getting our checklist done, Martha?
Been guilty of that myself. I walk right by the good stuff to get the checklist done. Got to do the honey-dos. I'm performance-based. If I do these three things, Jesus is going to love me. If I do these three things, my wife is going to love me. If I do these six things, my kids are going to love me. I can be performance-based. I need to read more Max Lucado and learn grace. Y'all with me here?
I'm a hardworking guy, and I can think that wealth comes from hard work like Martha. That's me. That's the spirit of pride.
There's never been a farmer who knows what he's doing-who's planted corn and put out the fertilizer and put out the herbicide and everything else-and then stood back and said, "Okay, sun."
No, he stands back and prays, "Lord, send the sun and the rain."
Farmers aren't confused. They know that it's not all up to them, but a spirit of pride says the opposite. It's me. It's cause and effect. And those of us who have a spirit of pride, when we fall into that, we say things like, "Those who don't work shouldn't eat." We quote those Scriptures, and we say, "The diligent prosper, and those who manage a small thing well are given more to manage."
We like those Scriptures, and we know how to use them, right? I'm good at it. I can do it. I can wear you out with that stuff. And I do believe all of that. There is a cause and effect. There is a sowing and reaping. And when you do manage a small amount well, you are given more to manage, and I taught my teenagers that those who don't work don't eat.
These are good things. They are the truth. But if you stay over in that corner, you can develop a spirit of pride. Sometimes those of us who are in that corner, we might be libertarians or Republicans. We might watch more Fox News than CNN. Sometimes that could happen. It could happen.
The Spirit of Poverty: Judas
Judas represents the second spirit, and it's the spirit of poverty. The spirit of poverty says, "Wealth comes from the devil, and wealth is evil." And that spirit is loose in the land, too, isn't it?
And I've felt that. I went broke several years ago, and I thought maybe I did something wrong. I was just a baby Christian. I thought maybe God took it all away from me to protect me from myself. Maybe I was doing something wrong when I built the wealth, and when I started handling money God's ways, the wealth started coming back, and I started feeling weird, like I had done something wrong because I wasn't driving a hooptie anymore. I'm not driving a car that the predominant color is Bondo. I got a nice car, and I start to feel like, "Oh, wealth is bad. A good Christian doesn't have a nice car." Have you heard those voices in your head?
It's a spirit. It's an evil spirit. It's the spirit of poverty. And people who speak out of a spirit of poverty, they say things like Judas did. They say, "Oh, a Christian wouldn't have a car that nice because you could have sold that car and given that money to the poor," or "How many wells could be drilled in Haiti for what you spent on that house?"
These are the Christians. You could go on Twitter, and atheists will tweet you Scripture. You can. I'm proof. It's amazing. Because they take it out of context, and they don't know the Word, and they use a slice and a dice to make a point that is not the point of that Scripture because they're biblically illiterate.
And some Christians are that way too. The spirit of poverty comes from the first century after Christ's death. There were a group of well-intended Christians, which is what we all end up being. We start well-intended, and then we become Pharisees.
The Pharisees, by the way, loved God. They just got off track and started worshiping performance and rules instead of God. They weren't like the devil. They were kind of on our side, y'all, you know? But their spirit went bad. And this group, the same thing happened with them. It was a group of Christians called the Gnostic Christians, and eventually they became the Gnostics, and Gnosticism became heresy. They became heretics.
And the core belief in Gnosticism is that anything physical is evil. For something to be holy, it has to be in the spirit only. And so your clothing is evil. Your body is evil. The plants that you eat, the animals that you eat are evil. Your kids are evil-we already knew this.
But you get the idea. Anything that you can touch is evil. That's Gnosticism. And that is heresy, because God made the physical, and according to Genesis, every time He did He said, "And that is good."
And then when He made man and woman, He said, "That is very good." He made my hands, my nervous system, my red and my white blood cells. They're created by Him. They're not evil because they're physical. They are to be submitted to His lordship. He made my mind and your mind and your ability to make things like an automobile to drive instead of walking.
Automobiles aren't evil. They're inanimate. They move, but they're basically inanimate objects until we touch them and make them move. They don't have a soul. They don't have life. They're not evil. They're not good. They don't have morals. It's a car.
But Gnosticism falls into that spirit of poverty, and it has moved now into our culture, and that's where this wealth-is-evil spirit has come from. It's the spirit of poverty.
We hear that money is the root of all evil, but the Bible does not say that. The Bibles says the love of money is the root of all evil. Money's not evil. Therefore, rich people aren't evil. And poor people aren't holy by the fact that they're poor. That's not what makes you holy or good or evil. There are jerks that are both. Right?
So there's evidence right in front of our eyes, and yet we hear this spirit everywhere. It goes into politics and it goes into the news media, and then we Christianize it. People who fall into this area might vote for Democrats, and they might watch CNN. And they might not like capitalism as much, and there becomes this polarization in the marketplace between two non-biblical spirits.
A spirit of pride is not the biblical spirit. It's not a biblical view of wealth. And the spirit of poverty is not a biblical view of wealth.
By the way, the spirit of poverty has two little sisters: envy and jealousy. I used to think they were the same thing, and then I start studying it. I studied the seven deadly sins according to the Catholics, and the Catholics say one of the deadly sins is envy. Envy and jealousy aren't the same thing.
Jealousy is "I want what you have."
Envy is "I don't think I can get it, so I don't want you to have it."
Are those spirits loose in the land? They're loose in the land. So, you know, we've got a problem because there's a whole bunch of people out there saying, "You shouldn't have a car that nice." So we did detailed research to establish the level of car you can drive and still be saved. Because I wanted to know. I didn't want one that was too nice. You kind of got to hit that happy medium, right? Just where you're okay and you can still love Jesus, but you can still get to work, right? So we looked into it in detail. I'll help you with it. It's a '93 Camry.
Isn't this ridiculous? This is ridiculous, you guys. And this is how people talk out there. Let me tell you what car is too nice-any car that's nicer than what you have if you're functioning in envy and jealousy. Let me tell you how big a house is too big a house-any house that's bigger than yours if you're envious and jealous.
"Well, no one needs a light bill that high." How do you know? Here's an idea. Mind your own business!
I've got a good friend who loves Jesus as much or more than anybody in this place right now. He's worth $3 billion. That's 1,000 million. That's what a billion is. I sat with him in a group of Christian philanthropists, all of whom had in excess of $100 million and all of whom gave away tens of millions of dollars each. I wasn't supposed to be in this room. I was a wiener in a steakhouse, you guys.
I got to listen to these men's hearts. And I got to watch my friend with his grandbaby sitting in his lap and loving on him. And I got to watch the tears run down his eyes as he read Scripture to the meeting of men and women who are leaders in giving. Last year he gave away $370 million-100% of it for ministry.
You will never know who he is because he doesn't care what you think. He didn't do it for you. He didn't put his name on a building anywhere. He bought Bibles and put them in places we can't even talk about. They are doing things with his money for the kingdom that will blow your mind, and you will never hear about it or know about it.
Three hundred and seventy million dollars! If all of us got together and piled up all our money, we'd still never see that amount, right? And he gave that away last year. Does this blow your mind? It did mine because it's inconsistent with the spirit of poverty. Because he's a very wealthy, heavy giver who loves Jesus. That's so inconsistent with what we're told.
"Well, the rich young ruler can't get to Heaven. . . . The camel can't get through the eye of the needle. . . ." Oh, wicked and perverse generation. It's unbelievable.
And so I'm walking with this man, who is obviously accomplished, obviously mature in his faith, obviously a fabulous philanthropist in the name of Christ. We walk to his car to go to his home for dinner and he stopped. He said, "Dave, would you ride with me?"
I said, "I would be honored, sir."
He said, "I've got to apologize, though, for my car before we go out."
I said, "Why are you apologizing for your car? Do you drive a hooptie? Are we going to make it to the house? Are you one of those? Is it a '93 Camry?"
He started laughing, and he said, "No. I've always had a decent car, but I splurged and I bought myself a nice car the other day. It's the nicest car I've ever bought in my life."
He's worth $3 billion. He's 72 years old. We walk out there. It's a nice car. It's a $130,000 Mercedes. I know because I liked it, and I looked it up when I got home.
And so it was a nice car. I said, "What in the world? Why would you apologize for this car?"
He said, "The day I bought the car, Dave, I had three pastors send me hate mail saying that I had lost my salvation and lost my way." And he said, "Within the next week, our company received emails and posts all over the internet that I had bought this car and that apparently I wasn't following Jesus because a Christian would never drive a car like this."
Now, let me help you with the ratios, okay? Three billion dollars, okay? He gave away $370 million. He spent $130,000 on a car, okay? Him buying this car is like you and me buying a biscuit. So my message to you, if you're one of those who sent that hate mail, is to shut up and mind your own business. You're ignorant-and I say that with the heart of Jesus.
See, here's the problem. My pastor Mike Easley says, "Don't let the world teach you theology. Learn your view of wealth from the Bible." Because Jesus did redistribute wealth. In the parable of the talents, He took it from the guy who had the least and gave it to the guy with the most. But it didn't have to do with the least or the most. It had to do with who was managing well, and that was Jesus who did that. He did a reverse wealth distribution. That's weird.
See, that just messes with people's theology, doesn't it? Because we want everything to be fair. Everything's supposed to be fair. It's not fair. Tiger Woods plays golf better than me. It's not fair! Michael Jordan shoots a basketball better than me. It's not fair! Brad Paisley plays a guitar better than me. It's just not fair! Most of you have better hair than I've got. It's just not fair!
So they make more money because they have a talent that's known as world-class. Guess what? That's fair. But fair is not equal.
My kids are not the same. The Bible does not say raise up your children fair. It says, "Raise a child in the way he is bent, and when he's old, he'll not depart from it." Raise him according to his characteristics. You've got one who's an artist, you've got one who's a mathematician. Don't make the mathematician an artist, and don't make the artist a mathematician. God help us, they might run for Congress. Right?
Some may say "It's not fair." It is fair, but it's not equal. You see what the spirit of poverty is doing to our culture? It's not biblical, you guys. And Judas represents this bunch.
The Spirit of Gratitude: Mary
The last one is a spirit of gratitude. The spirit of gratitude is represented by Mary-in this case, Mary, the sister of Martha, not Mary, the mother of Jesus. The spirit of gratitude says that wealth is God's. It's not ours. And wealth comes from God.
Wealth comes from God, and it is God's. And I'm grateful. The way I act in my life is how I say thank you. It's an act of worship.
My friend Robert Morris says, "It's not how much we have that matters; it's what we do with what we have that matters." It's how I handle my life in stewardship, how I handle money in stewardship. If I'm functioning in the spirit of gratitude, everything I'm doing is an act of worship as returning unto my Lord. I'm saying, "Thank You, Jesus, for what You did at the cross. Thank You, Jesus, for dying for me. And because You're my God, and You provide for me and my family, and You allow me to do things in the gifts that You gave me, everything in my life is going to be an act of gratitude."
Gratitude breaks open very expensive oil, fragrant oil worth 300 dinar. Let me help you with this, because I'm the math guy. Three hundred denarii, in that time, was approximately a year's wages. The average household income in America today is $50,000. This woman just dumped $50,000 worth of perfume on Jesus' feet.
Now, that's a lot. I don't care who you are. I'm standing back and saying, "Well, could you just, like, save half of it? Don't you think?" I mean, $50,000!
Now, I'm an old boy that's kind of a redneck hillbilly, so I don't know much about perfume. But I am married to a woman who knows a lot about it, and I have come to understand that the cheap stuff is not real potent. You buy the cheap stuff, it's kind of like, I hope you smell it. Right? The more expensive it is, the more it lights up your nostrils, and the more powerful the aroma is. The really, really expensive stuff, you just take the lid off of it and the whole room fills with the smell. Have you ever been around that stuff?
A couple times Sharon and I stopped by a place we shouldn't have stopped by, and Sharon smelled that stuff. She said, "That smelled good," and I said, "Yeah, let's leave." It's expensive, y'all. You know what I'm talking about? So this is not the cheap stuff. This is $50,000 worth of perfume. So when you open it, the room filled. When she poured it on His feet, the house filled. By the time she bent over and began to worship Him by wiping His feet with her hair, the whole neighborhood smelled like perfume, and Jesus said, "Leave her alone, for she has done this for my burial."
This dinner happened right before Passover. Four days later, this Mary walked into that tomb that the stone had been rolled away from. Her Lord was gone, but the smell of her perfume was there!
That's an act of gratitude. She anointed the Son of God for His burial with $50,000. Wow.
The spirit of pride would say that's irresponsible. The spirit of poverty would say she should have sold that and given it to the poor. You shouldn't build a big, nice church. All that money could have been used to help poor people. Oh, you mean like the ones who come to that church and get their lives changed?
If you listen, you'll start hearing these messages, now that I've awakened you to it. They're all over the place. And you need to run them out of your life, and you need to vote them out of office. Now, I don't care if they're a Republican or a Democrat. I don't care if it's pride or poverty. We've got to get back to understanding God's view of these things, and when we do, we're going to see revival break out like never before.
This is real. One hundred percent of the time that I'm grateful, I immediately say, "What can I do to help?" One hundred percent of the time that I'm grateful, I say, "Lord, thank You for this money that You gave me to feed my family. How do You want me to handle it?"
He says, "Oh, there's a couple things in here. Get out of debt, live on a budget, live on less than you make, always be giving a tenth to your local church." There are a couple things in here that are clearly outlined. Don't cosign. It's all in here. He tells you how He wants His money handled. You have to study that. That's an act of gratitude on your part. It's your way of saying, "Thank You, Jesus, for the blessings that are pouring in my life. Because of my gratitude, I'm going to be excellent."
You see, I think if you're going to put a fish on the back of it, you ought to drive it right. That's your life.
My good friend Rabbi Lapin, who's an orthodox Jewish rabbi, says, "Dave, everybody needs a rabbi. Even you Christians." He says, "When you do well in the marketplace, people say, 'Thank you.' They give you certificates of appreciation with presidents' faces on them."
It's an act of gratitude to be a giver. You always leave a nice tip when someone waits a table well. Generosity is a natural outflow of the spirit of gratitude. Excellence is a natural outflow of the spirit of gratitude. When I'm thankful, I act like it, and it changes my life. So I have a choice. I get to be Mary. I get to be Martha. I get to be Judas. I confess to you, I've been all of them at times.
Closing Prayer
Lord Jesus, help me to be Mary more often and not to be prideful about what You've allowed me to accomplish, what You've accomplished through me. Lord, help me not to judge things when I don't have any idea what I'm talking about. Help me to not look foolish, inept or ignorant.
Lord, help me to worship at Your feet and pour out everything I've got there. Let my life look like it's a reflection of a spirit of gratitude.
God, we thank You. We thank You for the people here in this place. We just ask that You pour prosperity on them and that You protect them from evil spirits regarding money and that You give each one of us an increased measure of gratitude and out of that comes some excellence, and out of that comes extraordinary levels of generosity.
Father, we just stand back in awe of You, and we say thank You.
In Jesus' name, amen.
