I grew up in a typical blue collar family. My dad managed one of the very first fast food restaurants – the Lucky Wishbone – and my mom stayed at home taking care of four kids. She didn’t work outside the home until all of us got older, so for much of my life, our family got by on one nominal income.
But we always had food on the table and clothes to wear to school. We usually took some kind of vacation each year – often a camping trip, but occasionally we’d splurge and go somewhere like San Diego or Disneyland. So I never felt poor. At least not until I got to high school.
I went to Amphi High School and back in those days, the Catalina Foothills school district hadn’t yet built their own high school so many of the high school students from that district went to Amphi. So when I finally got my driver’s license in the middle of my junior year and saved up enough money to buy a used yellow Ford Pinto for $1,600 and drove to school for the first time, I found my Pinto parked among the Porsches and BMW’s driven by some of the Catalina Foothills students. And for the first time in my life, I felt poor. But the reality is that I was no poorer than I had been up to that time. It was only when I began to compare myself to others that I began to see them as rich and myself as poor.
Why am I sharing this with you? Because it’s real easy for us to look around at others and see them as rich and myself as poor and then ignore the passage that we’re going to read in James this morning as he writes to the rich. But frankly, compared to the world as a whole, probably every one of us here this morning is rich and therefore we need to heed James’ words.
Did you realize that if your family income is $10,000 a year, you are wealthier than 84 percent of the people in the world? If it's $50,000 or more a year, you make more than 99 percent of the people in the world. Nearly 1 billion people in the world today subsist on less than $1.25 per day – about the amount of money we’d spend to buy one item off the Value Menu at McDonalds.
So with that perspective in mind, let’s read the first 6 verses in James chapter 5:
Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you.
(James 5:1-6 ESV)
This is the second section in his letter where James does not address his audience as “brothers”. And just as we saw in the first instance at the beginning of chapter 4, James turns his attention to those who are associated with the Jewish believers in the churches to whom he is writing, but who demonstrate by their actions that they are not genuine believers.
But that certainly doesn’t mean that there is nothing of value here for those of us who are followers of Jesus. In fact this passage clearly communicates this bottom line that we’ll focus on this morning:
The way I acquire and use wealth
is a good measure of my spiritual health
This is not the first time in his letter that James has dealt with the issue of wealth. At the beginning of chapter 2, we saw how he used the illustration of a rich man and a poor man coming into church in order to teach about the sin of partiality. And we really shouldn’t be surprised that James would devote a significant portion of his letter to deal with the issue of material wealth, since his half-brother Jesus also devoted a significant portion of His earthly ministry to address that same topic.
Did you realize that Jesus had more to say about money than any topic other than the Kingdom of God?
• Jesus talked more about money than He did about heaven and hell combined.
• Roughly half of all the parables Jesus told had to do with money and possessions.
• One of every 10 verses in the gospels and 1 of every 7 verses in the gospel of Luke deals directly with the subject of money.
So why did Jesus focus so much on money and possessions? Certainly not, as some contemporary preachers and Bible teachers would have us believe, because Jesus wants us to be wealthy and financially prosperous. In fact, a close look at what Jesus teaches about money shows that that His teaching is a polar opposite of those who promote a prosperity and wealth gospel.
Both James and Jesus devote so much attention to financial issues because the way we handle our finances is a spiritual issue. So in his letter that is structured around a number of tests that we can use to evaluate the genuineness of our faith and determine how spiritually mature we are, James makes it clear that:
The way I acquire and use wealth
is a good measure of my spiritual health
So I’m going to ask you to do two things this morning in response to that bottom line:
1. First, I’m going to ask you to evaluate how you acquire wealth. Since that is relatively easy to do, we won’t spend a whole lot of time there.
2. Second, I’m also going to ask you to evaluate how you use that wealth. And since that is a much more difficult task for most of us, that’s where we’ll spend the majority of our time.
Together, those two actions will actually give us a very accurate barometer of our spiritual health.
Acquiring Wealth God’s Way
1. Don’t rob others
James, like Jesus, never condemns wealth. It is the way that these rich people who called themselves Christians obtained that wealth that was the issue. They had become rich by exploiting others. In particular, they had failed to pay their workers the wages that were owed to them.
In James day, the rich landowners would hire day laborers and agreed to pay them a certain wage in exchange for performing work. This was actually very similar to what we see occurring in certain areas of our city every day. And the Jewish law was very clear that those workers were to be paid the agreed wage at the end of the day. Here is just one of a number of places in the Old Testament where God established laws to protect these laborers:
You shall not oppress a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether he is one of your brothers or one of the sojourners who are in your land within your towns. You shall give him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets (for he is poor and counts on it), lest he cry against you to the LORD, and you be guilty of sin.
(Deuteronomy 24:14-15 ESV)
So in effect these rich landowners were stealing from these laborers by holding back the wages that should have been paid to the workers and personally benefitting from the use of that money.
I suppose that example might be directly applicable to some of us here who employ others. And if that’s the case, then we have a responsibility to pay our workers what we have promised to them. But this principle can certainly be applied more broadly. There are a lot of ways that we can “steal” from others and benefit financially without putting a gun to someone’s head. Let me share just a few:
• Borrowing money from others and not repaying that money.
The Bible is really clear that only the wicked borrow and do not repay that debt:
The wicked borrows but does not pay back,
but the righteous is generous and gives;
(Psalm 37:21 ESV)
I want to publically commend some of you that I know have been obedient to this command even though it has caused a great deal of personal hardship for you. Despite the fact that you were “underwater” on your home mortgage and it would have been financially beneficial for you to walk away from that mortgage and just let the bank foreclose, you’ve made the sacrifices necessary to keep paying back that money that you borrowed because that is what God requires.
• Stealing time from your employer.
If you work for an employer who is paying you to work for them and you use that time to engage in personal activities during work hours without making up that time, you are stealing from your employer and acquiring wealth by robbing others.
• Stealing goods or service from your employer.
This could include everything from taking home office supplies to using your employer’s internet connection to conduct personal business without permission to fudging an expense report.
Although they aren’t addressed directly in this passage, let me briefly mention two more principles that we find throughout the Scriptures that ought to guide how we acquire wealth.
2. Work hard
The Proverbs are full of verses like this that extol the virtue of hard work:
The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing,
while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied.
(Proverbs 13:4 ESV)
The idea that we are to work hard leads directly to the third and final principle:
3. Avoid “get rich quick” schemes
Wealth gained hastily will dwindle,
but whoever gathers little by little will increase it.
(Proverbs 13:11 ESV)
Unfortunately in this country we have government sponsored “get rich quick” schemes –we call them lotteries. But in reality they are really “get poor quick” schemes. Did you realize that on average, states pay out only $0.60 in winnings for every dollar spent on lottery tickets – by far the worst odds for any form of legal gambling in the United States?
So just for the fun of it, let’s suppose you had a $1,000 burning a hole in your pocket and you decide to “invest” it in the lottery. On day1 you purchase $1,000 of lottery tickets. Statistically speaking you could expect to “earn” $600 in winnings. So on day 2 you take that $600 and “invest” it and now you can expect to be down to $360. Keep going and by day 14, you’ll have a whopping $0.78 left in your pocket – not even enough to buy one lottery ticket.
Before we go on, I want to encourage all of us to take just a moment to think about how we acquire wealth. Am I doing that through hard work, or am I benefitting by robbing others or am I trying to accumulate wealth through some kind of “get rich” scheme? If God brings something to mind, I’ve given you a place to make some notes so you can take some time to address those issues later.
Using Wealth God’s Way
James also addresses the way these rich people were using their money. They were living in luxury and self-indulgence. They were focused only on themselves and only on the short term. But James reminds them that all their material possessions were only temporary and, in fact, were already rotting and corroding.
Although James points out what they were doing wrong in using their wealth, let’s approach this issue from a more positive perspective and see what the Bible teaches us about how we are to use our wealth. Obviously that is a topic that we can’t even begin to cover in our remaining time this morning, so let me focus on three broad principles that we can use as a guide.
1. Remember that I possess, but God owns
We often use the word “stewardship” to summarize this principle. This concept goes all the way back to creation account in Genesis 1 where God created Adam and Eve and commanded them to take care of His creation. Adam and Eve understood that the earth and everything in it belonged to God, an idea that David would later confirm when he wrote Psalm 24:
The earth is the LORD's and the fullness thereof,
the world and those who dwell therein,
for he has founded it upon the seas
and established it upon the rivers.
(Psalm 24:1-2 ESV)
If we really understood and believed that God owns everything and that He has entrusted a portion of that which He owns to me for my care, then we really wouldn’t need to spend a whole lot of time discussing how God wants us to use that wealth that He allows us to possess temporarily while we’re here on earth. Everything else that the Bible teaches about our finances flows from this truth.
In a sense, our material possessions are a test. We see this most clearly in the Parable of the Talents. In that parable, the servants who had been faithful stewards of what had been entrusted to them were commended and entrusted with even more. But the servant who had not been a good steward of the resources entrusted to him was condemned and those resources were taken from him and given to one of the faithful stewards.
I think there is pretty good Scriptural evidence that God tests us like that. He allows us to possess some of that which He owns and then He watches to see if we are faithful stewards with His resources. If we prove to be good stewards with what he has given to us, then He entrusts more to us. If not, He often takes some of those resources away from us and gives them to someone else who will be more faithful with them.
I can tell you that for Mary and me, this truth that God owns everything has been the key to having peace in the midst of several financial crises we have experienced over the years. This was especially true when we took the substantial amount of money from my 401{k) plan from my former employer and invested it in the Baptist Foundation of Arizona, thinking we would not only earn a good return, but that we could help build new churches here in Arizona. But due to some shady financial practices, the Foundation collapsed and all of our money was essentially gone for a period of time.
A lot of other people in that same situation got really angry. Others worried a lot about what would happen to their money. But I can honestly say that Mary and I had such peace because we knew that money belonged to God, not to us. Fortunately, we did end up getting a portion of that money back and God has graciously restored those funds to a large degree. But even if that hadn’t occurred, we would still have peace.
Perhaps some of you have money invested in the stock market and you constantly worry when the market drops a percent or two, or even more. I can promise that if you’ll just understand that money isn’t yours, it’s God’s you’ll worry a lot less and sleep a lot better.
The next two broad principles I’m going to share flow directly from this truth that while I may possess, God owns everything.
2. Meet the needs of others
God obviously wants me to use the wealth he entrust to me to take care of my own needs. But the problem with the rich people that James was addressing is that they had indulged their own wants and desires to a degree that they were no longer able to use those resources in the way God intended – to care for the needs of others.
First of all, God wants us to meet the needs of our family, as Paul makes clear in his letter to Timothy:
But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
(1 Timothy 5:8 ESV)
We also know from the Scriptures that God is concerned for the down and out in society – the poor, the needy, widows, and orphans. James picked up on that idea at the end of chapter 1 when he wrote that religion that is pure and undefiled before God involves caring for orphans and widows.
So often God provides us with a surplus because He wants us to use that surplus to help the needy in our society. It seems like that was the case for those to whom James was writing here. But instead of using those resources to help the needy, they were actually exploiting those people for their own personal benefit.
Obviously the challenge here is to discern when I’ve crossed over the line from providing for my family to living in luxury and self indulgence like those people. And I can’t really give you any hard and fast rules here because this is something that I struggle with constantly myself.
Were I the well known pastor with a net worth of $40 million who lives in a 17,000 square foot mansion valued at $10.5 million, I think it would be pretty easy to know where I was on that scale. But it’s a lot more difficult for me to discern whether it’s OK to put a swimming pool in my backyard or take a vacation in Hawaii. Although after coming back from the mountains to the heat in Tucson this week, I think I can probably make a pretty good case that a swimming pool is indeed a need and not a luxury.
Like I said, I sure don’t have all the answers here, but here is the conclusion that I’ve come to for the time being. I’m confident that I can support this position with examples from Scripture, but I also don’t want to be too dogmatic here, understanding that God may very well lead me to a different conclusion down the road as I get to know Him better.
I am convinced that when we are faithful in being good stewards of our material resources according to Biblical principles, God, whose nature is to give, often provides us with things for our enjoyment that go well beyond just meeting our needs. And when that happens, we need to both acknowledge that those gifts come from God’s hand and be content with whatever God chooses to give to us. Here is how the writer of Ecclesiastes conveyed that idea:
Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil—this is the gift of God.
(Ecclesiastes 5:19 ESV)
The fact is that the financial principles we find in the Bible work. When we follow them faithfully, one of the results is that we often find that God provides us with the extra resources to provide for a nice meal out, or a vacation or something else that we can enjoy. And as long as we don’t become greedy and self-indulgent, we just need to be thankful, not feel guilty about those things.
3. Invest in the Kingdom
You can’t read this section without hearing echoes of these words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount:
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
(Matthew 6:19-21 ESV)
The idea here is that God entrusts us with wealth so that we can invest it in the kingdom of God. That has been the case throughout history. In the Old Testament, the people regularly brought their tithes, which were required, as well as their freewill offerings to the priests at the tabernacle and later the Temple. The people also contributed to the building of the tabernacle and temple.
In the New Testament church, Paul frequently writes about how the people are to bring a portion of their wealth to the local church to be used for the expansion of the kingdom of God. God desires that we contribute to the furthering of His kingdom with our wealth, not because of some legalistic requirement, but because our hearts are so consumed with Jesus and His kingdom that we give out of our love for Jesus and our heartfelt desire to see His kingdom grow.
If you’ve been here at TFC for any amount of time, you know that I rarely preach on giving. That’s not because the Bible doesn’t have quite a bit to say on that topic, but rather because I would much rather focus my efforts on equipping all of us to become more mature disciples of Jesus. Because, as James makes very clear here, those who are mature disciples are going to give regularly and generously, because that is one of the characteristics of a mature disciple. Genuine, mature disciples understand that…
The way I acquire and use wealth
is a good measure of my spiritual health
Once again we need to pause for a moment for all of us to consider how we’re doing when it comes to how we use the wealth that God has entrusted to each one of us. Do I really believe that God owns everything that I possess and that I am merely a steward of that wealth? Is that mindset borne out by my actions? Do I use those resources to meet the needs of my family and the needy? Am I consistently and generously investing in the kingdom of God?
Again, I’ve given you some space on your outline to jot down anything that God brings to mind here so that you can spend some more time this week working out those issues with God.
The way I acquire and use wealth
is a good measure of my spiritual health
Because that is true, we’re going to respond to God with a corporate prayer in which we commit to acquiring and using wealth in a way that honors God and benefits His kingdom. Will you stand with me as we pray this prayer out loud together?
Heavenly Father,
We acknowledge that the earth that you founded upon the seas and established on the rivers and everything in it is yours. Like David, we acknowledge that all things come from you. Like the people of Israel we acknowledge that you alone give the power to acquire wealth.
Lord Jesus,
We confess that we haven’t always acquired and used our wealth in a manner that lays up treasure in heaven. We thank you that because of what you did for us on the cross that we can be confident that you forgive us for that sin.
Holy Spirit,
As you dwell within us, empower us to acquire and use wealth in a way that would bring glory to you and advance your kingdom. Help us to not be greedy and self-focused, but rather to be generous to others and to your kingdom.
In Jesus’ name we pray,
Amen
