AMERICA’S GREATEST SIN - WANTING WAY TOO MUCH
Matt. 6:19-27
“Do not store up treasures on earth / Store up treasures in heaven, - For where your treasure is there your heart is / No man can serve two masters / You cannot serve both God and Mammon (Money). Do not worry (be torn up) about your life – what you eat – what you wear.”
Philippians 4:6
“Don’t worry about anything / ask God for what you need, always asking Him with a thankful heart.” - TEV
I was conducting a revival and the nightly news revealed the appalling number of people in that county that had to choose between food and medicine. An alarming number were eating dog food so they could buy medicine. The next day the Pastor and I had dinner with one of the finest Christians in his church. He had retired and had just moved. He went from a large $300,000 dollar house to a $600,000 house on twelve acres he had purchased. He said, “Brother Bob, we prayed about this and saw that God was in it.In this down economy our house sold the week after we put in on the market.”
I wanted to say, “Man, with people all over this town eating dog food or doing without medicine, I don’t believe God was within a million miles of what you did. And from all I could tell, he was a very good Christian man; and I know a thousand just like him sitting in our pews. Materialism has blinded us to true Christianity; and our anxiety over “things” is the price we pay.
OUR WORRIES
Most of our worries are money worries. It is not by accident that Jesus, in His Sermon on the Mount, discusses worry in the section dealing with our relationship to material things. It is the longest section because it is our biggest problem.
Almost all of us have far more than we need. Compared to the rest of the world we live like millionaires. Yet we are stressed out; always on the go; and our family life suffers the most.
The American dream is a nightmare. We buy things we don’t need; with money we don’t have; to impress people we don’t like. When we are young we spend our health to get wealth and when we are old we spend our wealth to get our health back
OUR WEALTH
A. It Dethrones God
Jesus says in Mt. 6:21-24:
“Your heart will always be where your riches are / No one can serve two masters. He will hate one and love the other. He will serve on and be disloyal to the other. You cannot serve God and Money.”
The Ten Commandments begin with putting God first and having no other “gods”. They end with, “You shall not covet” (Ex. 20). The New Testament says “coveting” – wanting things we do not have is “idolatry” (Colossians 3:5). These are the book-ends of the Ten Commandments, and are the main reason we break the eight commandments in between.
Jesus used the Aramaic term “mammon” (money) as a personal name for the greedy person’s god. We speak of the “Almighty Dollar.
B. It is Detestable to God
1Timothy 4:10
“The love of money is the source of all kinds of evil.” – TEV
Col. 3:5
“You must put to death the earthly desires at work inside you; such as sexual immorality; indecency; evil passions and greed (covetousness); because covetousness is idolatry.”
God lists wanting way too much with the detestable sins like indecency. The church in the sixth century listed it with the “Seven Deadly Sins”. It was the first sin in the Bible. Eve had everything but wanted more. It was the first sin out of Eden. Cain killed Abel because he coveted the acceptance God gave Abel.
It is the source, the “root”, of almost all other sins. All six of the seven deadly sins come from it: pride (I want me to be first) / greed (wanting money) / lust (wanting sex) and gluttony (wanting pleasures). And since the desire to acquire makes us miserable, we can add melancholy.
C. It Damages
1Timothy 4:6-10
“Those who want to get rich fall into temptations. They end up caught in the trap of many foolish and harmful desires that pull them down to ruin and destruction.”
“The love of money is the source of all kinds of evil. Some, in their eagerness to have it have wandered away from the faith, and have broken their hearts with many sorrows.”– TEV
God is not in the business of ruining our fun; He does not stay up nights thinking of ways to make us miserable. He hates this sin because it hurts us.
1) It Dissatisfies (Damages Happiness)
“If you love gold, you will never be satisfied with gold / If you long for wealth you will never be wealthy enough.” – Eccl. 5:10
Solomon sucked up all the pleasures he could find- wealth, wisdom, works, wine and women. And he called it, “Meaningless, Chasing the wind.” (Eccl. 1:11) Madison Avenue advertising has done a job on us and our families. It says, “Here is more. Here is something else you need.” Even the right dish soap puts a smile on our faces. But greed is insatiable because our ego is involved. What we accumulate proclaims how successful we are and our motto is:
“He who dies with the most toys wins / Once a man twice a boy The only difference is the price of his toys
Last year, several CEO’s earning $30 million dollars broke the law and risked going to jail for a few million more. Tell me that isn’t worship. We are all like thi: We never earn enough. Our home is never nice enough. Our place in the company is never high enough. Our bank account is never large enough. We “get all we can / Can all we can / and sit on the can.”
2) It Damages our Families
Eccl. 2:22-23 (TEV)
“You work and worry your way through life; and what do you have to show for it / Everything you do brings you nothing but heartache and worry. Even at night your mind cannot rest.”
DEBT Any marriage counselor will tell you the two biggest problems in marriage are selfishness and money problems. At the head of the list is debt and credit cards. Gorging ourselves on more and more, our families pay a terrible price. We live under the shadow of debt. This creates:
STRESS The "mad desire to acquire gone haywire" requires extra work to make money, not for necessities, but for luxuries. The tired mother and father come home irritated already; and things like supper, crying kids, teens who played video games all day, a couch potato husband, and still too many bills to pay, makes home life a hell. And the better parents we want to be; the more guilt we feel, and thus the more irritability and depression we feel. We take this out on each other and on the kids.
Our possessions possess us. There are always are things to mow; things to plant; things to paint; things to pull up; things to prop up; things to pay for; and things to ponder that we might need. When people die one of the hardest problems is what to do with all their “stuff”. We now rent storage units to hold all our "stuff".
RAGE And we are angry. It produces road rage. I let three cars in front of me from a side road while taking my kids to school. My young daughter said, “Daddy, the man behind us is making a dirty gesture at you.” I looked back and there he was – driving a nice car, wearing a tie, with a twisted face near the windshield, giving me the “finger”. I said, “Girls; that is an unhappy man.”
We leave our $500,000 houses in our $60,000 cars going to our six figure jobs, and explode with road rage if someone pulls out in front of us, or is driving too slow. That is why our purses and pockets are full of pills.
3) It Damns the Soul
A man asked Jesus to make his brother divide the family inheritance with him and Jesus gave him a stern warning:
Luke 12:15
“Be on guard against every kind of greed; because a person’s life is not made up of what he owns.”
Then he told story of a successful man planning well for retirement (filling his barn, to eat, drink and enjoy life). He wasn’t planning to spend it on prostitutes; or pornography; he just felt he had earned the right to enjoy life before he died. Everyone in America applauds him and his portfolio but God calls him a fool. The problem is, when the last nail was driven, (when the retirement income was signed for) he dropped dead.
4) It Dilutes the Gospel (Mark 4:18-19 / Luke 3:11-14)
People like this fill our churches. Paul said "in the last days", people in powerless churches will be, “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” (2 Tim. 3). One of the reasons for this is that there is no repentance in our Gospel. There is no call for a break with the old life of doing what we want.
People are told today that all they have to do is believe they are sinners, believe Jesus died for them, and accept Him. When they say They accept Him as Savior and “Lord”, they usually mean they accept Him as God. They do not mean their Lord, their Master, their “Boss” of what they can and cannot do.
In Mark four Jesus pictures the Sunday Morning crowd in most churches. Their bodies are there but their minds and hearts and desires are somewhere else. He says in Mark 4:18-19:
“They listen to the message, but the WORRIES about this life; the LOVE OF RICHES; and all other kinds of DESIRES, crowd around them and choke the message.”
The public ministry of Jesus, what Mark calls “the beginning of the gospel”, begins with a church service and the call to repent. John the Baptizer and Jesus both preached repentance.(Mark 1:4 and 15) When people asked John what he meant by repentance. His answer in Luke 3:11-14 is the first ethical command in the New Testament, and it has to do with our attitude about material things. He say, help the poor. Help the poor; don’t collect too much money from those who owe you; don’t take money by force; and be content with your wages.
Our “god” is what we think about the most; work the hardest for and love the most. And for most people, even those sitting in our churches this is material possessions. We drive our idols, wear them and live in them. Our gods are not really these things, they are “us”. We worship ourselves and these are our offerings to “us”. To this day God asks if we are serving Him or ourselves. Our souls hang in the balance.
