Money- When Will We Ever Have Enough
5/2/99 Ecclesiastes 4:4-8 1 Timothy 6:17-19
A rich man wanted to make sure he had enough money with him in order to go to heaven. He learned that he would die in a few days. He called his three friends: a doctor, preacher, and lawyer to his bedside. He said, "The preacher has told me that you can’t take it with you, but I believe I have worked out a way so that I can. Doc tells me that I won’t live long, so I have prepared three sealed envelopes, each containing $10,000. When I die, I want each of you to walk by the casket and drop in your envelope with the $10,000."
A short time later, they attended his funeral and then met together. The preacher said, "I’ve got a confession to make. We’ve been needing to repair the organ in the church for a long time, and I took $2,000 out of Bill’s envelope and used it on the organ." The doctor said, "This makes it easier for me, because I took $5,000 out and used it for my new clinic and only dropped in $5,000." The lawyer said, "Well, my conscience is clear. I did just what Bill said. I kept my envelope, picked up both of yours and dropped in a check for the whole amount of $30,000."
When it comes to money, we have all kinds of reaction. Ever heard someone say, "I don’t want nobody to know how much I make?" Is it because the person wants others to think he is richer than he is, or that he is poorer than he is. If you ask a person who makes $20,000 a year, what would be a good paying job, she would probably say making at least $30,000. If you ask a person making $30,000 a year the same question, she would say $50,000.
If you ask the person making $50,000 he would say $75,000 and on and on it would go. Most people think a good salary is one that pays more than they are making. Do you realize that if you own your home, have two cars, and kind of retirement plant, you have more wealth than 98% of the world’s population. You are in the top 2% of the world’s richest people. Probably most if not all of us here are in the top 10% of the world’s richest people even though we claim we are broke and don’t have anything.
Money is something which is neither good or bad. It’s what we do with our attitude toward money that makes the difference. Our attitude toward life determines if we will ever have enough money. The Bible is filled with teachings on money. The worst thing we can do with money is to fall in love with it. That means we will never be satisfied no matter how much of it we get. For the Bible tells us is Eccl 5:10 Whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income.
Money is an important topic for us to deal with, because Jesus teaches us that if our financial lives are out of order, our spiritual lives will also be out of order. Jesus said in Luke 16:11 , if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches." So we have to demonstrate we can properly handle the money God has given to us, in order for God to develop us spiritually into what He wants us to be by giving us spiritual wealth.
In 1989 according to the records of Social Security, 85 out of 100 Americans will have less than $250 in the bank when they reach age 65. Now with all the money that has passed through their hands in the previous 50 years, where did it all go. How come they have so little to show for it? What are some principles we can find in Scripture to help us make sure we are being good stewards with what we have.
One thing we need to do is to quit pretending we are rich. Proverbs 13:7 says one person pretends to be rich, but has nothing, but another tends to be poor; yet has great wealth. Many of us have a serious problem of wanting to impress people with what we have, as though what we have determines our value as a person. In Proverbs, Solomon said, "I look at all the hard work people are doing and most of it is done because of a person’s envy of his neighbor." In other words, if they got one, I have to one. It will even be better if I got one first.
Our society is making it easier for us to pretend to be richer than we are. We can now lease cars that we could never afford to buy before. People see us in our nice cars and think we really are in the money now. Only now at the end of the lease, we still don’t own any more of a car than we did at the beginning.
We can buy brand new furniture and not have to pay for it for six months. Somehow thinking God is going to bless us in the next six months, and we will be able to pay for something then we could not afford today. That’s not faith. That’s like Satan telling Jesus to jump down off the top of the temple to make God catch Him.
We can rent our furniture, our stoves, our TV’s, and our other appliances. In doing so, we pay twice as much for the stuff in the end. All because we are not willing to wait until we can afford the product. We get hooked on, its only $5.95 a week, or $13 a week. That sounds like little until you add all those weekly payments into monthly bills.
Some of us have money in our pockets at the end of the week, and we think its ours, but its really not. You have a budget sheet in your bulletin. Every family needs to fill this thing out if they don’t already have one. Some of the money you think is yours for spending actually belongs to your insurance company, your auto mechanic, your taxes and others. The bills that only come every three months or six months are going to come. You have to set aside money each month so that when they come, the money will be there. We would rather wait for the bill to show up, and then ask for prayer because the devil is really attacking our finances. The devil is not attacking us, we’re being poor stewards with what we have.
Anybody who has a car, should know the car is going to break down. You need to set aside money each month for car repairs. There are some of us who should not buy a car. We need an RTA monthly pass. So what if Slick’s Auto will put you in a car for no money down and $115 a month. Can you afford the insurance, the tags, the new tires you’re going to need, and the major repairs that are going to happen. Your $115 a month, may really be closer to $350 a month, but Slick is not going to tell you.
Slick also isn’t telling you, you’re paying a 20% interest rate. Slick is making more off you in interest than he is on the car. So that $2,000 in interest you gave to Slick, you could have given to the work of the Lord. Sure it may take longer to ride the RTA, but you don’t care about the transmission, the engine or the tires on the RTA. If they go bad, you get off the bus and catch the next one. If your income is limited, fixed, and your budget is tight, you should think hard before buying a car.
You hear people say all the time, if you have to pay a $600 mortgage note or a $600 rent, you’re better off paying the mortgage. You may not be if your budget is already tight. Your $600 mortgage may or may not include your real estate taxes which can turn that $600 payment into a $700 payment. It also does not include your water and sewer which makes it a $775 payment.
If something breaks and you’re renting, its somebody else’s job to fix it. If you own it, it’s your job to fix it. That payment could very easily become $900 a month. If you can’t afford the $900 payment, then it might be better for you to rent, until your circumstances change. Jesus said, "what person starts to build a tower without first sitting down to calculate if he or she has enough money to finish the job."
My friends just because the door opens for you to get something, does not mean that its God’s will for you to have it. Sure you prayed God would make a way for you to get something, but God does not open a door for your financial ruin. Some people make it easy for you to get something, knowing they are ripping you off. If the car dealer told you, this car is worth $5000 but you will have to pay $9000 to have it, most of us would say no way. But if he said you can have this car for $150 for 60 months, we think God has opened away for us. God never desires for His people to be ripped off.
The other way we can pretend to be rich is through credit cards. We charge things left and right. After a while, the only thing we can afford to pay is the minimum charge. If you had an extra $1,000 dollars a year, would you rather pay it interest fees to the credit card company or the work of Jesus Christ. You see many of us would like to invest more in the kingdom of God, but we have made ourselves servants to Master Card, Visa, and Discovery. Proverbs 22:7 says the borrower is servant to the lender.
Even though we may want to do more for the kingdom, we have allowed ourselves to become servants of those other than Jesus Christ. The main reason is we are living beyond our means, and we refuse to wait. Sometimes we want to impress others with our generosity. A generosity we cannot afford to have. Credit cards should be used only as a necessity for emergencies unless you can pay off the entire balance at the end of each month.
Larry Burkette has a cooking recipe to help those who want to get out of credit card debt. He said, preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Carefully place you credit cards in a pan, and put then in the oven. Let them simmer for 15 minutes. Take them out and let them cool off. Send the cards back to the company and tell them you do not want any replacement cards. Then pay those bills off.
Another area in which we are poor stewards of the money God has given to us is in co-signing a loan. We believe the bible teaches that since we are to love everybody, we are to help them when they get into a jam. So when Mary, who has two kids, comes to us and ask to co-sign for a car loan, in our eagerness to be a Good Christian witness, we agree to co-sign. Realize when you co-sign for a loan, you are saying, if this person does not pay, I guarantee you I will pay back the whole amount.
Now most of the time when you co-sign, the other person is not going to tell you that they have stopped making payments. By the time the bill collector catches up with you, there are a bunch of late fees and added costs to the bill. Your first reaction will be, "how could they do this to me?" Well they were able to do it to you because you did not read the book of Proverbs:
Proverbs 22:26, says, do not be a person who strikes hands in pledge or puts up security for debts. 17:18 A man lacking in judgment strikes hands in pledge and puts up security for his neighbor. 11:15 He who puts up security for another will surely suffer, but whoever refuses to strike hands in pledge is safe. Proverbs 6:1-6 says if you have pledged or co-sign for somebody, try to do whatever you can to get out of the situation as soon as possible.
Now if you still feel led to co-sign for someone, do it with the expectation of having to pay the bill. That way you won’t get mad and fall out when you have to pay the bill. Don’t be like an aunt of mine who refused to pay for a car she had co-signed on. She thought she had gotten away with it by simply ignoring the creditor. But some five years later when she and her husband wanted to buy a house, this unpaid co-signed bill showed up on her credit record. She couldn’t afford to pay it off and she and her husband loss this house they had moved into on a land contract.
That one event was one of the major causes of the eventual destruction of their marriage. Co-signing will come back to haunt you when you least expect it. Again don’t blame the devil for the problem. God has told you what to do and not to do. Everybody who went back on their word and didn’t pay off the loan, assured the co-signer in the beginning that they had the money to pay it off and there would be no problem.
But remember the Bible teaches in James James 4:13-15 Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money." Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, "If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that." Anybody you co-sign for, you should ask them to take out a life insurance policy with you as the beneficiary just in case they up and die on you. That alone might cause some of them not to ask you to co-sign.
Another thing the Bible teaches about money is that those who have money and are in business, should treat people fairly. God is watching how you treat your customers, your tenants, and your clients. If you are cheating people out of their money, Proverbs 13:11 says "dishonest money dwindles away, but he who gathers money little by little makes it grow."
Christian owners have an obligation to pay their workers more than just the minimum wage. The book of James condemns those who are getting rich while paying their workers peanuts. Christian landlords have an obligation to maintain their properties in good condition and to do what the law requires. Do not try to get wealth, at the expense of cheating others. Proverbs 8:18 tells us, whoever trusts in wealth will fall, but the righteous will thrive like a green leaf.
Proverbs also tells us that the righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern. The writer also tells us that whoever oppresses the poor to increase his wealth will come to poverty. It’s not enough to simply be happy about earning money. We need to ask the question, how did I earn this money? Does it really belong to me or have I knowingly cheated someone else out of what was rightfully theirs.
Still another thing the Bible teaches about money is the danger of falling in love with it. Many Christians do not finish the race, because they head off in the pursuit of wealth and riches. How many people we’ve seen who asked us to pray for a home? Once they get the home, we rarely see them in church anymore. Now they have to have two jobs to fix the home the way they really want it.
They can no longer come to church and bible study, and slowly but surely the flame of fire for Jesus Christ begins to dim. It’s not that they intended to stop growing as Christians. In the parable of the sower, Jesus said some seeds fell in among the weeds. The plants began to grow, but the weeds choked them out and it the seeds could not produce fruit. He said, those seeds represented people who wanted to grow spiritually but the deceitfulness of wealth and riches choked it out of them. Last week a person in the church had an offer for a high paying job, with little time for her family or a lower paying one which gave her family time. Which do you think she chose. She could not have made that decision if she was up to her ears in debt.
We fall in lover with money in small subtle ways. Once we have tasted something, its hard to go back to what we used to have. We get to the point of thinking we deserve this. Once we have designer name this and that, its hard to back to ordinary clothes. We tell ourselves, but this is of better quality and it will last longer. It lasts longer alright, up in our attic or in boxes in closets.
Meanwhile the fashion world changes, and we’re robbed of those clothes because if we wear them now, people will think us out of style. Well it would have been cheaper to have gotten the ordinary clothing and let it wear it before the fashions wore it out.
Once you get air conditioning in a car, you don’t want to even consider a car without it. Once you get a little remote to unlock your door, it becomes hard to think of getting another car without one. Once you’ve had a cadillac, a lincoln or a lexus, it becomes hard to think of a plymouth, a tempo, or civic. The more difficult it becomes to do away with these things, the more we find ourselves falling in love with money. It does not happen over night but its happening.
Money is not bad nor are possessions, but the love of them is dangerous. 1 Tim 6:10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
Look at what you’re willing to do with the money you have, and you can tell if you’re falling in love with it. Will you lie or steal or fudge a little bit on the job or at home to get it? Has having more money made you a more generous person. Now that you have money are you more likely to tithe, are you helping others more or can you only see this thing you’ve got to have next.
The only way to ever have enough money is to learn the meaning of being content. We really do not have to have the latest, the fastest, the biggest, or the most luxirious anything. To be rich is to live below one’s earnings level so that you can be free to do what God may ask you to do. Once we realize this, we will be free to invest more of our money into the cause of Jesus Christ.
You see money has its limits. Money can buy us a good time, but it cannot fill place in our lives that only God can fill. Why is it that rich people are more likely to commit suicide than poor people. We will say in a minute, "If I had her money, there’s no way I will commit suicide." In his book For Better or For Worse, Walter Maier included this story: "A rich man had committed suicide. In his pockets were found two items: $30,000 in cash and a letter. The letter read in part: ’I have discovered during my life that piles of money do not bring happiness. I am taking my life because I can no longer stand the solitude and boredom. When I was an ordinary workman in New York, I was happy. Now that I possess millions, I am infinitely sad and prefer death.’" Yet most of us believe if we had that money, we’d be happy. We’re working two and three jobs in pursuit of a happiness that’s not really there.
Money is something we all need for living. Our attitude toward money is going to determine if we control money or if money controls us. That’s why Jesus said, "you can’t serve God and money." Everyone of us will be faced with having to make the decision to have less money to spend in order to grow in God, or to have money to spend at the expense of our relationship to God. Which decision are you making today.
God does not put a limit on how much money we can have. But God does place a limit on what our attitude toward money can be. God does not put a value on us based on the money we have. He does not love us more if we are poor or if we are wealthy. Our value to God is based on the fact that Jesus Christ came into this world to save us from our sins.
God offers us all something regardless of how much money we have to spend. The word of God says in Isaiah Isa 55:1 "Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.
The life we’re looking for is not found in more money and working harder to get it. God knows how to provide for his children. True life is not in wealth, but in Jesus for Jesus said, ""I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.
