Dennis Tuuri

Well, there’s a theme hopefully you observed in the songs we sang. The sinfulness of our current, many of our current government officials has been made manifest in the papers and the headlines of the papers for the last few months increasingly. The walls of gold do in us. It appears quite frequently. Greed and covetousness is driving the rulers of our nation, many of them.

Today’s text is found in Hebrews 13:5 and 6.

And we’ll begin today a series of sermons dealing with money. So last week sex, this week money, what next? These are, as one who does premarital counseling and marriage counseling as well, these are two of the big issues of course that produce marital difficulty and they produce difficulty in our life. They’re temptations. They’re kind of linked together in the text before us and they’re important for us to consider and to be warned in terms of sin, but then also to move ahead in terms of how we observe a walk, a life that is pleasing to God and as a result blessed by him.

Them and transforming to our culture. So please stand for the sermon text today, which is Hebrews 13:5 and 6. Hebrews 13:5 and 6. Let your conduct be without covetousness. Be content with such things as you have. For he himself has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” So we may boldly say, “The Lord is my helper. I will not fear. What can man do to me?”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your word once more. We pray that you would transform us by it. Strike us, Lord God, with the sharp two-edged sword. Bring us to conviction for whatever sins may be found in our hearts and reflected in our lives in terms of covetousness and a lack of contentment. We pray, Lord God, that you would instruct us to the end that we might indeed be content with what you have provided and ultimately content with your presence with us.

We thank you, Lord God, for the tremendous blessings that we have, and pray now that you would further those blessings upon us by richly showering us truth and knowledge from your word that we may be transformed and live according to it. In Jesus’s name we ask this. Amen.

Please be seated.

In King’s Academy during our chapel time for the last month or so and will be for the next month, I’ve been talking on the Beatitudes from Matthew chapter 5, and you know, it’s a useful thing to think about very often, these Beatitudes, the blessedness of the Christian life. We are richly blessed, are we not? Praise God for that. I mean, it’s a wonderful thing to gather together to hear once more of God’s great love for you, the death of the Lord Jesus Christ and his resurrection and ascension for your sin, to see, you know, pictured before us once more this wonderful progression of Christian families.

We are tremendously blessed, but we think that blessing comes from certain things that the scriptures say it doesn’t come from. What does it take to be happy? What’s happiness? You know, how do we get happy? And you know, we tend to think, well, the happy ones, the blessed ones are those that, you know, have a lot of money to do things with and those that, you know, have not much cause to cry out to God and to suffer.

Blessed, happy are the ones, blessed are the ones that, you know, everybody likes. We want friends, we want all that kind of stuff. But Jesus in the Beatitudes, you know, tells us that blessedness comes from some other place. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, right? Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. And then toward the end, blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil things against you for my sake.

For so persecuted are they the prophets that were before you. I mean, our view of happiness is not that stuff. And today’s text is very germane to this issue of what makes us happy, how do we try to achieve happiness, blessedness, and all too often this money thing is a worse temptation than the, you know, illicit sexuality thing that we talked about last week. As tempting as that, as much of a temptation as our culture produces to us in terms of sexuality, you know, I think probably you can multiply that by quite a big factor and get the temptations the culture gives us in terms of trying to get us to be covetous.

And it’s a hard subject to approach because, you know, so often this subject is talked about in terms of, you know, that money is kind of not a good thing, and so we don’t want to, you know, really want to have money and all that stuff. That’s not what the text says. The text says before us that it’s not good. It’s a sin to be a lover of money. Money is a good thing. Silver and gold, which is what the money of the Bible descriptively is, at least a good case to be made that maybe long-term, the multigenerational perspective, we may want to see that again. I don’t know. But, but, silver’s a good thing. Silicon’s a good thing. Sand’s a good thing. Computers are good. These are created by God. He created everything good.

So we’re not saying here that there’s some kind of evil inherent in money. That is not the case. That would be asceticism to assert that money is bad. Money is good. But money, like all good things, produces particular temptations to it. And what we’re, you know, what we’re warned about in the text before us is not to be a lover of money.

Now, this text, and this I’ll spend several weeks on this subject because it’s such a big part of our lives. And what we’ve seen here in Hebrews 13 is that this wonderful book asserting the supremacy of the Lord Jesus Christ, that God now speaks through him, and not just that, but the Lord Jesus has performed this high priestly work for you. He’s brought you these wonderful blessings.

Hebrews has been full of these wonderful, beautiful vistas that show us the work and person of the Lord Jesus Christ. And mixed in with that have been all these great warnings, you know, not to walk in disbelief, to this and not to move aside from it. And here toward the end we have some four very strong warnings to us. You know, the translation says, you know, let your conduct be without covetousness.

Well, you know, it’s a stronger sense here. Again, like we said in terms of these other statements in Hebrews 13, this is a specific command from God, and it’s a strong one. The love of money, that’s how it begins. It doesn’t begin with your conduct. But the first word means not a, and then the word “philos” means brotherly love. We’ve seen this word “philo” three times now in this text. Here it’s connected to a word that means money, and the origins of that word mean kind of shiny or silver, but it’s money.

So don’t love money is at the start of this particular verse. And do not be a lover of money in your conduct. And this relates, I think, to our whole walk, but very specifically to our vocation. So it’s a specific, you know, explicit command. And in the same way that we saw two commands in terms of marriage—we, you know, marriage you must defend marriage and the marriage bed is not to be defiled, supposed to have a pure bed—in the same way here we have two specific commands. There’s first the command that we don’t be lovers of money in our walk, and then secondly the command, the positive side of this, is to be content.

So today I want to talk primarily about the first part of this command, and next week we’ll talk about contentment, and then after that we’ll talk about—and I’ve listed it on your outline—other topics related to money.

So again, this is a very simple thing. It’s a simple aspect of our lives that really we deal with on an almost daily basis. Probably not on Sunday, unless some of us are called to work on Sunday, as some people are. I think we’ve got—I think Freddy’s folks are dairy farmers and you got to milk those cows. But you know, most of us, that Sunday is a day to kind of not think about money too much and kind of rest from that stuff.

But the other days of the week, money is a big part of our thoughts. It’s a big part of our life. It’s a medium of exchange in terms of what we do in terms of work. And it’s a simple thing, right? It’s something that we engage in every day of the week. And what we’re told here is that these very simple things—loving brothers, being hospitable toward, you know, strange Christians who are strangers to us—remember the word stranger there. Well, let me just back up. The love of money here, which is spoken against, the other two loves are—we’re to be, we’re to have brotherly love (Philadelphia), and then we’re to be hospitable. Remember that word means love of strangers in its literal sense. So this is the third love statement here in the text. And this is a prohibition. The other two are—we’re supposed to do those things.

We’re supposed to love our brothers, and that has immediate reference to the local church. And then we’re supposed to love strangers. That doesn’t mean just any stranger. It means those who were, who were Christian, Christians part of, you know, affirm, confess Jesus Christ, and we’re supposed to invite them into our homes, be hospitable. We talked about this before. So to exercise this stuff, and then to have good marriages and good families, and to have our work squared away, this seems mundane, and yet this is the stuff of life, the application of these wonderful, beautiful truths that will transform the world.

You know, the scriptures are given and we’re supposed to disciple the nations, but part of the way we do that is by living out these very simple lives, simple things. So this text again addresses quite mundane, kind of simple thing, and yet a thing that’s very important for us.

Now, you know, I wanted to mention—you know, as we go through this application points are exceedingly important—on your outline you know I’ve reminded us here that we’re to love brothers and Christian strangers and sufferers. Remember that the admonition to be kind to prisoners and those that suffer is specifically those who are suffering for the faith. In its immediate context in Hebrews, this verse has application maybe to prison ministries, but in its first interpretation, this is talking about people that are in prison for their faith. These are Christian strangers and Christian sufferers that we are to have a mindset toward helping.

And this hospitality thing, I’ve got lived-in stalls here in hospitality. You know, in Proverbs, we’re told that where the stall is clean, there’s no ox. And if you don’t have an ox, it’s easy to keep your barn clean because nothing makes a mess. But then it says in the Proverbs that with ox, with lots of ox, there’s lots of work produced. So we have lives and lives are messy, and we have homes and if they’re lived in, they’re kind of messy. And I’m bringing this up because I don’t want us just to blow by these verses and not really have our lives changed by them, right?

So we’re supposed to grow in brotherly love, of course, continue to grow, and we’re supposed to be hospitable. And one way we can move toward that goal as a congregation is to not be freaked out if we go over to somebody’s house and it’s kind of messy because if that happens and if we’re all kind of then get worried that our houses aren’t clean enough to have folks over, you know, this afternoon, if we have some folks drop into church as we did last week from out of state and we want to extend hospitality to them, we’re not going to feel comfortable doing that if we think that somehow we’re going to be judged because our homes haven’t been cleaned up for visitors.

I guess what I’m saying is, yeah, it’s good, particularly on Saturdays, get your house cleaned up, ready to invite visitors over if that opportunity invites itself. But a big part of that is producing a covenant community that is not overly judgmental about the way our homes look, right? So, you know, if we have attitudes of going over to people’s houses that is explicit and is assuring to them that, hey, we know that if you have a clean house it’s because there’s no life going on.

If we build that kind of culture where a little messiness is all right, then we’re going to increase in hospitality one toward the other and to inviting folks in from outside. So, you know, children, you can help your parents be more hospitable by helping clean up your house on Saturday and by assuring your mom, too, as you get older, and your dad that, hey, don’t worry about it so much if the house isn’t spick and span. We got gracious, loving Christian folks in our church. And if we end up having some of them over and the house isn’t perfectly clean, that’s all right.

So, you know, that’s a specific point of application I wanted to remind us of by way of reviewing what these simple texts are: wardrobe covenants. I mentioned this last week and I wanted to read, by way of application again here, from King’s Academy’s dress code.

Now, see, the thing is, okay, so we said last week that to avoid sexual sin, the men should make a covenant with their eyes, not to look upon women improperly, and the other side of that is that women should make a covenant with their wardrobe to be careful how they dress. See, the thing is, women, you don’t really have to do a lot to make yourself attractive to your husbands or to other people. And so you want to be very cautious and careful with your wardrobe. That’s not easy for you to remember. It’s easy for young men to remember: I got to make a covenant with my eyes and I got to be careful because it’s, you know, it’s a sin they’re dealing with. But your wardrobe isn’t easy for you to remember.

So I just wanted to read a little bit from the dress code of King’s Academy. We say this: Young women should exercise particular care to be modest. Young women are welcome to wear skirts instead of pants, but the skirt must extend to the knee or below.

Now, I want to say here, this is not the dress code for RCC’s worship service. I’m not trying to make anybody feel bad, but this is what we do at our school to try to enforce this idea of modesty and concern, you know, for not producing, you know, temptation in these ways. Any slits in the skirt should be minimal. Shirt should meet the waistline so that the midriff and lower back are not exposed. Shirt should fully cover the bust area. Bra straps should be hidden by the shirt. Now, embarrassing people, I suppose.

Skin-tight clothing is unacceptable. Please remember, modesty is a kindness to your fellow students. Okay? So women, have you, you know, I don’t want to just blow by this stuff every week. You know, you should think about it and you should help your teenage girls think about this stuff. How are we doing? You know, if there seems to be these styles out there, and if they come from the world, typically they’ll be involved in some degree of sexual temptation. We just shouldn’t do it.

It’s not feasible for a dress code to address possible questions that will arise concerning appropriate attire. The teachers at King’s Academy are responsible for applying the general principles of neatness, cleanliness, and modesty to specific situations. So, when dressing for school, please remember that the goal is not how much can I get away with without getting into trouble. Rather, the goal is to dress to create a Christian learning environment that blesses fellow students and honors God.

Okay, so there’s some specific stuff that may be of use to you, and another exhortation and admonition from your pastor, you know, that our young women should be thinking about their wardrobes and thinking specifically in ways that, you know, wouldn’t seem natural to them, but you should think about this: you know, am I really dressing in a provocative way? So let’s try not to do that.

So what we have here in today’s text is another kind of love. In a way, of course, what we’ve talked about in terms of marriage has to do with love as well, and this text today in terms of covetousness also has to do with love.

Dante, who wrote a description of paradise, purgatory, and hell in his *Purgatorio*, talks about the seven deadly sins and he considers these sins as offenses against love. So from one perspective, all seven deadly sins are sins against love. He groups them accordingly: pride, envy, wrath, and anger are perverted love. He says perversions of love. Insufficient love is sloth. It’s not loving enough. And then the sins that we’re talking about last week and this week—avarice, greed, gluttony, and lust. And gluttony could fall into the whole greed, covetous thing, and lust. These are excessive love of earthly goods.

So perversions of love. So what we have here in the text today is sort of linked with, in Dante’s view of things, these other perversions or excesses rather of love, including lust, and of course, this is also true in the Ten Commandments. In the Ten Commandments, we move immediately from don’t commit adultery to not stealing. And so there’s this relationship between sexual sin and failure of contentment with what God provides us with, physical riches as well.

And so they’re linked together, at least in the order of the Ten Commandments. And as we pointed out last week, and we’ll talk about this more, they’re linked together in other ways as well. They’re linked together here in this text, in all kinds of other texts. There is this linking together of improper sexuality being spoken against and an improper view of our physical possessions. So they’re sort of related.

And as much as, you know, I think that really covetousness is an easier temptation to fall into—I mean, in most Christian churches like this one, they’re going to discipline sexual sin, there isn’t a whole lot of it going on. But there is probably, because it’s unseen, it’s unknown, it’s more of a heart thing going on. There is probably more temptation to covetousness. You’re not tempted to sexual sin so much, but you probably are tempted to have an improper attitude toward things. So, you know, it’s almost a bigger problem, this particular thing that’s talked about, than the problem we talked about last week.

All right. So what I want to do is talk now about some causes of covetousness. Next week, we’ll talk about contentment, and then move on to talk about tithing. One of the ways to avoid covetousness, at inordinate love for your money, is to give a percentage of it—like God says—to his church, to his purposes, his kingdom. So to tithe is one way, ritually, every week to tithe or offer money coming up for it after the sermon, to consecrate your wealth afresh to God and to, you know, get away from the sin of covetousness.

So we’ll talk about that too. And we’ll talk in a couple of weeks about debt. And I think that as long as we’re talking about finances and money, it’d be good to talk about debt. This is a real problem in our culture. And you know, it’s important that we speak to it from the pulpit, I believe, in terms of covetousness because usually, not always, usually debt is, has a relationship to a failure of contentment with what God has provided for us.

And then we’ll also have a separate sermon specifically on vocation. The scriptures make a strong link between vocation and dominion. And so we don’t want to just talk about the sins of avoiding covetousness and the positive virtue of contentment, but we also want to speak in terms of generally this walk, this conduct, this vocation and its importance for dominion. So we’ll talk about that too.

So we’re going to spend some time here talking about money, and first of all today, then, covetousness. First of all, what are the causes? Some causes of covetousness. And one thing we’d want to say is selfishness. And because we see this link to what has just preceded it, in the relationship as we said earlier, to the seventh and eighth commandments, one thing we can infer from that is covetousness is a selfishness.

Improper sexuality is a selfish desire to satisfy lust as opposed to bring them under the control of the Holy Spirit and to see all these relationships as mediated by Christ. Improper human sexuality is selfishness. That’s what it is at its core. And as we said last week, even in the context of the marriage bed, I mean, this text tells us not about, you know, don’t get on the internet. It says keep your marriage pure, and at its heart we can say that the way we do that is by being giving and not taking.

And so it’s about getting away from selfishness in terms of the marriage relationship. And so we can infer that here as well: covetousness, one of the causes of covetousness, is this idea that we are selfish.

There was a man who wrote a document on the, he talks about the three nets of Baal, and you know, Baal is like a term the Bible uses for sons of foolishness. Baal is contrasted in Corinthians to Christ, and so he’s kind of, he’s not anything but the description is a lord of people that are servants of Baal, sons of Baal, and one of the early church fathers said this: that there are three nets that Baal spreads for his catch to bring captive people to him. The first net is sexual offense. The second, greed for profit. And the third is the defilement of sacred things.

And those three nets are sort of combined in what we’re talking about here in Hebrews 13:5 and 6. It is a net that Baal throws out to allure us with. And at its heart, it seems that selfishness is a big part of what goes on here. And so to avoid covetousness, we want to be self-sacrificing. We want to focus, for instance, on service in business as opposed to mastery. We’ve been discussing in King’s Academy class Rehoboam’s loss of the kingdom, the divided kingdom after Solomon.

And the wise counsel that he didn’t listen to, and as a result lost it all. The wise counsel from his elders was not just, make the people’s burden lighter. You know, his dad attacks people and they wanted relief. But their specific counsel was to serve the people, to serve the people. And in that way, Rehoboam would guarantee that they would be his servants as king. Okay. So again, it’s like the Beatitudes. It’s the inverse of what we normally would think of.

And the Bible says the way to avoid covetousness, and the way to avoid covetousness in business specifically, is to see your business first and foremost as service to your customers. You’re not out first and foremost to make money. That’s part of it. But you’re out to perform some function that is kingdom building. And because of that, it’s some function that involves some degree of sacrifice to serve other people.

And most businesses know this. They know that the proper business plan to make money in the long term will be to serve other people. God rewards that with money. Money is not bad. So selfishness.

Secondly, another cause of covetousness is the allure of bling. And I apologize to Kelly and Amber today for this, but we got some bling going on here. In case you didn’t know, Amber’s been engaged to Kelly Kaiser. Praise God for that, Amber Zurker. And she’s got a big old diamond ring on that hand. So that’s a got some bling going on.

Bling is a rap term that refers to jewelry in general, kind of showy jewelry. According to an article on the internet, it’s a hip-hop term, came from a song by B.G., whoever that is, featuring Cash Money Records. That fits with bling: Cash Money Records. In any event, what it refers to is kind of the shininess of jewelry, flash jewelry. Bling.

And so, you know, the allurement of bling. This is, you know, I could—this is an interesting topic because, as I said, the word covetousness here really means don’t be a lover of shiny things. Don’t be a lover of bling is really what it means literally. “Philos,” lover. And then the term that is translated silver, but it, but the root of this word for silver is shininess. So things that shine. Don’t be a lover of things that shine.

You see, God’s made a beautiful world with all kinds of shiny, neat stuff—bling, you know—and that’s good. We should enjoy those things. Shininess is good. But ultimately, we should see it as related to the true source of light, purity, and gold. Glitters is God himself. These things are pictures of God. And when we worship the picture, when our goal is to get the picture as opposed to what the picture is representing to us—God—then see, we’ve engaged in practical idolatry.

So, you know, one of the problems is allurement. Now, again, I don’t know about women, but I know that as men, and many men I know, that we’re kind of allured by bling. And maybe it’s not jewelry. It’s computers that do whatever we want them to do. It’s the big screen TV. It’s stereo systems. It’s all these neat gadgets, cell phones, all kinds of neat things around us. And there’s an allurement, at least to me, I think to other men as well, there’s an allurement of them.

You like them just because they’re cool. You know, I guess that in the advertising industry, it’s called sex appeal again, right? It’s kind of a sexy thing. They’re selling sizzle as opposed to the steak, the kind of the bling, the brilliance of it.

There’s a new age article called the problem of glamour. And now they so associate glamour and glimmer and shiny things with any desire, which we say is wrong. That’s just wrongheaded. Desire is a good thing mediated by Christ. But I think that they’re right in one way: that the world, in many ways, particularly the modern world, there is this tremendous temptation or allurement of what shines, glamour, the sizzle, all that stuff. And all that stuff is good, but it reflects, ultimately, you know, God and his beauty and his person.

So a second problem that allures us to covetousness is the allurement of bling. And you got to understand that about yourself. And you know, you want to avoid that temptation to be, you know, blown away by the shininess of the thing. I mean, that’s a direct result of the term that’s used here, that covetousness is a love of shiny things, of bling.

Third, there is pride. You know, in 1 Timothy 6:10, we read about people who suppose that gain is godliness. From such withdraw thyself. And then it goes on to say in verses 17 and 18, later in 1 Timothy 6: charge them that are rich in this world that they be not high-minded nor trust in uncertain riches.

So another problem that allures us to covetousness is pride. You know, we think somehow that because we’ve got these things, there, we’re a good person. We equate gain with godliness. And this is all linked up with being high-minded and prideful. And so we want more stuff to feed our own pridefulness.

Ultimately, we could say that all sin ultimately is related to pride, the pride of putting our priorities before God. But, very directly, 1 Timothy 6 says there’s this relationship: there’s a temptation to pride that richness brings, and pride brings us to a temptation to richness, a desire for wealth, a love of it, as opposed to a proper attaining of it.

Fourth, another cause of covetousness is idolatry. And this I’ve already alluded to, but in Luke 16:13 and 14, we read that no servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve, our Savior tells us, God and mammon. You can’t serve God and riches. You know, and so idolatry is serving riches.

And our Savior, you know, talks a lot about money, and one reason for that is that the proper use of money and proper vocation is very important to dominion, as we’ll talk about in a couple of weeks. But the other reason he talks a lot about money is it’s a tremendous temptation. I mean, you can find a lot more references to temptations to money in the Gospels than you can to improper sexuality. It’s much more endemic to the human state and to our state. And so we should recognize this: that Jesus says ultimately, if our goal in life is to make money and to have x money at the end of our lives, we become idolatrous.

Our goal is to love and serve God and to build relationship with him and his people. Now, God rewards that with money, and money is not bad. I’m not saying money is bad, nor the accumulation of it is bad. But understand that it can be, and frequently is, idolatrous at its core.

Idolatry, you know, takes anything that really is given by God, a created good thing to represent him, and worships it, right? Romans 1: people are who worship the creature instead of the creator, created things, right? And so the created wonderful beauty of shining gold, platinum, diamonds, whatever it might be, beautiful things from God to represent and his beauty and brilliance and to remind us of those things, and the goodness of the created order. The order represents the God who created it, right? It reflects his beauty, and that’s a good thing. It’s all meant to lead us to an appreciation for God.

But when we stop short of going behind the goal to think about the God who is represented by it, then we’re committing practical idolatry. So idolatry, and that’s a big deal. God judges idolatry and judges it strongly.

So idolatry. And then finally, and this is what this text says specifically—the root cause of what this text says, and we can infer, you know, that there’s selfishness because of the sexual sin, and we can infer these other things that we’ve talked about properly—but this last cause is the cause of covetousness that, at least in Hebrews, God ties to their problem, their temptation. And this last cause of covetousness is the one that’s mentioned here specifically.

And as verse 5 says, don’t do this, but be content. He then gives us motivation, saying that God has said, “I’ll never leave you nor forsake you,” and therefore you can say, “What can man do to me?” So what he’s saying here is obviously that fear is driving their temptation to covetousness.

Now, remember, he’s addressing this to a faith community that had gone through difficult times. They had their property stolen and seized by the government or people that were, you know, persecuting them. They were in tough times. You know, they’d seen Y2K, or it kind of come down around their head in some ways when Rome, if that’s where they were, kicked all the Jews and Christians out of Rome, took all their possessions, et cetera. And there’s illusions in Hebrews back to this, verse 34 of chapter 10: “Ye had compassion on me and my bonds and took joyfully the spoiling of your goods, knowing in yourselves that you have in heaven a better and an enduring substance.”

That means that they were, their goods were taken from them. So they were likely to be fearful, you know. If you’ve gotten robbed, you’re more likely to be fearful of that. And so their fear drives their sin.

Now, remember that one of the most important pastoral truths for parents to teach our children and pastors to teach the parishioners, one of the most important pastoral truths for Christians—not for the ungodly, but for Christians—is found in Hebrews 2. And I’ve talked about this so many times, but it’s so important. Hebrews 2:14-15: “For as much then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise partook of the same, that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is the devil, and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.”

So from one perspective, Hebrews 2:15 says that our bondage to sins, including our bondage to the sin of covetousness, is related to a fear of death, and that the Lord Jesus Christ, whose death we remember every Sunday, presented here for us, why? Because we’re so afraid of it. All right? So afraid of it. And what we need to focus on is the atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ to recognize that we can put ourselves at peace about fear of death.

Fear is a tremendous motivating factor for covetousness. We want more things because we’re fearful about what’s going to happen in the future. They didn’t know what was going to happen next. So they wanted to really focus their lives on the attaining of goods. Y2K is coming, maybe, you know, AD 70 is on its way. We got to store up lots of stuff. Money is what we need now. Money, food, all that sort of stuff.

Now, there’s a proper stewardship when we know something’s happening. You know, I think that has something to do with the pastoral advice to hold things communally in the book of Acts because they were in a particular time and place where some degree of that was useful because stuff is coming down. So we don’t want to ignore what’s coming down. I’m not saying that. But there can be a fearfulness in our lives that drives a desire to reach to assurance and a calming down, not through relationship to God, but through relationship to things, right?

Because God says that ultimately the cure for, at least in Hebrews, the cure for covetousness is contentment. And the core understanding that gives us contentment is that God says he will never leave us nor forsake us.

See, we’re richly blessed. Said that at the beginning of the sermon. Tremendously blessed. We come together, and the Lord God reminds us over and over again throughout this liturgical service. What’s he saying over and over? Same thing he said to Freddy and Brenda: “I’m a God to you and your children. I’m your God. I will protect you. I will take care of you.”

All this other stuff that you worry about, all this stuff that you’re anxious over in terms of money, things in your life, it’s all representation of me. I’m with you. What did Jesus say? The Great Commission. Last thing he says, he assures him of the same thing: “Do this work for me. And lo, I am with you always.”

God promises us his presence, his abiding presence with you. “I’ll never leave you nor forsake you,” he says. You can you can bank on that. And that’s the only thing you can bank on. And that’s the cure for the covetousness that’s talked about in the text here before us: the presence of God with his people.

We’re tremendously blessed.

Next week, we’ll look at Luke chapter 12. You know, what we’ve got there is a guy that has success, and he wants to build bigger barns to put things in. And we’ll look at it in some detail next week, but you know the story, right? Kids, your coloring page today is from Luke 12. You got this rich guy, and God’s blessing him. He has material success, and he wants to build bigger barns, and then his soul is required of him that night.

And the parable that Jesus is teaching there is to warn them about covetousness. He had just been approached by a guy whose brother wanted Jesus to tell his brother to give him his inheritance. You know, we’ve got death going on in our church family. Of course, a couple of extended family members died this last week, and you know, those of you that have been through the death of parents or older relatives, you know that one of the most horrible things that all, you know, more often than not, will happen is the sort of thing that happens in Luke 12 where a guy comes to Jesus: “Hey, make him give me my inheritance.” The brothers, the family members start arguing over that money that was left, or whatever the possessions were, or whatever it is.

You know, covetousness rears its ugly head right in the face of death. It’s a horrible thing that happens. And that’s the background for Jesus telling them, you know, to beware, be on your guard against covetousness. And then he tells this instruction.

He says, “Well, there was this guy and he was rich and he built more barns because his barns wouldn’t hold all his wealth.” And then his soul was required of him. What did he do wrong? What did the rich man do wrong? Was he rich? To build bigger barns? No, I don’t think so. That’s what you do, right? I mean, if we believe that normally your labor is rewarded by God and that includes possessions, if you’re a farmer, I guess Mr. Whismer has 150 head. I know people in Poland have six, seven head. They want to get to 15 or 20. That’s what you want to do is increase the size of your service and your business that you’re running to the purposes of the Lord Jesus Christ. You want bigger barns. You want increasing wealth. Nothing wrong with that. And there’s nothing wrong with the fact that he was rich. The Bible doesn’t say rich is bad. Bible says rich is a good thing. Abraham was exceedingly rich, blessed by God. Nothing wrong with richness.

We can infer that probably this guy was not slothful. He was adding value to whatever God had given to him. God doesn’t expect us just to take our job and that’s it and be content always with what you have. No, that’s not what biblical contentment is. God says you’re supposed to increase in stewardship. That’s part of the blessings of his love to us mediated through Christ. We’re supposed to increase our abilities, our stewardship responsibilities. We’re supposed to add value, right?

It’s the slothful man, the lazy man who doesn’t do nothing with what he gets in hunting. God gives him a rabbit and he doesn’t even cook it because he’s lazy. We’re supposed to add value. You know, the whole offering thing related back to the tribute offering is just that. Remember tribute offering in Leviticus? What do you have to do to that cereal or grain? You had to add value to it. You couldn’t bring it raw. You bring your raw work that you didn’t process or do anything about to God. He says, “Forget it. That’s not what I want. I want you to be out there working. I want you to be blessed by me. I want you to add value to the land. And then you’re going to have more things. And I want you to build, you know, build bigger barns, and I want you to bring me, you know, evidence of what you’ve done in transforming the world in terms of the kingdom of Christ.”

So it wasn’t wrong that he was rich. It seems to evidence a degree of, you know, not slothfulness, but diligence in his labors. He’s blessed by God. He’s doing what you should do: building bigger barns. I’d say the guy did nothing wrong.

Well, Jesus maybe, you know, it says that he died that night and maybe he didn’t write a will. No, he—I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I don’t think it’s any positive action of his that is being judged by Jesus. But what Jesus says he did wrong is not what he did, but his attitude was that he was doing all this for himself. That’s what Jesus says in interpreting the parable to us. He says what was wrong was he wasn’t doing all this stuff for the purposes of the kingdom.

He wasn’t motivated to have, be blessed, have business, have money, have increasing bigger barns. All that stuff’s good if you’re doing it for Jesus. If you’re doing it not because you’re fearful—that this is what I need to make it through the next, you know, part of my life—no. Root out fearfulness. If you’re doing it not by saying it’s the most important thing in my life, life that I’m practically showing forth. Whatever you serve is what your master is. The only thing I’m really concerned about is what my bottom line looks like when I die. Forget that. That’s idolatry.

Jesus says, you know, what he was doing wrong was motivation. Not what he did was wrong, but his motivation was wrong. Maybe he liked bling. Maybe he liked just the look of better barns as opposed to thinking behind these blessings and money that God had given to him to appreciate the Lord Jesus Christ being manifested through these things. I don’t know specifically, but Jesus says in a general sense, his problem was that he was doing all this stuff for himself.

Now, there’s a tremendous challenge in that to us. It means that when you go to work tomorrow, you got to be doing it with a motivation to serve the kingdom of Jesus Christ, not because you want money at the end of the day. If that’s the only thing you want is a paycheck to feed your family, that’s wrong. Jesus says the motivation is kingdom. It’s making manifest what he’s done. It’s looking for the blessings of God, giving him thanks for them.

In a sense, it’s what the Lord’s day is all about. Taking our hands off of our vocation, off of money, so that we can then approach it again tomorrow with a proper sense of commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ.

There was this story about a guy that was found—real story, I don’t know which desert it was in California. He found this guy and he had two things. He had a hunk of gold in his hand. He’d died out there in the middle of the desert. And he had a little piece of paper, and the piece of paper said, “Died rich.” So he knew he was going to die, but at least I died rich. He says, well, turns out it wasn’t real gold. That was fool’s gold. He didn’t die rich. Cursed by God, if that’s what you think riches are, then you’ll end up as foolish in your death as that man was in his.

There’s a warning to us, but there’s a tremendous blessing in this text right here. God will never leave you or forsake you. He is the source of all contentment, blessedness, and riches. He is our exceedingly great reward, as will as he said to Abraham, he’s what will satisfy us ultimately.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for our work, for our vocation. We thank you, Father, for the beautiful things that you surround us with, Lord God. And thank you that these are all good and acceptable as we use the mediator for you. We thank you for providing the gardens in which we live and for telling us that the fruit on these gardens is ours for the taking and delighting and tasting but only as we see them mediated to us through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I pray, Father, over the next few weeks that you would help us to consecrate our riches, our vocations, our money to you afresh, that we may see it in terms of your purposes. Help us, Lord God, to root out this very incipient and ubiquitous sin in our life: to love what shines as opposed to loving you, the shining forth through the shining forth of the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you, Father, that we can now consecrate our money to you by giving you our tithes and our offerings.

In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen.