The Simple Pastor
By Phil Whittall, church planter, blogger & book reviewer
RT @lukedvd: Hope his resignation from the England manager job will allow @JoelVirgo to focus on his church duties #nomorehairdye 17 hrs ago
“God was and is the owner of all things. I was and am simply His money manager. He has never revoked his ownership, never surrendered his claim to all riches and treasures. God didn’t die and leave this earth to you and me. He still owns it. The more I thought about it, the more real it became.”
And
“Do Nanci and I go to bed each night thinking, “It sure is a big sacrifice giving away all that money”? Not at all. I go to bed feeling joy, because there’s nothing like the thrill of giving to God’s purposes and His people. It’s participating in God’s grace. It’s exactly what we were made for.”
And there’s more
“We didn’t need a higher standard of living. We didn’t need a better house or car. We didn’t need a better retirement program or more insurance…We don’t need a million dollars or a hundred thousand dollars. We do just fine on a lot less, and God will provide for us every step of the way.”
Read the whole thing here
Saying ‘thank you’ to another person is a habit that needs teaching, we’ve been doing that with our two year old son, so that when he receives something he says ‘thank you’. It’s all a bit cutesy but the reasons go much deeper than civility and good manners. There are lessons and disciplines we need to bring into our relationship with God. Thankfulness to God essentially puts things in the right order of importance. Here are just three ways ‘thankfulness’ is a good spiritual discipline to have.
In my daily readings I’m in the Book of Job and a fair bit of the discussion relates to wealth. Job is introduced as a phenomenally wealthy man (Job 1:3) he was a millionaire (maybe even billionaire) of his day. His wealth was a blessing from God (Job 1:10) and its removal was seen as evidence of sin. Job’s friends argue that Job’s misfortune can only be as a result of his sin and pride.
In reply Job argues that things are not so clear cut. He is innocent and now poor and in distress while many wicked men sleep easy with their ill-gotten riches. Wealth isn’t the obvious sign of God’s favour that you might think. So wealth could be a sign of blessing (Abraham, Job, Solomon) or it could not, so how do you tell? Clearly, not by looking at the wealth but by looking elsewhere for the fruit of the character and the integrity of their actions.
Yet it was the description of greed in Job 20:20 that caught my eye:
“Greedy people want everything and are never satisfied. But when nothing remains for them to grab, they will be nothing.”
In the ESV it says the greedy person ‘knew no contentment in his belly’. Deep in the gut, the one who lusts after stuff, who chases after money, who hungers continually for more, will never be satisfied. There is no enough for such people.
Today on the news I listened to the tragic story of Joan Cunnane, 77, from Stockport. A shopaholic she was found dead under a pile of unopened purchases. Crushed to death, alone in a house of things she bought but never opened. It was one of the most tragic news stories I heard. Greed crushes the soul to death, under the weight of never fulfilled desires the spirit dies. We need rescuing and salvation from greed.
So what satisifies me? What I earn? What I achieve? What I own? What I experience? When will that ever be enough? Proverbs 19:23 tells us that knowing God, fearing the Lord is the place where my soul can be satisfied, because there lies life – everything else ultimately is death to us without God, it is rotten. We should consider it rubbish, Paul argues (Php 3:8).
So, I hope I can make it a constant refrain in my heart to set my gaze upon the one who can truly satisfy, for that will be enough for me.
We know that following Jesus is the goal of our lives (seek first the kingdom of God and all that) and even though God may bless some of us with massive incomes, it’s not for massive personal gain but for massive blessing of others. Anyway, the answer is obvious.
The follow up question, ‘how is that evidenced in your life’ is a little trickier. I’m pretty clear that wealth is not the goal of my life but somehow along the way I’ve done pretty well at acquiring things for myself. I’m not wealthy by any measure (although I am a very long way from being poor) but if the goal is not accumulation then how come I have so much stuff?
But NOT having stuff is not the goal either it’s just less distracting from what is the goal. When I buy books, sooner or later, if I keep them I’m going to need some bookshelves. When I buy a DVD player, I’m going to buy some DVDs to watch. One purchase almost always leads to another – new outfit, new shoes. Then somehow, by a series of very small justifications I end up with a house full of stuff, and invariably the bigger the house the more stuff there is. So even though my desire is to radically follow Jesus, I find the laptop, the TV, the books, the toys, the house, the hobbies can all (if I let them) get in the way.
The more I have, if there are no restrictions, then the more weighed down I become, the less responsive I am. God asks us ‘why spend money on what is not bread and your labour on what does not satisfy?’ But our response is that we are satisfied, satisfied with lesser goods and lesser things, satisfied by the temporary not the eternal, satisfied by the mundane not the significant, by trinkets and toys, by possessions not people.
So, action is needed. The things must remain servants – every now and then I need to demonstrate that they don’t have a grip on my life by technology Sabbaths (anyone else get jitters when they don’t check the web to see what’s going on? – the BBC used to pride itself on updating its news site every minute of every day), I need to exercise my freedom by sharing and giving rather than simply just taking and keeping. I need to set boundaries (thus far and no further) to the size of my wardrobe, to extent of my house or the frequency with which I change my car or kitchen. Action to keep distractions in check is necessary if I am to keep first things first and seek his kingdom.
But I must also turn my attention to delighting in Him and that isn’t achieved by having little or lots…
On that note yesterday I kept my laptop switched off all day, and found it hard to do…I think I’m addicted. Alternative ways of passing the time paled in comparison to either working or wasting time on a computer game. So I’ve decided I must have a computer sabbath each week. It’s not good for my creativity, imagination, soul to be addicted to a screen.
Freedom of Simplicity is a classic and a must read for everyone interested in seeking out the simple life in the 21st century. Few people will have written so thoughtfully and drawn so deeply from the wells of Christian experience than Foster.I do sometimes find Foster too thoughtful, he goes to great pains to find language that is reflective, considered and balanced but perhaps in doing so he lacks the punch that is at times needed. For me, when reading a book that is designed to challenge then there must be moments of clarity where the writing is like splashing ice cool water onto a hot, tired and dusty face, the result is an intake of breath, a stinging experience but one that is ultimately refreshing and one that sharpens the senses. Foster is too gentle for me, even when he makes his most stinging rebukes of contemporary Christianity and modern society.
However having said all of that, there is so much to think about in this book, so much to draw on, so much to revisit and think about that probably one reading is not enough. But to gain the ‘single eye’ where our focus is on seeking the kingdom then this is a helpful and essential guide.
Paul was fully satisfied in God, he was completely fulfilled in his relationship with God through Jesus Christ and as a result I imagine it would be impossible to sell Paul a loan, a new car, rearrange his finances or persuade him to buy a bigger house if they didn’t help him achieve his purpose in serving God. There was a direct connection between happened to Paul on the inside and what he needed on the outside. I wonder what would happen to personal debt if this connection was made more often.
I don’t know about anyone else but as I consider the church in the UK too often those differences are small if they’re there at all. OK so we give a little more to charity, we get divorced a little less, we probably smoke less but not so much as you’d be convinced that Jesus was really making a difference in our lives. Yet when you read the life of the early church what grabs me is that it was obvious to everyone that Christianity meant a new life and not just spiritually on the inside but lived out everyday!
So to take but one example (if I can I’ll work through others) in 1 Timothy 6/6-11, and in particular these words from St Paul
“For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it”
If we believed that and I mean really believed it then surely we wouldn’t fill the middle with the pursuit of stuff. We start with nothing and we finish with nothing and the actions of most people is to say, ‘Well hey I should just get hold of much stuff as possible and enjoy it now because I can’t take it with me’ and if you look inside the lives, houses, garages, lofts of most Christians then you’ll see they think that too. But what Paul is saying is that because we can’t keep it we shouldn’t really bother with it other than what we need to survive (he lists food and clothing and I might add shelter). Everything else could become a trap because we see in it the path to a fulfilled life instead of being the path away from a fulfilled life which is only found in following Jesus. And he had food, clothing and shelter was a bit iffy. The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head remember.
Of course to really apply this passage to ourselves we need to be convinced that when the Bible talks about the rich it’s really talking to us. The biggest trap of all is to think I’m not rich, Bill Gates is rich or whoever. Well wealth is deceitful so I guess it’s no surprise that we think that.
So the next step is to be really think about that question – when the Bible talks about the rich is it really talking to me?
I believe Jesus when he said 'life does not consist in the abundance of our possessions'. I believe he offers something better. This blog is mostly about that search.
I'm also a husband, a father, church planter, keen runner, reader, and motorcyclist. These and a few other things make guest appearances from time to time.
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