WEALTH MANAGEMENT - TWO COURSES TO TAKE

WEALTH - TWO COURSES TO TAKE

WEALTH MANAGEMENT

Wealth is a curse like work, but a harder and more shame­ful curse. He who is marked with the sign of wealth has com­mitted, perhaps unconsciously, an infamous crime, one of those mysterious and unimaginable crimes which are nameless in human language. The rich man is either under the burden of the vengeance of God, or God wishes to put him to the test to see if he can succeed in climbing up to divine poverty. For the rich man has committed the greatest sin, the most abomi­nable and unpardonable. The rich man is the man who has fallen because of an exchange: he could have had Heaven and he chose Earth. He could have lived in Paradise and he has chosen Hell. He could have kept his soul and he has exchanged it for material things. He could have loved and he has pre­ferred to be hated. He could have had happiness and he has desired power. No one can save him. Wealth in his hands is a metal which buries him alive under its icy mass; it is the tumor which consumes him still alive in his corruption; it is the fire which burns him and reduces him to a terrible, black mummy, a blind paralytic, black mummy, a ghostly carrion which everlastingly holds out its empty hand in the cemeteries of the centuries, begging in vain for the alms of charitable remembrance.

NOTE: Wealth is the Physical resources God gives humans to control and the human tendency to lift those resources to replace God as the center of life.

• Purpose of wealth in note on Isa 23:18. To use wealth for personal desires has its own rewards and they are wholly those of self-gratification which ends with the experience. To use wealth merely for the production and accumulation of treasures of this earth is to leave the essential spiritual life poor in the ultimate issues. To look upon material wealth as a trust and to use it in such a way as to help and bless men according to the will of God is, in the most literal sense, to lay up treasure in heaven!

"And her merchandise and her hire shall be holiness to the LORD: it shall not be treasured nor laid up; for her merchandise shall be for them that dwell before the LORD, to eat sufficiently, and for durable clothing."

Paul thoughts on money are summarized in 2 Tim 4:13. Did Paul enter Christianity for the sake of wealth? No, all the wealth was in the keeping of those whom he had forsaken; the poverty was on the side of those with whom he now identified himself. So poor had they been, that those among them possessed of any little property sold whatever belonged to them in order to provide for the dire necessities of the rest. Indeed, one of the burdens afterwards laid upon Paul was to collect means for those who were threatened with starvation. Such was the humble condition of these early Christians, that he often refused to take anything from them even for the bare necessities of life, but labored himself to provide for his scanty needs. To the Corinthians, he writes, "Even unto this present hour we both hunger, and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no certain dwelling place; and we toil working with our hands." (1 Cor. 4:11, 12, 13. See also 2 Cor. 12:14; 1 Thess. 2:4-9; 2 Thess. 3:8, etc.) In his farewell to the elders of Ephesus, he appeals to them as knowing it to be true that, "I coveted no man's silver or gold or apparel. Ye yourselves know that these hands ministered unto my necessities, and to them that were with me" (Acts 20:33, 34). He forsook the great Jewish hierarchy with its gorgeous temple and its overflowing treasuries, where his zeal in putting down the hated sect of the Nazarene would have been almost certainly rewarded with a fortune. He cast in his lot among the poverty-stricken disciples of Jesus Christ, among whom it was his ambition to be poor. Near the end of his life he presents to us the picture of an old man shivering in a Roman dungeon and pathetically asking for a cloak to be sent him to cover his naked and suffering limbs during the severity of an Italian winter.
Paul likewise warned against the power of money. One of the qualifications of a church officer is to be free from the love of money (1 Tim. 3:3). Deacons likewise must not be "greedy for money" (1 Tim. 3:8 NRSV). The strongest warning is found in 1 Timothy 6:10 (NRSV): "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith." Paul may be implying that people who love money will resort to all kinds of things to get it. The desire for money has a way of enslaving the person seeking it.
    The answer to the wrong use of money is to use it for kingdom purposes. Money can be used to enhance our relationship to God and bless others. Paul commended the liberal giving of the Macedonian Christians (2 Cor. 8:1-4; compare 2 Cor. 9:7).
    Hebrews encourages us to "Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have." (Heb. 13:5 NRSV). Jesus admonished us not to be anxious over material things, but to trust the Heavenly Father to care for our needs (Matt. 6:25-26). Christians are to recognize that God's kingdom is more important than money (Matt. 6:33). Material wealth is given to human beings as a stewardship. God is the owner of all things, and we are given a portion to use. At all times we are to keep in mind that we will one day give account to God for the use of our wealth.
Did Paul become a Christian for reputations sake? No; those with whom he united were held in universal contempt; their Leader had been put to death as a criminal among thieves; the chiefs of the cause that he had espoused were illiterate men. On the other hand, the wisest and the greatest men in all the land indignantly rejected the teachings of this new sect. The preaching of Christ crucified was to the Jew a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness. There was no reputation for the great disciple of Gamaliel in parting with his splendid honors and identifying himself with a lot of ignorant fishermen. He would only be execrated as a deserter and betrayer of the Jewish cause, and he might rest assured that the same bloody knife that slew the Shepherd of the scattered flock would soon be unsheathed against himself. All the reputation that he had so zealously built up was gone the hour that he went over to the new religion, and from that day on contempt was his portion. He was accounted as the filth of the world and the off scouring of all things.

 

For a wise man of wealth there is only one salvation: to become a poor man, a true and humble poor man; to throw away the horrible desti­tution of wealth in order to enter again into poverty. But this resolution is the hardest that the rich man can take. The rich man by the very fact that he is sickened by wealth cannot even imagine that the entire renunciation of wealth would be the beginning of redemption, and because he cannot imagine such an abandonment, he cannot even deliberate on it, cannot weigh the alternatives. He is a prisoner in the impregnable prison of himself. To liberate himself he must first be free. Christ asked the rich man to take that step.

 

Cf. Matt. 19:23-24; 1 Cor 4:13; Mark 10:25-26; Luke 16:19, 22; Luke 18:25-26; James 1:11.

 "Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."
"Being defamed, we entreat: we are made as the filth of the world, and are the offscouring of all things unto this day."
"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. And they were astonished out of measure, saying among themselves, Who then can be saved?"
"There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day:" "And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried;"
"For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. And they that heard it said, Who then can be saved?"

"For the sun is no sooner risen with a burning heat, but it withereth the grass, and the flower thereof falleth, and the grace of the fashion of it perisheth: so also shall the rich man fade away in his ways."