Wealth in Check: A Call to Faithful Living
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
Good morning!
Please keep your bibles open with me in James chapter 5.
Imagine with me, for a moment, a world where everything is run by corporations: where money talks and people are expendable. One of the biggest things we face in this kind of world is that people behave in a way that reflects their motivation. If it’s money, the behave and treat others in a way that reflects the importance of their own bottom line over everything else. Their vision of success is driven by the almighty dollar instead of the Almighty maker of Heaven and Earth.
Now imagine that this world, this culture exists within the church. We mighty try to brush it off and say that it wouldn’t be as blatantly obvious as what I pictured, but lets call it what it is - Material wealth can lead to spiritual ruin if it becomes our motivation, but a truly successful life is one that reflects God’s ethical and moral directives for his people and being faithful to him in all circumstances.
Our passage today is pointed directly at people within the church whose primary ambition in life is to be wealthy; those who compromise on their relationship with Christ to make a profit. James has been walking us through the importance of living in a way that reflects our hope in Jesus. As such, he gives us a few idea that we are going to focus on this morning:
Don’t Store Up Worthless Wealth (5:1-3)
Don’t Withhold What You Owe (5:4)
Don’t Let Money Lead To Compromise (5:5-6)
Don’t Store Up Worthless Wealth (5:1-3)
Don’t Store Up Worthless Wealth (5:1-3)
Please read with me, starting in verse…
1 Come now, you rich people, weep and wail over the miseries that are coming on you.
2 Your wealth has rotted and your clothes are moth-eaten.
3 Your gold and silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be a witness against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have stored up treasure in the last days.
James is giving a pointed rebuke to those in the church who have allowed their wealth, prominence and influence to overshadow their Christian identity. In a sense, he is speaking to those who he feels have been corrupted by their own wealth.
He says specifically, to weep and wail over the miseries that are coming on you.
He points out how riches in this life are only temporary - and how the corrosion of their riches - the physical wasting away of physical gold and silver -
A quick google search says that Gold itself is such a resilient metal that it wont break down for more than 10,000 years - unless the conditions on the earth change.
Scripture says,
18 For you know that you were redeemed from your empty way of life inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold,
19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of an unblemished and spotless lamb.
Here, Peter notes the temporary nature of silver and gold. If it takes gold more than 10,000 years to perish, as google suggests, then we get the notion from James that we will witness the corrosion of our silver and gold from the vantage point of eternity.
Even Job’s well-meaning friend, Eliphaz, knew the value of the right focus when it came to wealth - his accusation against Job, though unfounded, was that he was in sin and that his wealth had unduly influenced him and he is calling on Job to repent of his sin. We know that Job wasn’t guilty of sin, but that Satan wanted to show God that people would curse Him if it weren’t for their material possessions and comfort - God picked Job out by name as a faithful person He would use to put Satan in his place. Eliphaz says this:
23 If you return to the Almighty, you will be renewed. If you banish injustice from your tent
24 and consign your gold to the dust, the gold of Ophir to the stones in the wadis,
25 the Almighty will be your gold and your finest silver.
26 Then you will delight in the Almighty and lift up your face to God.
Eliphaz was wrong to think that God was repaying Job for some kind of sin that he committed, but he was right in the idea that God should be our gold and our silver - our riches need to be seen in our identity as slaves of Jesus Christ.
Eliphaz, though he was well-intentioned like Job’s two other friends, went down in history for giving advice that merely piled guilt and shame on a man who was going through enough without that guilt and shame being added on. But his advice here - to let the Lord be your gold and to let the Lord be your silver so that you delight in the Lord instead of earthly riches - is great advice - and that is the hope of James in our passage today - that believers wouldn’t value their earthly wealth so much that it overshadows their identity as believers in Jesus.
What does this mean for us today - James’ language here is a warning. But we can use this warning as a reminder not to allow our wealth to take priority over our identity in Christ - and this has several great applications - I’d like to point out a few…
we should not be so focused on storing up wealth that we forget to behave in a way that honors the Lord and reflects his desires for our lives well.
If our wealth causes us to be arrogant, are we reflecting the Lord and honoring him with how we live?
If our wealth causes us to be selfish, does that honor him?
How about we take the opposite and see how that works -
Does our lack of financial riches cause us to act in a way that doesn’t honor the Lord? Do we sometimes say we trust God but in reality, we stress and worry about finances in a way that becomes sinful? Do we forget that God uses finances in our lives to teach us to be faithful so that we become rich in faith (like James says in James 2:5)
5 Listen, my dear brothers and sisters: Didn’t God choose the poor in this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?
We can take the principle of what James is going at in chapter 5 and boil it down to say that our wealth (weather great or small) should not become so prominent in our lives that we live in response to that level of wealth instead of living for Jesus. We should npt be so focused on gaining wealth that we miss out on the richness that awaits us in a growing and vibrant relationship with Christ.
Christ wants us to be successful in this life, but His definition of success is different that ours. Success that Christ values isn’t measured in the accumulation of material possessions or wealth, but in faithfulness to Him in the various circumstances life throws at us.
As I have gotten a little older, one thing I have learned really well is that life doesn’t care what our plans are - calamity and trial have a way of coming regardless of what our 5 year plan might be. While there are seasons of ease and even peace, life exists in the reality that we don’t know what is going to happen - but God is teaching us that faithfulness is the most important thing - it is the measure by which we should determine if we are successful in life or not; not the size of our bank accounts or the value of our estate when we die - but in the well-earned words we should all long to hear - “Well done, my good and faithful servant!” Hearing those words should be our desire - a million times more than any financial goal we can think of.
We should not live to store up wealth that is worthless, but should live in a way tha honors the Lord and is vigilantly faithful to him in what ever circumstances may come our way. One way that being faithful to God would be seen in our lives is if we…
Don’t Withhold What You Owe (5:4)
Don’t Withhold What You Owe (5:4)
Let’s pick up again, in verse…
4 Look! The pay that you withheld from the workers who mowed your fields cries out, and the outcry of the harvesters has reached the ears of the Lord of Armies.
If we remember the purpose of James letter - as a whole - it is that we need to live lives that reflect well our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. As he gets into our passage for today, he speaks about not storing up wealth in the wrong place - in money instead of the Lord - but he is showing how some of the people in his immediate audience - those who would have been among the first to read it - had withheld pay from those working in their fields during harvest.
Scripture reminds us that a worker is worth his wage in
18 For the Scripture says: Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain, and, The worker is worthy of his wages.
Now, I am not going to stand up here and pretend I know anything about harvesting anything from the ground. Any time we’ve ever tried to garden and grow anything worth value, my involvement ensured that it wouldn’t grow. My wife has been able to get some produce from the garden, but not me! I have no experience in harvesting crops! And I know that the harvest season is here and within the Sprague community, harvest time is a big, big deal! As I read this passage, all I could think about was what would happen if one of the farmers I knew didn’t pay his people for their labor. Would that worker want to work for them again? Most certainly not! What little I know about harvest tells me that it is hard work - long hours, that it can be physically laborious, and would leave the strongest of men feeling exhausted at the end of the day. Then I imagine the sense of injustice of getting to the end of that day, or that season, where I had worked so hard for the sake of someone else - that my labor was directly benefitting them by lightening the amount of labor they had to do in exchange for an agreed wage, to then not receive that wage.
In our society today, we have a lot of safeguards against such a thing - if someone is working, they legally must be paid for their time. But it is not unheard of for a paycheck to bounce. It’s not unheard of for people to show up to work to find the doors locked with a sign that says, “Store closed…” That sense of injustice when wages are withheld is a special kind of violation, and God’s promise is that he hears those cries.
Notice how James refers to God - as the “Lord of Armies.” The imagery he is trying to remind people of is the same as what Moses said in
14 The Lord will fight for you, and you must be quiet.”
He isn’t “shhhhh’ing” them, but is telling them to be still - be at peace, because God will fight for them. Moses was telling the Israelites this while they stood on the bank of the Red Sea, when Pharaoh and his army were coming to capture them and take them back into slavery - they were seemingly trapped, but the God parted the sea for Israel to walk through.
James is reminding us that the God who commands legions and legions of armies is the one who hears and responds to our cries of injustice. And the fact that it is in the context of having had wages withheld, not for taxes or other things that we need to pay legally, but having a Christian brother or sister withholding these wages for no other reason than holding on to their wealth, reminds us that money can make good people do bad things. It isn’t a good thing to withhold someone’s wages when they’ve earned them.
The principle behind this is if we owe someone something, we should pay it.
Now, this can open up a whole can of worms, because many times, we are told that we owe something that hasn’t been explained well and is becoming more and more of an obvious cash-grab - like a medical bill you receive for services you got two years ago, but somehow just got around to processing the bill. I’m not saying that every bill we get is justified, or saying that we should blindly pay every bill that comes our way - the question here is legitimacy - we are called by God to pay what we legitimately owe. As Christians, it is how we should conduct ourselves and our businesses.
I received a bill for labor by an electrical company that put a couple 220v breakers in my shop so that I could operate my table saw, planer and dust collector - those are all tools I use every day to conduct business. When I got the bill, I was surprised by the amount they were billing me for, because it was over my estimated cost by more than double.
Would it have been a good reflection on Jesus had I told them that I wasn’t going to pay because their price was ridiculous when they had already done the work? Nope! They were gracious and set me up on a payment plan. Rather, I could have shopped around and hired someone else if I wanted to pay less - but when the work is done, its done - and we need to pay what we owe. Now - did this cause me to institute a company policy that says we don’t start work without an estimate - Yep! But did the cost give me reason not to pay? No. My responsibility before God is to pay what I owe and let him be the source of my contentment and joy.
The landlords James was speaking about in our passage today, their comfort was in their money and their behavior didn’t reflect the faith they professed in Jesus. James is reminding them that paying what they owe is part of our Christian responsibility. When we don’t pay those who work for us, whether they be employees, contractors, utility services, whatever - we are standing up against the Lord of Armies. The same God who parted the Red Sea stands against us if we refuse to pay what they are rightly owed.
James tells us not to store up worthless wealth for ourselves, but to be faithful to Christ. He tells us to pay those who work for us what they are owed and not to hold on to the money while we go against the Lord of Armies. His principle here is…
Don’t Let Money Lead To Compromise (5:5-6)
Don’t Let Money Lead To Compromise (5:5-6)
Let’s finish our passage today; read with me starting in verse…
5 You have lived luxuriously on the earth and have indulged yourselves. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter.
6 You have condemned, you have murdered the righteous, who does not resist you.
Maybe underscore the call to righteous living by illustrating the opulence and oppression condemned here, urging the necessity of living humbly like Christ. Emphasize that indulgence at others' expense is contrary to Christ’s love and mercy. By serving others and acting justly, we reflect Christ’s nature and store treasures in heaven, avoiding the spiritual pitfalls highlighted in this passage.
This is a hard verse to approach because compared to the original audience, we are ridiculously wealthy. We have material resources beyond the imagination of anyone living at that time. We have air conditioning and heating to keep us comfortable all year, we have abundant food that is decadent, and snacks that we eat because we like the taste - snacks that hold absolutely no nutritional value. Our society is very different than those who would have been the first to read this letter. Compared to most people in history, even the poorest in our communities live luxuriously on the earth and have the ability to indulge. But if we look past the immediate words and dig into the context, we see that the motivation of the heart is James’ target. Is “Keeping up with the Jones’” more important to us that living faithfully to God? Are we willing to compromise our moral and ethical behavior - that should be determined by Scripture - in order to capture the opulent life that the world says is a sign of success? Are we chasing material comfort more than the comfort of peace with God?
James is specifically speaking to those in the church whose business practices make them indistinguishable from any other worldly business man whose primary focus is his own bottom line, who would do anything to anyone if it meant that he came out on top. I don’t believe we have those kinds of people here - but God knows our hearts. I have run into people who claim to be Christians but flaunt their wealth and influence and capitalize on those things to take advantage of others. I think if we all tried hard enough, we could all think of a few people we have come across like that at some point in our lives.
The accusation here is against those who compromise on Christian ethics and behavior for the sake of their bottom line. The motto, “It’s not personal, it’s just business…” does not apply to Christians in terms of how we treat others. God calls us to treat everyone with dignity because people are image bearers of God and people get their value as image bearers of God. The reason why Christians oppose abortion so strongly is because taking a life in the womb is snuffing out a life that bears the image of our maker. It’s the same reason why medically-assisted suicide, or even suicide in general is looked down upon - it is snuffing out something given value because it bears the image of God - not because of what that life brings to the table.
As such, we are to treat everyone in a way that is keeping with our Christian morals and ethics. We shouldn’t have a separate set of morals for business than we do for treating people in our every-day lives.
28 Anyone trusting in his riches will fall, but the righteous will flourish like foliage.
The word for foliage here is often translated simply as “green leaf.” The way I take this is that no matter how much humanity covers the earth, there will always be green leaves. They are abundant and caref-free because God provides what they need. We should be the same.
In terms of how we live in community, we should be careful not to be known as the ones who don’t care about what Christ teaches in terms of our behavior. Proverbs gives us a simple lesson in that:
1 A good name is to be chosen over great wealth; favor is better than silver and gold.
Conclusion
Conclusion
We need to be careful not to allow wealth or the pursuit of riches to cause us to compromise on our Christian morals, ethics and behavior. We need to be smart in how we conduct ourselves financially, as finances play a big part in how our society operates, but we are to do so with wisdom and submission to God, rather than trying to make make God submit to our financial desires. The more we press into Him, the more faithful we are to him, the more successful we will be in his sight.
17 Instruct those who are rich in the present age not to be arrogant or to set their hope on the uncertainty of wealth, but on God, who richly provides us with all things to enjoy.
5 Keep your life free from the love of money. Be satisfied with what you have, for he himself has said, I will never leave you or abandon you.
We have the promise of God that he will never leave us or abandon us, what more could we want? If we live in terms of eternity, we will see the value of money diminish in our lives. Submission to God takes money from a driving concern to a back-ground issue. What ever our financial situation, God wants us to be faithful to Him, and that means being submitted to Him - submitted in not only what we believe, but in how we act. Our behavior, especially when we think no-one from the church is watching, is the biggest tell of our character. We want to live lives that are pleasing to God - and in terms of our money, that means that pleasing God means putting him before money. When we interact with others, we see them in terms of their value as image-bearers of God and not merely opportunities to get ahead. When we have people working for us, we treat them well, pay them what we owe them and not cause their hearts to cry out to God against us. We never let our financial situation or plans cause us to compromise our ethics or behavior before God - we are accountable to Him in all things, and if we want to please Him, our goals should be to look more and more like Jesus - in His holiness and righteousness, than in any metrics of worldly success we may be tempted to pursue.
Money is not evil - God uses it in people’s lives every day. It can be a tremendously helpful tool! But it should never define us. It should never be what determines how we behave - we must be faithful to serve God, not money. He must be our master, not money.
19 “Don’t store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal.
20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves don’t break in and steal.
21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
We will never be accountable to money because it is an object - God is living and will be the judge over everyone - let us focus our efforts on pleasing Him and preparing for eternity than merely making the rest of our temporary stay on earth more comfortable.
Let’s Pray.
