Preached · June 4, 2017
A New Summer Series
We are launching into a new series this week. If you've been with us at Good News, you know that we took 31 weeks to go through the whole Bible. And so as we were planning together as a staff and elders, thinking about how we were going to structure the summer, we thought maybe we should keep our series a little shorter, give people a bit of a breather, a bit of a break.
We're going to be doing three series this summer: June, July, August. In August, we're going to be looking at the mission, the values, the vision of Good News, doing some testimony. We're calling that series This Is Us. In July, next month, based off of that hit book that we saw in a Hallmark aisle, we're doing a series called I'm Dead, Now What?, which is all about the afterlife and leaving a legacy and things like that. And then this month, June, we're going to be talking about our money, a series called How to Be Rich. Not How to Get Rich, How to Be Rich.
If you are visiting with us this morning, you're probably thinking, great, I picked the one church that talks about money all the time, which is everybody's fear of a church. But I'm here to tell you, in my seven years of being on Good News staff and coming here, I can't remember a series on money. We've had some messages, some talks about it, but not a series.
Sometimes churches can be infamous for getting the money series out there, the generosity series, when things are in dire need. Like, oh, the bank account's low, people aren't giving like they're supposed to, we better preach a series on money. And I'm also glad to tell you that's not the case. You've got a church leadership and staff that's very diligent with their money. There's money in the bank account. There's money in a savings account to pay for things when they break. Our year-over-year giving is better than it's been in years. You guys are known as a generous, faithful, giving kind of church. So this is not a panic, preach a money series kind of time.
Why Preach on Money?
So why are we preaching on money? Well, it's not about what I want from you. I'm not trying to get something from you today. It's about what we want for you. The point of this series is not just for you to fill the church coffers and make sure that we're all floating on a bubble of riches. It's about what we want for you.
Malachi chapter 3 says, this is the word of God, this is God speaking:
Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse. Test me in this, and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be enough room to store it.
So this is not about what we want from you. This is about what we want for you. We want you to experience God's blessing in your life. We want you to experience what happens when you are faithful with not just 10% of your money, but the whole 100% of your money. What happens when we listen to what God has to say about our finances, about our money, about our riches, our resources, and what happens when we do that well?
Because what it comes down to is this. If you are not following God's plan, following God's Scripture for your money, you either didn't know or you knew and you decided to disobey. You either didn't know, meaning maybe you did not have good models of this in your life. Maybe your parents weren't particularly good with money. Maybe nobody's taught you the word of God about what you're supposed to do with your money. So you didn't know, and that's a pretty good excuse. Or maybe you knew, and you just decided that you knew better. You knew, and you decided, well, God's plan is not my plan. God's word is not really something I'm going to prioritize in my life. So you knew, and you disobeyed. Those are basically the two options.
So if you want to be able to say that you didn't know, I'd suggest you run out of those doors, because you're about to know. If you want to be able to claim ignorance, now is your time to casually walk out. Otherwise, after today and after this series this month, you'll be either on the obedient side or on the knew-and-disobeyed side.
Command Those Who Are Rich
So if you have your Bibles, your iPads, your iPhones, your Android devices, whatever you've got, I invite you to join me in the book of 1 Timothy chapter 6. We're going to be focusing in these four weeks on verses 17 and 18. This is what it says:
Command those who are rich in this present world.
Now we're going to stop right there. Command those who are rich in this present world. I would put money on this, except I'm not sure that's part of God's plan for my money, but I would put money on this: that some of you read that first line and thought, whew, this doesn't apply to me, thank goodness. You read "command those who are rich in this present world" and thought, I can sit back and relax for the next 20 minutes because that's not me, I'm not rich. This is for somebody else.
But let's hold up a second. Look at what the text says. Look at what Paul is writing to his protégé, Timothy. Timothy's a pastor in the church of Ephesus, and this is what Paul is telling Timothy to tell his church. How are these people rich? It's not rich compared to the guy next to me or the lady behind me. It's not rich compared to those who own homes on East Lake. Or if you own a home on East Lake, it's not rich compared to those who own a home on West Lake. Or if you own a home on West Lake, it's not rich compared to those who own a home in Hawaii. It's those who are rich in this present world. The whole one. The big one. The global one. This one.
If you have a yearly income of $37,000 a year, you are in the top 4% of worldwide income makers. If you make $25,000 a year, you're in the top 10%. If you make $48,000 a year, congratulations, you are in the top 1%.
Now, listen, something's weird happening right now. Do you hear it? Not a single one of you is jumping up and down saying, I'm rich, I'm rich. No one got on their phone with their mommy and daddy right now and said, guess what? I made it. I'm in the top 1%. I'm in the top 4%. What's going on? Why did we not respond like that?
Rich Is a Moving Target
Well, because rich is a moving target. You ever notice that? When was the last time that you felt rich? For me, I grew up kind of entrepreneurial, and I used to scan slides for people a couple generations older than me. They would take the 35-millimeter slides and realized that those were not necessarily the best way to store their photos, and so I would digitize them. I'd scan them, put them on a CD, and I would charge. I was like the cheapest guy in town, a dollar a slide, and people would hand me a thousand slides for me to do. So I'd do a job and I'd make a thousand dollars and I felt rich. Well, now a thousand dollars flows in and out of my bank account in a week and I don't feel that rich anymore. What happened? Rich is a moving target.
Rich is always not me, but some other guy, some other lady, some other person. Rich is something that we always compare up to instead of comparing down to. Great, Anthony, you said. I'm in the top 1% of income makers in the world, but I don't want to compare myself down to the people who make less money than me. I want to compare myself to the people who make more money than me. And so when rich is a moving target, guess what? You'll never feel rich.
Gallup, the people who do the polls, asked a bunch of people what rich would be for them. And it was always approximately double their current income. If you make $30,000, well, what does it take to be rich? You need to make about $60,000. And then they asked people who made $60,000, what does it take to be rich? Well, it takes about $120,000. The same question was put to the people who read Money Magazine. And those people, they did a poll, and Money Magazine put together the data, and they said, on average, in order to be rich, you need $10 million in liquid assets. I don't even know what a liquid asset is, but you need $10 million of them. And can you guess what the average income is of the readers of Money Magazine? About $5 million. You need double what you make now to feel rich. And as soon as you get there, you don't feel rich anymore, because there's always going to be someone who makes more money than you.
First World Problems
One of my favorite posts or memes online, you'll see them shared on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, is the first world problem memes. I'll show you a few of my favorites. "I want food from the back of the fridge, but it's blocked by all the food in the front of the fridge." I was there last night. I could not find my butter. There was too much stuff in the fridge. "My commute to work is so short, my car only gets warm when I get there." Oh, you poor baby. First world problem. "My iPhone is not the newest anymore." We all know that pain. "I'm so tired of eating at all the restaurants near work." "The pizza box doesn't fit in the fridge." "I bought new shampoo, and I forgot to bring it to the shower." "My laptop is dying, but my charger is all the way upstairs." Oh, the pain. "I have more clothes than hangers." How many of you fight with your spouse over the hangers?
Now, Andy Stanley, the guy who wrote the book How to Be Rich, calls these rich person problems. "I've got horrible cell phone coverage." Oh, man, that's a rich person problem. "I've got this mortgage, and it's just so much money." A mortgage? You've got a home? That's a rich person problem. "Oh, my car lease is just so high." That's a rich person problem. "My credit card debt, it's just so much every month." That's a rich person problem. That's unique to people like us who live in the richest country in the world, who are part of the most successful economy in the history of humanity, in the history of our species.
So when Scripture says, "command those who are rich in this present world," Paul is talking to us. Some of the richest people on the planet, and the richest economy in the history of the planet. The problem is not whether or not we are rich, because we are. The problem is we don't know how to be rich. Sounds like a good title for a sermon series.
We're Not Very Good at Being Rich
We're not very good at being rich. Very few of us have been taught well how to be rich. Now, a few of us do this exceptionally well, and you know some of those people. You know people who are generous and who are not arrogant with their money, who don't flash it around. And those people are exceptional folks. You like to be around them, not because they're sharing with you, just because they're effervescent with the joy, realizing that what they have didn't come from their own hard work by itself, but it was a gift from God. But the large majority of us, we don't know how to be rich. We don't know how to use the resources that God has given us.
Some of you have probably read or heard these stats before. About 80% of NFL players find themselves bankrupt or financially strained two years after retirement. 60% of NBA players are broke within five years of retirement. 50% of lottery winners spend their entire winnings in five years. We're not very good at being rich.
You would also think that as we got richer, we might naturally get better at generosity, at sharing our income with others who need it. But not so much. These are some stats from the IRS, pretty recent. If you make under $25,000, you give away about 12% of your income. You know why? When you make that little money, in our minds, you know that riches have failed you over and over again. So you're not hugely attached to them. You're fine giving them away. They don't rule your life, so you're happy sharing. You make $50,000, that on average drops down to about 6%, 6.8%, almost in half. You go up to $100,000 in income, it drops in half almost again, 3.8%. $500,000 in income, 2.6%. The more money we get in our lives, the less good we get at being rich, at sharing our money.
Now, some of you are thinking, okay, the percentage goes down, but at least the number, the amount of money goes up. Well, kind of. If you make $100,000, on average, you're going to give about $3,400 away. You make $200,000, you give $700 more. That means tomorrow you could get a $100,000 raise and only give away $700 more. Because that's the thing about wealth and money. It grips us. It grabs us. Extra money has a way of not feeling so extra anymore. It feels like ours.
Even right now, you're kind of thinking in the back of your mind that there is going to be a time in this sermon or in this series where the pastor, the preacher, the minister, is going to tell you to start giving away more of your money. Maybe to this church, maybe to the church that you're from, maybe to some nonprofits in your area, places like Cherish Center, Discovery House. You know there's going to be a time in this series where the preacher is going to ask you to start giving away more money, and you're already thinking about why that's a bad idea. You're already thinking, well, if I just had a little more, if I just had a little bit more margin, if I just had a little bit less debt, then I could give away more. But not now. It's not a good idea, preacher. Do you know why you think that way? Because you don't know how to be rich. We can justify. We can rationalize. We're very good at it. But no matter how you slice it or dice it, in this present world, brothers and sisters, we are the rich ones. And statistically speaking, we're not particularly good at it. I know some of you in this room are, and we thank you and God's blessing is in your lives, but we need to be taught. We need to be shown how to be rich.
Until we relax into the reality that we are rich, until we admit to ourselves that we are rich, we're never going to be intentional about getting good at it. Learning how to be rich, it's not just about what to do with your money. It's also about learning what your money does to you. How to spend it, how to invest it, how to give it away. It's about learning what your money is doing to you. How does it change your character? How does it change your habits? How does it change your actions? Because that's just as much a part of learning how to be rich.
Two Side Effects of Wealth
So when Paul writes, "command those who are rich in this present world," he's talking to us. Let's see what he has to say. He says:
Tell those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant, nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but rather to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.
He continues:
Command them to do good and to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share.
Now, we're going to get into this more in the next few weeks, the side effects of being rich. But I want to point out two things very quickly that Paul warns us about when it comes to our wealth. Wealth has side effects. Remember, knowing how to be rich isn't just about what to do with our money. It's about learning what our wealth does to us.
The first thing it can do is it can make us arrogant. We've all known an arrogant rich person, right? Don't point. Just raise your hand. Arrogance, it's not a winsome quality, is it? It's not the thing that you put in your singles profile. "I'm rich and arrogant." Not so much. Wealth, when we don't know how to be rich, can get into our hearts. It can make us proud of all the wrong things. It makes us boast about the wrong things. Wealth can rot our character.
And secondly, wealth can give us hope migration. Paul writes, don't be arrogant and don't put your hope in wealth, which is so uncertain. Hope migration is when we move our hopes for the future away from people, away from God, away from a relationship with Jesus, and move it instead toward our riches, toward wealth. Imagine the feeling you would have if your bank account were wiped out, when your retirement account tanks, when your insurance policies get wiped away. That feeling, that knot in your gut, that's hope migration. That's putting our future in the hands of something so uncertain. Something that's not God.
A Firewall Against Hope Migration
So how do we get better at being rich? How do we protect ourselves from our character being rotted? How do we protect our hope from migrating to the wrong things? Well, that's next week. But here's what I want you to do in the time between today and next Sunday.
I want you to get out your pens, get out your smartphones. I'm serious, get them out. I want you to write something down. This week, at some point, you're going to encounter a challenge. You're going to have a problem. It may be a flat tire. It may be just the fact that you have a hankering for a roast beef sandwich. Whatever it is, you're going to face a problem this week. And you're going to get out your wallet, your credit card, your cash, your checkbook, and you're going to solve that problem in seconds. Just seconds. So with the wealth in your credit card, with your wallet, you're going to be a problem solver.
But before that, I want you to look at what's on the screen. What does every piece of American currency have on it? In God we trust. So write this down. Put it in your cell phone, your notes, your piece of paper. Put this down:
I will not trust in riches, but trust in him who richly provides.
That's 1 Timothy 6:17. We who are rich in this world are not to be arrogant. We're not to put our hope in riches, but we're to put our hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Whatever problem you solve this week, say this out loud to yourself. Remind yourself not to migrate your hope to something so uncertain like money, but to put our trust in God instead. And that way you're putting a firewall up against hope migration.
God's Good Gift
Look, friends, brothers, sisters, there is nothing wrong with being rich. That is not what Scripture says. In fact, God says he gives us everything for our enjoyment. Enjoyment. We get to enjoy being rich. It's God's gift to us. He gives good gifts to his children. He is a good, good Father. He desires to bless us. So it's not a trick to be rich. It's God's gift to you. But we have to be good at it. And we're going to talk more about that next week.
