Greed

So put to death the sinful, earthly things lurking within you. Have nothing to do with sexual immorality, impurity, lust, and evil desires. Don’t be greedy, for a greedy person is an idolater, worshiping the things of this world.  -Colossians 3:5

For how often greed is discussed in the Bible, I think the church rarely talks about it. I also think it’s one of those other things the church tends to judge outsiders on - I have never once heard of someone talking to another church member about their tendency to be greedy, or confess greed in a prayer or confession time.

Confession time for me though - while I was reading this, I got distracted with an e-mail about laptop promotions! “Yes God, good word… I love your Bible, wonder what that scripture means… Ooh, new laptop models!” It’s disturbing, really - without greed I think our culture would just cease to function. Of course, we can thinly mask our greed with certain christian-ese: “blessing”, “hunger, “fruits”, “success”... What is even more maddening to me is that I can be talking about bearing fruit and making an impact, and the other person can be nodding and thinking we are on the same page where I am talking soul impact and they are thinking worldly influence.

I think it’s also disturbing the number of people I know who say they have a hard time worshiping. It’s a lot of people! However, the same people who have a hard time worshiping God often times have no problem worshiping a sports team or a new car. Maybe we are thinking about worship wrong. We don’t think of greed as worship, but the Bible says it is.

Nazareth

Philip went to look for Nathanael and told him, “We have found the very person Moses and the prophets wrote about! His name is Jesus, the son of Joseph from Nazareth. “Nazareth!” Exclaimed Nathanael. “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” -John 1:45-46

God decided to come down is the strangest of places. Nothing God did was the way we would have done it as citizens of the world:he came to a place that was absolutely despised, born to a lowly family, born in a manger, and grew up a carpenter. God could have done so much better for His son, but that’s not the point. God is in the habit of redemption. He is in the habit of restoring the lowly.

Nazareth wasn’t thought much of, if it was thought of at all. History tells us that Nazareth had less than 200 people in it at the time of Jesus. It wasn’t strategically important, and didn’t have anything to set it apart from other places. But the King decided to make it His home. The King decided this was going to be an important place, and today, 2000 years afterwards, this little town of under 200 people is better known than entire metropolises in antiquity.

Where are the Nazareths in our lives? Where are the places or people that others despise, but who God is looking to inhabit? What opportunities are we missing to minister because, to our eyes, they are not strategically important? What kind of places in our own lives are nothing of value, but just waiting to be inhabited? Then, as now, we run the risk of missing God because of our own perceptions of what is important or not.

God, thank you that you chose the lowly and the despised. Thank you that you are King. Show me the people and places you want to redeem. Teach me to make judgments not based on worldy importance but instead on the value you place on them.

 

Colossians 3:12-13

Since God chose you to be the Holy people He loves, you must clothe yourselves with tenderhearted mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Make allowance for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you. -Colossians 3:12-13

Interestingly enough for me, I hear very few exhortations to be kind and gentle. If you’re a believer, you’re likely to hear, often: be generous, evangelize more, stand up for your faith, prayer more. But be kind and gentle? I think that may have gotten lost along the way.

There are no worldly benefits to kindness. It makes you easy to take advantage of. If you treat people with gentleness you will be burned and hurt by their reaction. But it’s there in the Bible so we do it. It’s how our master worked and lived.

In all honesty, the biggest thing that keeps me from being kinder is my schedule. It’s so packed that I often don’t have time to stop for the person in front of me or for really finding out how the people around me are doing. It’s hard to be kind when you’re emotionally torqued. I need to slow down more, daily, and let me roots go deep into Jesus. 

Just A Prayer

God, thank you for creating me. Thank you for this life you’ve given me, with it’s hardships, failings, problems, victories, and possibilities. Thank you for making me so much more than just what people see on the outside.

Thank you for my friends and family. Thank you for the many people you’ve placed in our lives. Thank you for another day, full of hope and wonder and excitement. I may think Iknow what you have in store today but you could easily just surprise me spectacularly.

 

Thank you for protecting us, for taking care of us even in the tough times. Lord thank you so much for your absolute mercy and grace and that, while I can delay your will for my life, Ican’t overrule it.

 

Teach me, Lord, everyday how to walk with you. Teach me what it means to follow and to serve you. Guide me in the paths to righteousness oh Lord. Help me see the foolishness of believing in my own eyes more than my spiritual eyes.

 

God, let the noise of this world be drowned out by the whisper of your voice, let the busyness of the day be overwhelmed by your stillness, let the constant drone of negativity and hopelessness be silenced by a single word of hope from Your lips, and let the urgent tasks give way to preparation for a visit from THE KING.

Off of the Mountian

 

This is my first day off of my prayer retreat and I’ve had to come back to Earth. It was the most interesting prayer retreat I had had in awhile. I am not nearly as focused as I used to be, flitting in and out of tasks, sleep, prayer, reading. Maybe it was just the stage of life that I’m in at the moment but focus seems to be a rare treat.

God was talking to me about making achievement an idol. I need to stop it. God has way better plans for me and His way of accomplishing is working on the heart first, then fruit will follow. John 15 - our goal is to remain in Him; his goal is the fruit.

A guy in my Friday men’s group pointed out that remaining in Christ was more than just receiving from Christ - it was garbage collection too. If the vine remains in the branch, then the waste and refuse gets removed too. The dead tissues float away and are processed in other parts of the tree. I found this so revolutionary - I had always thought about in-flow but never the things I gave to Jesus, and definitely not that these were equally important.

My time was spent a lot of it giving things to the Lord. Particularly memories and experiences that I was holding over myself in an attempt to motivate me. Every time a memory comes up, I have been giving it to God and giving Him permission to do what He likes with it; I will not use it to guilt or shame myself unless He tells me I should. I feel lighter now and less burdened; however, I also feel considerably less motivated.

I was being unhealthily motivated by guilt and shame for some of the things I had done in the past and some of the people I had let down. With that gone, I can see that eventually this will lead to more energy and more love on my part, but right now I’m struggling to have my motivation return. If I don’t have guilt to push me, I have to be motivated by love and I don’t know how to do that. Also, if achievement is not the goal and I’m supposed to be pushing myself towards relationship instead, then how can I keep myself achieving? I think I need to pass through a season where achievement is not the most important thing but I’ve honestly forgotten how to live any other way.

Vision of My Idols

In prayer I realized I had been making an idol out of achievement. Everything else had taken second place to it, even relationships with God and my family. I justified it because what we are doing is for the Kingdom and many people are being helped. But it's not God's way and I had made an idol out of it.

I asked God to show me this idol in my life and I got a picture of a room. I was expecting a control room or other location where some steering is going on in my life, but this room seemed to be underground - like a hobbit hole. There were multiple rooms and they were filled floor to ceiling with junk, trash, and foul-smelling things. I was quite surprised that's what my idol of achievements looked like.
I asked God to clean it out, and slowly we started dealing with the buildup. As we got lower and lower through the junk, to my surprise I realized this wasn't just a couple of rooms, but a tunnel. Not only had I held up achievement as an idol but I used it to block people out of my life. We kept cleaning and I realized there were two lanes to this tunnel - some of the rooms were in one lane, some were in the other.
I started to realize why this place felt like it was underground and the lowest part of my life - we were cleaning out my connections to the Vine (John 15)- Jesus and the rest of the body of Christ. It's like I knew I was plowing ahead at an unhealthy speed so in order to not be discouraged by others, I blocked them out.
This tied in closely with the revelation a guy in my Bible study shared yesterday that connection to the vine is two-way - not only do you get life from the vine but you get garbage collection - the bad and rotten things get swept away to be dealt with in another part of the tree. By cutting myself off from others, I had unknowingly allowed tons of trash to start piling up in my life.
I am afraid that I won't have the same drive in life now that I have given my main tools up to the Lord. But I was putting achievement as more important than my relationship with God or what He wanted - like I was saying I'll sacrifice myself for the Kingdom of God when He wasn't asking for that. I also need to see accomplishment through God's eyes, not just through the world's eyes.