What The World Needs Now

Proverbs 3:13-14; Philippians 4:10-20

October 25, 2015 • Mount Pleasant UMC

In the year 312, Constantine, the emperor of the Roman Empire, was on his way to war, to a decisive battle, when he had a dream of an image of the Christian cross in the sky along with the words “By this sign you will conquer.” In that moment, he determined God had spoken to him, so he took the cross as his standard and headed into the battle—a battle which he did win. After that victory, Constantine issued what has been called an “edict of toleration,” in which Christians, who had been a persecuted minority up to that point, now were “tolerated” within the Empire. Eventually, not only were they tolerated, but the Christian faith eventually became the official faith of the Roman Empire, and Constantine himself even had a hand in shaping and unifying Christian theology (Yates, The Expansion of Christianity, pos 18-19).

There is a story (which may be more legend than fact) of the time when Constantine had the entire Roman army baptized. The entire Roman army which under Constantine may have numbered as many as 645,000—think about putting those numbers on our year-end reports! As they were taken down into the water, each of them lifted up their fighting arm so that it was not baptized. Every other part of them became Christian except the arm that would carry their sword into battle and could still be used, therefore, to kill others. Their sword arm would remain unbaptized.

Now, we don’t believe baptism works quite that way, but a theology of baptism isn’t the point of the story. The point is this: what part of our lives do we try to keep “unbaptized”? What part of our lives are we content for Jesus not to invade? As you might have guessed by the video and, if you read the article in the Circuit Reader, the answer most often in our world today is our wallets. Most of us are willing to give Jesus control over most every area of our lives as long as he doesn’t touch our money.

We live in a world where, even after we've been through a recent recession and near-depression, 40% of Americans still spend 110% of their income every year. The average household owes $8,500 in credit card debt (which amounts to $950 billion total), and we get four or five applications in the mail every week for new credit cards. I knew a guy who would literally fill out every application that came in the mail, and when one card got full, he would just transfer the balance to another one. He was constantly trying to run from his debt, hoping it didn’t catch up. I got a letter this last week from one of my credit cards congratulating me on achieving a higher credit limit. They said it will give me more “buying power.” What that really means is they hope I will spend more so that I can be trapped in that endless cycle of trying to pay off debt.

In addition to that challenge, we live in a world that believes in “living for the moment” and one-third of the population has nothing saved for retirement; only 2% of the population has an adequate pension plan. Even thinking about earlier in life, few have resources to pay for college for our kids. We have huge college debt that will follow some folks for much of their lives (student loan debts are over a trillion dollars today). And couples often bring that debt together when they get married, debt that is complicated because some have never learned to balance a checkbook or design a budget. On top of all of that is our desire for more, more, and more. When John D. Rockefeller was asked how much money is enough money, his reply was, “Just a little bit more.” And this was a man who already had millions and millions of dollars. But I suspect that, no matter what our income level, we might have the same response if asked the same question. What do we need? What does the world need now? Not love. What the world needs now is just a little bit more. Right?

Wrong. That’s the world’s answer. And, as with many matters, the church, the Christian faith, has a different answer. What we need now is not more, more and more. What the world actually needs now is wisdom—knowing how to do the best we can do with what we have. And so, for the next few weeks, we’re going to hover around the topic of money because it is always a part of our lives, whether we have a little or a lot. Money affects us more than we’re likely willing to admit. So in the coming weeks, we’re going to look at some very practical guidelines from the Bible for earning, saving and giving. We’re calling this series “Pocket Change,” because we’re going to be focusing on the heart attitudes toward that stuff in our pockets that need to change. Before we need money, we need wisdom.

There is a whole section of the Bible dedicated to what are called “wisdom books,” books like Psalms, Ecclesiastes and Lamentations. It’s an important topic; the Hebrew word for “wisdom” appears in the Bible 318 times. But the book that readers of the Bible most associate with the topic of “wisdom” is Proverbs, which reads like a rather loose collection of “wise sayings.” Sometimes we equate wisdom with “book smarts,” but in reality the two couldn’t be further apart. “Wisdom,” according to the Bible, has more to do with what we call common sense. It’s not a matter of just having knowledge; it’s a matter of knowing how to live successfully live, knowing what to do with what knowledge we have. Wisdom is not so much about information as it is about transformation. When Proverbs talks about “wisdom,” the author isn’t just talking about accumulated knowledge. He’s referring to God’s direction for our lives, God’s wisdom. The Biblical writers have no interest in knowledge without goodness, without God. When Proverbs talks about “paying attention to wisdom,” the point is this: we must pay attention to God. So the author can say, “Blessed are those who find wisdom, those who gain understanding, for she is more profitable than silver and yields better returns than gold” (3:13-14). The opposite of wisdom, in the book of Proverbs, is trusting in our own “understanding” or our own “smarts.” You probably know someone like that. It’s the person who has gained a little knowledge and suddenly thinks they know it all. It’s the person who has an opinion on everything from politics to religion and everything in between. Usually they know very little about the topic but that doesn’t stop them. These are the folks who don’t mind spouting off on Facebook or on other social media about controversial topics before they’ve really thought them through. They are “wise in their own eyes,” Proverbs says. But they do not have wisdom. Wisdom comes from God and wisdom points back to God (cf. Goldingay, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs for Everyone, pgs. 17-18; cf. Harnish, Earn. Save. Give. pg. 21).

When it comes to money, we see this wisdom in our Scripture passage for this morning. Philippians is often called “the letter of joy,” because much of the letter is Paul expressing great joy over what is happening in the Philippian church. Philippi was located at the gateway between Europe and Asia, in what today is western Greece. It had a long history and was often called a “miniature Rome.” Much of the population was made up of retired military men who had been given land there after their service was complete. It was a wealthy town, boasting nearby gold and silver mines, and it was the first place in Europe where Paul preached the Gospel. It was also the first place in Europe where new believers were baptized (Archaeological Study Bible, pgs. 1925-1927). So Paul writes back to these believers, these friends, and he is happy to have heard what is going on there since he left. “I thank my God,” he says, “every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy” (1:3-4). And, at the end of the letter, he is rejoicing over a gift they have sent him. Paul is, most likely, imprisoned at the time he writes; he says he is “in chains for Christ” (1:13), and in Roman prisons at that time, there were no real provisions. You didn’t get three square meals a day nor any sort of comfortable accommodations. You only got what people from the outside brought you. So at some point, the Philippians have sent a gift to Paul to help him not only in his time of imprisonment, but presumably also for him to use to continue preaching the good news about Jesus. So he tells them, “I rejoiced greatly in the Lord that at last you renewed your concern for me” (4:10). Some scholars hear a bit of sarcasm in that verse, like, “Finally you got around to remembering me,” but I don’t think, given the tone of the whole letter, that’s really where Paul is going with that comment. Instead, he wants the Philippians to know he really is grateful, but that even if they hadn’t come through with a monetary gift, he still would have been all right. He puts it this way: “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances” (4:11). In verse 12, he says it this way: “I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation.”

The important word in both of those verses is this: content. The word Paul uses there was an important word in the Roman society. There was a group called the Stoics who believed that the highest goal of a person’s life was to remove all emotion from your life. We still use that word to describe someone who doesn’t seem to have any reaction to a tragic situation, or even to a happy situation; they’re “stoic,” we say. Emotionless. But these first-century Stoics believed first and foremost in self-sufficiency, that you should be able to reach down within yourself and find the resources within you so that you could endure anything. Their training regimen was something like this: you were to go into your house and break a cup or a household utensil (today we might use a piece of grandma’s china). When it’s broken, you say, “I don’t care.” Then you move on to a horse or a pet and if something happens to it, you say, “I don’t care.” Then you work up to the place where, when your nearest and dearest suffers and dies, you can say, “I don’t care.” This was the hope and goal of the Stoics, to be completely self-sufficient. And don’t we still see their philosophy and attitudes today in our world? Their goal was to be “content” no matter what happens, and that’s the word Paul uses to describe his heart in regard to money and the financial support any group, including the Philippians, sends him (Barclay, The Letters to the Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians, pgs. 84-85; Wright, Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters, pg. 134; Witherington, Friendship and Finances in Philippi, pg. 128).

If you yank that verse out of context, though, you could think that Paul has become a Stoic, that he simply doesn’t care whether people send him help or not, whether he has resources or not. But that’s not his point at all. Paul is seeing life from a very different—in fact, a completely opposite—point of view than the Stoics did. Paul is not talking about self-sufficiency here. he’s talking about God-sufficiency. Here’s the “secret” Paul has learned (it’s in verse 13): “I can do all this through him who gives me strength.” That’s a verse we often take out of context, too; I did for a long time. We like to use it as a self-empowerment, inspirational verse. But when you really read it, you have to ask what the “this” is that the one who gives Paul strength is helping him get through. It’s prison. It’s suffering. It’s being derailed in your mission and having to find a new mission. It’s finding contentment in the midst of a season when very few would think they are content. The “this” is not achieving your dreams. It’s finding a sense of satisfaction even when things are not going your way. Especially when things are not going your way. It’s being thankful for a gift from a friend in the midst of a difficult time. It’s finding peace when there is too much month left at the end of the money, believing that God will provide even when every bit of evidence seems to point to a different conclusion. That’s the “this.” And Paul can do “this” because God is giving him strength. He’s given up relying on himself to find the resources to get through “this.” Instead, he’s allowing God’s wisdom to be the guiding force in his life. That’s wisdom. That’s what the world needs now.

Sometimes you have to learn this the hard way. I know we live in a culture where children expect to start their independent lives at the same financial standard of living where they’ve been all of their lives, with little to no understanding of how their family got to that point. And Cathy and I were no different. We got married and assumed things would just go on as they had. Then we moved to Asbury so I could attend seminary, and we found financial reality hitting us in the face. Cathy took a job in Lexington, and then one day it was suddenly gone. Downsized or something like that; I’m not sure we ever really knew what had happened. I was working very part time (work/study) and she suddenly had no income. There were still seminary bills to pay, we had an old car that seemed to need constant repairs, and we didn’t really know what was coming next. Thankfully, God provided a new job for Cathy, but more than that, we found we had to begin to trust God to provide for what was needed. We had to trust in his wisdom rather than our own. And for us, that included beginning to tithe. I’ll have more to say about this in a few weeks, but basically a tithe is giving ten percent of your income back to God, usually through the local church. It didn’t make any sense from a practical standpoint to give away ten percent when we didn’t really have much to begin with. I mean, our big date night every other week was going with another couple to MegaMarket in Lexington to shop for groceries. And we ate out on that night; our “big splurge” was to go to Fazoli’s. But I will tell you that as we begin to lean on God’s wisdom rather than ours, as we put him first in our financial decisions, we found we always had enough. We didn’t always have everything we wanted, but we had what we needed, even when it meant standing in line at the seminary student services office for commodities. We had what we needed. I told someone at one point that it didn’t make sense on paper, but God always provided.

Paul found the same thing. He was content with what he had and found that God provided when he needed something. “I am amply supplied,” he says. The offering from the Philippians was “a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God” (4:18). The Philippians, he is saying, have been obedient to respond in the way God would have them respond, and therefore, even more important than the actual gift they have given is the fact that they have listened to and relied on God’s wisdom. Because of that stance, because of that change in their heart, Paul can assure them, “My God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus” (4:19).

Now, what we’re going to explore in the next few weeks is no “health and wealth, name-it-and-claim-it” Gospel. That’s no Gospel anyway, certainly not a Biblical Gospel. God does not promise to give us whatever we ask for. He doesn’t promise to meet all of our wants. He promises to meet our needs. We often have trouble deciding what is a need and a want. Steve Jobs is famous for saying, “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” When the first iPod came out, I couldn’t imagine why I would ever want one of those; within the next two models, it moved onto my “need” list. It’s the job of good marketers to turn our desires into  needs, and out of that comes the unBiblical idea that God will give us whatever we want—because didn’t Jesus say, “You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it” (John 14:13)? Well, yes, he did, but that verse again needs its context. Jesus is on the way to the cross; he’s living out the example of being obedient to the Father’s will. In the Garden of Gethsemane, he will ask the Father to remove the cross from the game plan and God the Father will answer, “No.” Jesus is not promising us cars, wealth and accumulations. He’s reminding us that as we rely on God’s wisdom, as we turn every aspect of our lives, including our financial lives, over to God’s control, God will in turn supply what we need. Not what we want. What we need. Not that we can’t have some of our wants. The question we have to ask whenever we approach such a situation is this: what is God’s wisdom in all of this? Am I trusting in him to lead me or just my own understanding?

So how do we get wisdom? How do we allow God’s wisdom to begin to infiltrate our lives? First of all, we have to remember that wisdom—true wisdom—begins with God and not with us. Proverbs 9:10 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” Reverence for God, a right relationship with God is the beginning of wisdom. Not self-sufficiency. Not self-understanding. Not figuring it all out by ourselves. Fear of the Lord—that’s where wisdom begins. The word for “fear” appears 370 times in the Old Testament, and it can also be translated as “awe, wonder, amazement.” In other words, it’s seeing ourselves in right relationship to God. He is God. He is the creator. He is the one who can write the rules for life because he made life itself. He is God, I am not. Do you see how that begins to change our perspective, our understanding? When we grab ahold of this truth, it changes everything. If you don’t have a relationship with Jesus, you can’t grab hold of God’s wisdom because it begins as we realize who we are in relation to him.

But let’s also not rush past the word “fear,” because sometimes we need a good, healthy dose of fear to be able to do what is right (Harnish 24-28). We try to instill a fear of the hot stove into our kids so that they don’t touch it and burn themselves. We instill a sense of fear of the road that’s outside so that they know not to go out where the cars are zooming by. A healthy fear can open our eyes and shake us out of our complacency. When the last recession hit our economy, there was a lot of fear—healthy, in many ways, because such an event should have shaken us up and caused us to change our spending habits. (Sadly, it appears that did not happen across the board.)

That leads us to think about the second piece on the path to wisdom, which is this: true wisdom leads to life. Proverbs often reminds us that some of the most important choices we have to make is not between what is good and evil but between what is wise and what is foolish, between what leads to life and what leads to death. Think back again to the last time our economy went way down, and how there were people who took their own lives rather than face the consequences of their choice and decisions. But even beyond that drastic and irreversible step are the times when we’ve made bad choices that leaned on our own understanding and led to a disaster in our family’s life or in our own lives or even perhaps for those we might employ. Biblical wisdom calls us to trust in a God who can order our financial lives with Jesus at the center so that we can live well in every area of our lives. Biblical wisdom leads us to the kind of life that says, “I can do all this (endure anything) through him who gives me strength” (4:13). Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be talking about some specific Biblical principles that will lead us toward life rather than death (Harnish 32-35).

And that leads us to the final piece for this morning: wisdom must be passed on to the next generation. A little over a week ago, most of our staff went to a day-long workshop on family, youth and children’s ministry, and at the beginning, they gave a pop quiz to anyone under 21. And by “pop,” I mean “pop culture.” The questions about the movie Frozen they got right off the bat. But the things that went back any further than their lifetime—things that were important to my generation, for instance—they had no clue about. And the speaker, Reggie Joiner, turned to us in the crowd and said, “You’ve failed to pass along important things!” Of course, his point was that we do, in fact, often fail to pass along the most important things. Certainly “faith” is at the top of that list, but right under that should be what wisdom looks like, especially in this world of handling finances. A couple of years ago, our son, Christopher, got his first job and so we helped him open a bank account. They asked him if he wanted a debit card, and Cathy was understandably nervous. What if he overdraws the account? What if he messes up his account? My response (in a rare wise moment) was this: better he mess up now when he has a safety net in us than when he’s on his own. Better he learn now while we are there to teach him. And he’s done fine, but so often the next generation is left to flounder and figure it out on their own. We can’t do that and survive as a culture. Wisdom, Biblical wisdom, was always passed on to the next generation, and we must do the same. That’s why I believe this series of sermons is an important one for families to hear together, especially teens and parents, and more than just hearing, to discuss together. Take the questions in the bulletin, talk about them over lunch and in the days to come. Moms and Dads, don’t fail to pass on what you have learned. Be like the author of Proverbs, who said, “Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching” (1:8). Same goes for daughters, too (cf. Harnish 28-31).

What the world needs now, more than ever, is wisdom, Biblical wisdom, Godly wisdom that will lead us to plan and live lives that honor God and bless other people. That’s what we’re going to be seeking in the next few weeks, but for this week, be praying for wisdom. See yourself in right relation to God—fear the Lord. Seek the life that truly is life—life that is found by listening to God’s wisdom. And pass on what you have learned to the next generation. We want God’s best for us and for the world, so let’s seek what we need most: the gift of wisdom. For that, let’s pray.