Sermon Transcript

0:00:14.0

It is becoming a growing practice in churches like ours to no longer pass the offering plate.  Now, before you break out in rapturous applause, before some of you say, “Pastor, it’s about time.  I’m tired of the church getting after my money,” I get it.  I understand the pushback.  I understand there have been some abuses, maybe, in some places in the body of Christ where some have gone to an extreme.  And I get all of that.  But let me tell you why my heart is grieved by this growing practice in churches like ours.  It’s simply this- the giving back to God is as much an act of worship as anything else we do.  Let me say that again.  Giving back to God is as much an act of worship as anything else we do.

0:01:13.9

We’re in this series of messages called “True Worship.”  And we started a few weeks ago at the base of Mount Sinai where Moses brought down the Ten Commandments.  And we didn’t look at all ten.  We looked at the two commandments of worship, the first two.  And then we talked about true worshippers from John 4.  We talked about the transformed worshipper, Romans 12.  Last time we were together we talked about what?  Do you remember?  The ruined worshipper.  That’s right.  The ruined worshipper in Isaiah 6.  But today I want to talk to you about the content worshipper.  It’s my contention that we’ll never be true worshippers as long as things and material possessions clutter up our heart more than God does.  You see, Jesus made money and the things that money can buy the heart of the matter when He said, “Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart is also.”  And a couple verses later in Matthew 6 right there in the Sermon on the Mount, he says, “You can’t serve God and money.”  If I could just paraphrase it, you can’t be a true worshipper as long as you’re worshiping money and the things that money can buy.

0:02:32.7

Now, I understand we live in a digital age and we’re moving toward almost a cashless society.  And that’s why some churches no longer pass the offering plate in the worship service because most of their people are now giving digitally and online.  And we have many, many ways that we encourage people to give.  Not just the offering plate, but we have offering boxes, and we have online giving.  We have an app.  You can mail it in.  You know, all those kinds of ways.  We want to make it as convenient as possible.  And maybe there will come a time where the vast majority of people are using digital options and we do things a little bit differently in a worship service.  But we’ll never take out that moment where we’re reminded that when we give back to God, it’s an act of worship.  It’s a sacred trust.  And it’s a reminder that God owns it all and we are but stewards.  It’s a reminder that where our treasure, that’s where our heart is.  It’s a reminder that God doesn’t want something from us- He wants something for us.  And it’s an important thing to remember that, yes, the blessings that flow into your life when you give back to God as an act of worship, those blessings are well-documented in the scripture.

0:03:53.9

Now, I understand the excesses.  I understand the abuses.  I understand colleagues of mine, so-called preachers who devolve into a prosperity gospel, which is another gospel all together.  It’s not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.  It’s the “get rich quick” or the “get rich by giving to God” kind of gospel.  I reject that wholeheartedly.  But you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  You don’t want to ignore the scriptures well-documentation about the blessing that flows into our lives when we give back to God as an act of worship.  I call this biblical economics.  And God operates on a completely different economic system.

0:04:38.0

For example, Proverbs 3:9-10.  It says, “Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the first fruits of all your produce.  Then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.”  Now, you probably don’t have fruits, and you’re maybe not a farmer.  This was an agrarian society that the writer of Proverbs was writing to.  But you can easily make that transition.  You honor the Lord with your wealth by putting Him first in your finances.  If you’re a farmer, that means the first cut of the harvest, the first of your produce was given to God as an act of worship, as a way of honoring Him.  And if you honor God, guess what?  He honors you in return.  Then, only then “your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.”

0:05:33.2

Malachi 3:10 is another one of places where the blessings that flow into our life when we give back to God are well-documented.  “‘Bring the full tithe not the storehouse that there maybe food in my house, and thereby put me to the test,’ says the Lord of hosts, ‘if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.’”  What an amazing thing that God says here.  It’s as though He is putting His own character on the line here.  He says, “If you don’t trust Me enough with your finances to bring a tithe, a tenth of your income to Me,”—I say as a starting point in our giving—“if you don’t trust Me, then put me to the test.”  It’s the only place in scripture where God Almighty says, “Test Me.  And just see if I won’t open up the windows of heaven and pour out a blessing to you.  You won’t even be able to contain it.”  “Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man the things that God has prepared for those who love Him.”  And we can hardly imagine in our minds the blessings that God has for us.  It’s not just the financial blessing, but that’s part of it.  He’ll never leave you out in the cold because you honored Him first.  He’ll always take care of you.

0:06:53.9

Luke 6:38, Jesus says—listen to this—“Give and it will be given to you.  Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over will be put into your lap.  For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.”  The New Living Translation smoothes out that last line a little bit and says it this way- “The amount you give will determined the amount you get back.”  These are the words of Jesus.  And this could apply to your time, to your talent and to your treasure.  Give and it shall be given to you.

0:07:31.7

Let me just talk about it in the area of time a little bit.  Some things that I’ve experienced over the years.  I budget 20 hours a week for sermon preparation.  My staff knows that.  The elders know that.  You look on my calendar.  Twenty hours a week throughout the week is budgeted to be before the Lord to prepare for Sunday morning.  Do I always need that much time?  No, but it’s budgeted.  And I don’t let much of anything creep into that time.  I schedule around it.  But every once in awhile some things that are justifiably there that would creep into that time do so.  And I get down to the end of the week, and I don’t have 20 hours to prepare.  But these other things that crept in, emergencies or whatever they might be, I have found the Lord multiplying my time when I gave time to these things that were really emergencies and needed to be attended to.  And what would normally take me 15-20 hours to put together, He whips together in 3-4 hours.  I’ve seen Him multiply that.  It’s not the norm.  It’s not the way I always want to prepare.  I don’t want to be the pastor who is preparing the Saturday night specials, you know, that you don’t start preparing until Saturday night.  No, I don’t want to do that and presume upon the Lord.  But in those times when I’ve had to give my time in a different direction, the Lord multiplies it.  I’ve seen it happen throughout my ministry.

0:08:55.7

He does that in the area of your finances, too.  “Give, and it will be given to you.  Good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over.”  It’s an amazing promise.  It’s called the law of reciprocity or the principle of reciprocity.  And the apostle Paul echoes this idea in 2 Corinthians 9:6 when he says, “The point is this…”  He is summarizing chapters 8 and 9.  He says, “The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.”

0:09:36.2

I did my doctoral research on financial stewardship in the local church.  It’s been a passion of mine for years, the idea of putting God first in our finances and all of that.  I did my undergraduate degree in financial planning, so it was natural for me to kind of move in this direction.  But I spent a lot of time in my doctoral research in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9 because it’s the largest section of scripture in the New Testament given to financial stewardship and giving.  And want Paul is doing, what’s he’s addressing to the Corinthian church at that time is an offering for the poor that he was collecting for the poor in Jerusalem.  And he was going around to all the churches that he had planted, including the church in Corinth, and saying, “I want you to give to this.”  And he used as a motivation an example among the Macedonian churches he said were poor.  They didn’t have two nickels to rub together, but they were the first to participate in this offering for the poor in Jerusalem.  And they gave generously and willingly and cheerfully.  Paul comes to the Corinthians and says, “You need to follow their example.”  And toward the end of his dissertation there, he says, “The point is this.  Whoever sows sparingly reaps sparingly; whoever sows generously reaps generously.”

0:10:58.8

He uses the farming analogy here.  Imagine if you will the farmer who has bags of seed in his barn.  And he says, “You know, I don’t know that I want to toss it out there in the field.  Maybe I’ll just use half a bag here.”  And he just scatters a little seed here and a little seed there because he’s afraid to give away too much of his seed.  Well, what kind of harvest do you think he’s going to expect when harvesttime comes?  Paul says…in the context of a financial discussion about our giving, he uses this farming analogy to say, “Whoever sows sparingly reaps sparingly; whoever sows generously reaps generously.”

0:11:41.3

Now, that’s not Wall Street economics.  Nobody on Wall Street will tell you, “Give it away, and it’ll come back to you.”  No, that’s biblical economics.  There’s an old limerick that says, “There once was a man, some thought him made; the more he gave the more he had.”  And it’s true.  It’s true when it comes to biblical economics.  Could somebody look inside the worshipper’s heart that you have and inside your financial life and says, “You are the craziest person in the world to give that much money away to the Lord.  Is that even possible?”  Well, there once was a man, some thought him mad; the more he gave the more he had because he honored the Lord with his wealth.  And I just go through that as a reminder, again, that the blessings that flow into your life and mine when we give back to God as an act of worship are well-documented in scripture.  It’s well-documented in scripture.  And for that reason we’ll always have a time in our worship gatherings where we worship God in our giving.

0:12:51.9

Now, what does that have to do with being true worshippers?  Well, I really do believe that we’ll never be true worshippers without being content worshippers.  And we’ll never be generous givers without being content worshippers.  And that brings us back to Proverbs 30:7-9.  To a section of scripture that was written by a little-known guy named Agur. And he is responsible under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit for penning all 33 verses of Proverbs 30.  And in verses 7-9 we have a prayer, the prayer of Agur.  Now, some of you have heard of the prayer of Jabez.  How many of you have heard of the prayer of Jabez?  A wonderful prayer.  Just a few words, a few sentences tucked away in the Old Testament book of 2 Chronicles, I believe.  I doubt that many of you know the prayer of Agur.  And I doubt that any book written about the prayer of Agur is going to become a bestseller.

0:13:54.4

But here is what Agur says, beginning in verse 7.  And by the way, this is the only prayer recorded in the book of Proverbs.  He says, “Two things I ask of you, Lord; do not refuse me before I die: Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.”  To me, Agur is a content worshipper.  Wherever he learned the spiritual disciples of contentment, he has learned it here.  He is praying for it.  And do you hear the passion in his voice at the beginning there?  “Two things I ask of you, Lord.”  Two things.  He has boiled it down to two things he wants from the Lord.  And “Lord, You’ve got to do this before I die.”  This was a life or death kind of thing for him.  He prays for two things.

0:14:57.3

First, he prays for integrity.  He says, “Keep falsehood and lies far from me.”  You ever feel like praying a prayer like that in the world in which we live that is so full of sometimes blatant lies from politicians or leaders or others in our country?  Or maybe in your personal interactions with people who look you straight in the eye and tell a bold-faced lie.  The lies, deceptions, even the falsities that come from the advertising world of Madison Avenue that is always trying to trick you into buying something or trading something or getting a new this or a new that.  Promising things that they cannot deliver.  Over-promising and under-delivering.  I don’t know exactly what kind of lies that Agur had enough of in his world, but he’s just saying, “Lord, keep me far from that.  I want to build my life on the foundation of integrity.” Including financial integrity, because he quickly moves into the financial realm of his life by saying, “Give me neither poverty nor riches.”  But he’s looking for some financial integrity, let’s say.

0:16:16.9

But secondly, he prays not just for integrity, but he also prays for contentment.  Let’s go back and see it again.  “Give me neither poverty nor riches.”  Now, who prays that?  Honestly, in the quietness of your own heart, don’t you want a little bit more?  But Agur seems to have drawn a line in his life, and he is wiling to say, “You know, enough is enough.”  Where is that line for you, where enough is enough?  Oh, you can sit down with a financial planner, and you can plan out your future.  And you can run all kinds of scenarios.  And that’s an important thing to do.  We could go into the pages of scripture and talk about how important it is to plan for your future.  And even Joseph saw 7 years of famine coming and had 7 years of storing up.  And all of those kinds of principles in scripture.  But when is enough, enough?  How much do you really need to feel secure?  That’s really what it’s all about.  Or to feel better than your neighbors, or to keep up with the Joneses or the Smiths or the Browns.

0:17:30.4

Agur says, “Give me neither poverty nor riches.”  He says, “But give me only my daily bread.”  Really, what he’s asking for is a middle-class life, and he’s fine with that.  He doesn’t need anything more than that.  He knows that there will always be people who have more, but he’s not trying to keep up with the Joneses or the Smith or the Browns or whoever it might be.  There is a contentment in his heart.  Didn’t Jesus tell us to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven…Give us this day our daily bread”?

0:18:10.3

Hold your place here in Proverbs and turn with me to Psalm 37.  Psalm 37, and the psalmist says these words in verse 25, “I have been young, and now I am old.  Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread.” Here is the promise you can go to the bank on in scripture.  You put God first in your finances, you honor Him with your wealth, you give as an act of worship from a content heart- God will take care of you.  You’ll never have to beg for bread.  “Give me neither poverty nor wealth but give me only my (0:19:00.0) daily bread.”  There is a contentment there.

0:19:03.9

He says, “Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’”  That’s the danger of abundance, isn’t it?  There are two tests in life.  There is the test of adversity.  We all understand the test of adversity.  There is also the test of prosperity.  Have you become so prosperous that you’re just not as dependent on the Lord as you used to be?  Your prayers are not as powerful and as dependent upon the Lord because you’ve reached a certain level of prosperity.  And you’ve done the calculations.  You’ve looked out into the future, and if your investments just grow…you’re just fine.  “I think we’re going to make it, honey.” And that sense of dependence on the Lord has gone away.  You’ve failed the test of prosperity.

0:19:50.6

He says, “Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.”  (0:20:00.1) Agur didn’t want to have to go to the soup kitchen to find his daily meal, but he didn’t want soup du jour either.  He was content somewhere in the middle.  “Lord, just don’t give me a reason to not be dependent upon You anymore and to walk on my knees in humble, dependent worship upon You.  But don’t put me in a position where I question Your goodness and whether You can take care of me.”  I’d say it’s the attitude of a content person.

0:20:38.1

There is an old comedy film called Cool Runnings, and it’s about the first Jamaican bobsled team to represent their country in the Olympics.  The actor John Candy, a late comedian actor, was the starring role in it.  And he plays a former American gold medalist who becomes the coach of the Jamaican team.  In fact, they respect him so much because he won a gold medal in the bobsled as an American that when he becomes the coach of the Jamaican team, they affectionately refer to him as “the sled god.”  I like that.  Well, later in the story the coach’s dark history comes out.  Apparently in the Olympics that he participated in and following his gold medal performance, the coach apparently, it was learned, broke the rules.  And he weighted his sled, giving it a strategic advantage and was able to go faster.  And that’s who he won the gold.  Well, he brought disgrace upon himself and upon the American team, so the story goes in the film.  When asked by the Jamaicans why he cheated, the coach said, “I had to win.  I learned something.  If you’re not happy without a gold medal, you won’t be happy with one.”  He had never found that place of contentment in his life.

0:22:00.0

True happiness and contentment was an elusive virtue for the sled god, you might say, as it is for so many people in our world today.  To say that most Americans are lacking in contentment is a grand and glorious understatement.  Our Madison Avenue culture programs us to compete and achieve and increase and reach for more of everything in life, to buy new, to get more, to trade up.  And these are messages that bombard us every day from the advertising world.  Keeping up with the Joneses or the Smiths or the Browns, it’s become a national pastime and part of what it means to chase the American dream.

0:22:39.3

But all of that clutter in our heart crowds out the contentment that is required to be a true worshipper of God.  Remember, Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart is,” and, “You can’t worship God and money at the same time.”  Contentment is about as appealing to adults as eating your vegetables is for a child.  And that’s kind of how we come at a subject like this.  The great novelist John Steinbeck wrote a book appropriately titled The Winter of Our Discontent.  And every time I think about that title, I think how strange that he didn’t call it The Springs of Our Discontent or The Summer of Our Discontent.  Instead he chose the season of the year that best represents the condition of our heart when we lack contentment.  In the absence of contentment, it’s winter, the frostiest season of the year, that blankets our being.  Siberia, we might say, smothers our soul.  And discontent makes our heart grow colder toward God, not warmer, in worship.  And the bobsled coach in Cool Runnings was living in Steinbeck’s winter of discontent.

0:23:52.4

What is contentment?  Well, the Puritan writer Jeremiah Burroughs said it this way.  Listen to this.  He says, “Christian contentment is that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit which freely submits to and delights in God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition.”  Sounds like a Puritan, doesn’t it?  And it sounds a little heady and a little intellectual.  Maybe another one from a guy named Bill Gothard helps.  He says, “Contentment is realizing that God has already given me everything I need for my present happiness.”  That’s pretty good.  “Contentment is realizing that God has already given me everything I need for my present happiness.”  Gothard goes to say, “Contentment is understanding that if I am not satisfied with what I have, I will never be satisfied with what I want.”

0:24:43.3

I kind of get the impression that the psalmist King David understood this, because he penned this psalm that we all love, the most beloved psalm in the psalter, Psalm 23.  And David begins by saying, “The Lord is my shepherd,”—finish it with me—“I shall not want.”  How is your "wanter”?  Everybody has a wanter.  I want this.  I want that.  Is the deepest desire of your heart a closer, more intimate relationship with God?  Is your wanter all about becoming a true worshipper?  Or is your wanter all about the next thing you buy or you’re saving for?  Our wanter can get out of whack if we let it.  And it can crowd out that place where we worship God in spirit and in truth.  The psalmist said, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”  There is a contentment there.  He has satisfied everything that my soul desires, my good Shepherd has.

0:25:54.4

The apostle Paul found contentment in some of the strangest places.  In his second letter to the Corinthians he writes, “Therefore I am well content with,”—listen to this—“weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties for Christ’s sake.  For when I am weak, then I am strong.”  What a list of things for somebody to be content with.  We probably wouldn’t put them on our list.  Paul also encouraged Timothy, his young protégé in the ministry, in 1 Timothy 6.  He says, “But godliness with contentment is great gain.  For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it.  But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.”  The writer of Hebrews adds, Hebrews 13:5, “Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you, and never will I forsake you.’”

0:26:52.0

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth saying again.  True financial freedom is free of debt, free from the love of money—right there—free to give generously, and free to have fun.  That’s true financial freedom.  Money is not the root of all evil, but the Bible says the love of money and the things that money can buy us, that’s the root of all kinds of evil.

0:27:14.5

Paul wrote to the Philippians—listen to this—“I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances.”  He says, “I’ve had to learn this.”  That word “learn” suggests that contentment is not natural to us.  We are unnaturally in our fallen state in the winter of discontent.  And Paul says, “But I have learned in whatever circumstance I am to be content.”  He suggests that it was through the various circumstances of life that God taught him how to be content in whatever circumstance.  He goes on to say, “Sometimes I prosper.  Sometimes I have more than I needed, and I learned through the test of prosperity how to be content.  Then were times of adversity in my life,” he says.  “And I learned through even times of adversity how to be content.”  Through the laboratory of life he learned contentment.  Are you learning contentment in whatever circumstances the Lord has you in right now?

0:28:22.2

I remember when I was in high school, I took a chemistry class.  My chemistry teacher, Mr. Buzzard…yes, that was his name.  He actually had a beak that kind of resembled a buzzard, and we had fun with that in high school.  But he was a great chemistry teacher.  And on Monday, Wednesday and Friday he lectured.  And then on Tuesday and Thursday we had a lab.  And I learned back then that if you’re going to learn chemistry, you learn some things through the lecture, you learn other things through the lab.  And so it is with much in the Christian life.  And so it is with learning contentment.  We can stand up here and lecture and sermonize all day long about the importance of learning contentment, but it’s really the laboratory of life that is going to seal the deal for us.  And that’s what Paul emphasizes here.  He says, “In whatever circumstances I was in, those were the circumstances—sometimes of prosperity, sometimes of adversity—that I learned,” he said, “to be content.”  And so it is with us.

0:29:27.7

One other quick verse of scripture on contentment.  Luke 3:14. These are the words of John the Baptizer.  I love John the Baptist.  He is just one of my favorite characters in the Bible, sort of an odd-for-God guy.  But he was always pointing people to Jesus.  And he said to a group of soldiers, some Roman soldiers who asked him, “What shall we do?  You say we’re to follow this Jesus.  What do you want us to do?”  And John laid out in the context there some simple ethics, ways to live life.  And he touches on their finances.  And he said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation.  And be content with your wages.”  You see, the soldiers were all about threats and false accusations.  Remember Agur, who says, “Keep falsehood and lies far from me.”  And here John is telling these soldiers, “Don’t do that.  Don’t act that way.  That’s not becoming of a follower of Jesus or a follower of mine, for that matter.  And be content with your wages.”

0:30:46.5

Now, contentment doesn’t mean that you don’t have any goals, you don’t have any dreams, you don’t have any aspirations that you’re striving toward.  I’m a goal-setting person.  I have dreams, and I’ve had them for years.  There was a time though where I wasn’t very content, and my goals reflected it.  A couple years out of college I remember I had a good job out of college.  And I was kind of on the “fake it ‘til you make it” plan.  And I thought I’d go out there and buy a new car.  I guess when you drive a Chevy Vega for 7 years—3 years in high school and 4 years in college—your wanter gets pointed in a different direction.  And I bought a BMW, 24 years old.  What BMW stood for me at that time was “Broke My Wallet.”  I didn’t know that, but I came to learn that.  Because I also came to learn through some adverse circumstances that involved the time that I crashed my BMW that I was on the “fake it ‘til you make it” plan, spending money I didn’t have to buy things I couldn’t afford to impress people who really didn’t care.  And the Lord had to teach me through that.

0:31:54.4

I’m at a stage in life now where I could probably afford to buy one, but I drive a Toyota.  But here is what I learned.  I learned through those hard times and through some good times to be content.  It wasn’t always that way.  I still have goals, and I have dreams just like the apostle Paul.  The apostle Paul was a goal-setting man.  He had dreams.  He had aspirations.  There was a time that his highest aspiration was to become the Pharisee of Pharisees, to climb that religious ladder.  And he climbed that ladder, and he got to the top.  He was a Pharisee of Pharisees.  He came from the tribe of Benjamin.  He lays out his resume in his letter to the Philippians, and he says, “I had everything, and then I met Jesus Christ.”  And he says, “I took all of that, and I put it on the dung heap.”  That’s what he says.  He took it over to Mount Trashmore.  That’s where it belongs.  And he says, “Now I press on toward the goal for the high calling of God in Jesus Christ, the upward call of Christ.” 

0:33:09.6

He is still goal oriented.  He is still a “go get ‘em” kind of guy.  But his goals have changed.  His dreams have changed.  They’ve been shaped by kingdom priorities.  And he is content in the material things of life.  “I’ve had more than I need.  I’ve had less than I need.  I’ve learned to be content in all circumstances,” he says.

0:33:33.4

What does this have to do with worship?   We’re talking about being true worshippers.  We’ll never be generous givers, let alone true worshippers, without a measure of contentment in our heart.  God will always bring us back to the foot of the cross where we have to die to certain things.  And one of those is that tendency we have to worship money and the things that money can buy.  Jesus made it the heart of the matter when He said, “Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart will be also.”  And so I think it’s true to say when it comes to giving back to God as an act of worship, God doesn’t want something from you.  He really doesn’t.  He owns the cattle on a thousand hills.  He wants something for you.  He wants to pour Himself and other means of blessings into your life.  But He says, “You can’t worship God and money.”  The greatest antidote to materialism and to greed and envy and keeping up with whomever we’re trying to keep up with…the greatest antidote to that is giving.  Giving to God first.

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I’ve found over the years it’s real hard to be materialistic when I give to God first.  But it resets my priorities.  And in the process, the Lord has given us times of plenty and times of lack, times of prosperity and times of less than that.  And there is a peaceful, satisfied contentment that comes over the heart of the true worshipper in either of those extremes, or even in the place that you are right now, when we’ve learned contentment, when we’ve put God first and everything else in its proper place.  Money can either possess you, or you can possess it.  And you can tell it where its proper place is.  Money isn’t evil.  It’s the love of money that crowds out the heart of a true worshipper and clutters up that place in our heart that rightfully belongs to Jesus and to Jesus alone.

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