Building an Authentic Faith - Possessions

I want to try a little experiment. Think about one thing you own that you really love. Maybe it’s your house or car, maybe it’s a vacation home or boat, maybe it’s a big screen HD TV with Stereo Surround Sound or a new computer, or maybe it’s an antique heirloom that has been passed down from generation to generation. Picture this thing in your mind and now imagine God asking you to sell that this week so that you can give the money to a neighbor who is in danger of foreclosing on their home. Could you do it? Can you even imagine doing it, or does it seem too hard, maybe even impossible? This was exactly what Jesus asked the rich man to do in Mark 10, except that Jesus wasn’t taking the man through a spiritual exercise or experiment, he tells the man to go and sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor. (read Mark 10:17-31)

The rich man comes to Jesus wanting to deepen and develop his faith. Because of his actions, we can see that he genuinely wants to build an authentic and powerful faith. He runs up to Jesus and falls on his knees in front of him. He not only is eager to hear from Jesus but he humbles himself and takes the place of student, on his knees in front of the teacher eager to learn. He wants to be guided, and he wants to know what he has to do to inherit eternal life. I believe this man is sincere and eager to develop his faith and so Jesus starts by outlining some of the basics in a life of faith: do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not lie, honor your father and mother.

All these I have done since I was a boy, the man responds. He’s been a good and faithful person his entire life, he grew up in the church and he has tried to do the right thing and live the right way and honor God in all he does. Again, there is the sense that this man is sincere and that he really wants to live a faithful live and Jesus responds positively to his authentic desire to grow, it says Jesus looks at him and he loves him and Jesus loves him enough to get to the heart of the matter. One thing you lack, Jesus said, go sell everything you have and give the money to the poor – then come follow me. Jesus knows that the one thing keeping this man from a vital faith was his possessions, his wealth, and my fear for many of us today is that the one thing that keeps us from following Jesus with all our heart and soul and mind and strength is our wealth - our possessions. While we strive to follow God’s will and live a life that honors God in all we do, we have a hard time letting go of all the stuff we have accumulated in this world. We have a hard time letting go of our possessions.

Now let me be clear that owning stuff is not bad and the reality of this passage is that if we actually went home today and sold everything we had on e-bay – tomorrow we would all be in need of someone to take care of us. There is simply no way we can sell all our possessions and give everything away without becoming a burden on our family, friends, church or society – so simply giving everything away is not the answer. So what is the answer? The answer lies where it did for the rich man –it lies in our heart – what is our attitude toward our possessions and our wealth? Being a follower of Jesus means that we need to look at our possessions and wealth through the eyes of faith. Following Jesus needs to shape our material lives, not just our spiritual lives, so we need to adopt certain attitudes about our wealth and possessions.

The first thing we need to understand is that everything that we have really does not belong to us – it all belongs to God. Psalm 24:1 says the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. I think this means that the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. All that we have belongs to God, our homes, cars, clothes, mutual funds, Big Screen HD TV’s with Surround Sound, it all belongs to God and we need to begin to look at things from this perspective. We live in a culture that says we own things and our possessions belong to us and we can do with them whatever we want, but what if things really weren’t ours? What if we saw everything as belonging to God? How might our lives change? My first thought is that we might be more open to sharing and using our possessions for God’s glory.

This is the attitude we find in the early church. If we turn to Acts 2 we get a glimpse of what life in the early Christian community was all about, it says the believers were all together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions they gave to anyone as he had need. What allowed them sell their possessions was that they didn’t see their possessions as really belonging to them individually – everything belonged to God and so everything was to be used for God’s purpose and to help God’s people. If we begin to look at our possessions differently then we might begin to use them differently, we might accumulate things differently and we might even let some things go.

So our attitude towards our possessions needs to change: we have to see that it all belongs to God, and then we can’t love our possessions more than we love God. If God were to call us to sell that favorite possession – could we do it? Do we love the item or do we love God? It’s not an easy question. When I thought about the things I love the most – they were family items that had been handed down through generations, they were things that had come from my grandparents. They hold special value for me far beyond money – they hold memories and family traditions – but I still have to ask myself, do I love those things – as wonderful and precious as they are – more than God? This is not an easy issue and the good news for us is that Jesus knows it is not an easy issue.

Go back to the story of the rich man. After Jesus called him to sell all he had and give the money to the poor it says the man went away sad because he had great wealth. He was sad because, for whatever reason, he loved his stuff – just like we do. And as Jesus watches the man walk away he turns to his disciples and says, how hard it is for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. Jesus knows it’s not an easy road for us, he understands, but notice that he also doesn’t change the rules. When the rich man walks away, Jesus doesn’t run after him telling him that he only has to sell half his stuff, or a quarter of it. Jesus doesn’t change the rules, he is firm and he is firm because he knows that this man loves his stuff more than he loves God and Jesus knows that is the bond that has to be broken for our faith to really flourish.

Jesus knows it’s hard for us to wrestle with letting things go in this world because he knows we are creatures of this world and we naturally love the things around us. It’s not that we don’t want to love God more than anything and everything – we do and we strive to – but it’s hard and our love for the things of this world just creeps back in again and again. There are times when, just like the disciples, I think that it’s just not possible for me to love God above everything. There is just no way we can turn off all our feelings toward our possessions and when we finally get to that place of acknowledging that we can’t do it – we begin to find the answer, because the truth is we can’t do it. Jesus said, with man this is impossible, but not with God, all things are possible with God.

The change in attitude, or the change in our hears that is needed when it comes to our possessions has to come from the work of the Holy Spirit. God is the one who needs to shape our hearts. God is the one who can help us let go of our love for the things of this world and gain a new perspective on all our belongings. Remember that it was after the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples that they had everything in common and sold their possessions and gave to those in need. None of that happened without the help of the Holy Spirit and we will never be able to fully change our attitude toward our possessions without the help of God’s Spirit. So if we are struggling to let go of our love for the stuff we have accumulated, then we need to ask God to change our hearts so that we can love him more.

Not only can’t we love our possessions more than God, we also can’t trust in them more than we trust in God. In Luke 12 Jesus tells the story of a man whose crop yielded such a great harvest that he tore down his barns and built bigger ones to hold all his grain and all of his goods. Once he had accumulated this great wealth he relaxed and felt secure for years to come. But then God told him, you fool this very night your life will be demanded from you and what good will all your wealth do? As we have seen in the past few weeks, all that we work to accumulate in this world can be gone in one day’s worth of trading on the stock market. Talk to anyone who has suffered the devastating lose of a fire, or those who lost everything in Hurricane Ike or Katrina. If we trust in the things of this world to meet our needs – we will be lost in the days to come because the things of this world are temporary. So again, what we need to do is re-orient our hearts and minds so that we won’t trust in our own strength, ability and bank accounts to meet our needs but in God and God alone. This radical shift of thinking doesn’t come naturally – again we need God’s help and we need to ask for God’s Spirit to guide us. But we also play a part in the reorienting our lives and one specific thing God calls us to do to help shift our thinking is to work toward tithing.

The word tithe simply means one tenth, or 10% and the idea of tithing comes from the OT where people were to return to God 10% of their harvest or their livestock. It’s not that God needed the grain or the meat, it’s that we need to be able to give because when we give the tithe to God we are saying in a concrete way that we do trust God to meet our needs. If we can’t do this then I’m not sure we can really say it.

I would invite you this week to figure out what percentage of your income you give to God and if it isn’t 10% ask God to show you how to increase the amount you give by 1%. If you give 3% give 4, if you give 4% give 5. If you will make the commitment to grow in this way – God has said he will commit himself to providing and caring for you. Tithing is not a financial issue, it is a faith issue and because tithing is a percentage giving – everyone can do it. If you have a minimum wage job – you can tithe, if you are at the other end of the spectrum – you can tithe. If your income this week dropped dramatically because of the stock market – you can still tithe.

Sometimes in our faith it’s hard to give sure fire concrete examples of how we can build an authentic and vital faith – but here is one. One clear way we can proclaim that everything we have belongs to God is to return to God a percentage of what he has given to us. One way to say we love God more than the things of this world is to begin to let go of some of the things we own and give them back to God. And one clear way to say that we trust God more than we trust in ourselves and our possessions is to work toward tithing.

Building an authentic and vital faith will have an impact on how we look at our possessions. For many of us this will be the hardest faith issue we will ever deal with, but just because it’s hard doesn’t mean we should start today by taking one step forward. Can we ask God to help change our attitude, to change our heart, and can we ask God to show us how we can change our giving.