Equipped to Serve: Part 2

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of pastoral ministry from 1 Timothy 6:3-21.

Almost two years ago now in a church in the metropolitan Chicago area, a pastor of an evangelical church (a man who had been there seven or eight years after serving in another church for about a dozen years) was dismissed from the ministry. On the one hand, he had been stealing sermons from the Internet. If you want to know where to go, I could tell you of several sites.

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In one sense, reading other sermons isn’t a bad thing. I mean, people have been doing that for years. The sermons get published and then you read them, and you can learn from them. That’s truly a good thing, but on the other hand, this chap was downloading these sermons and repeating them, reading them as if they were his. His illustrations were taken right from these texts. Even personal ones!

There was not only a degree of plagiarism; there was a degree of just plain out and out lying, but worst of all was the fact this meant he was not discharging the ministry he had been called to, for ministers, strictly speaking, are not paid to serve so many pounds for so many sermons, so many pounds for so many burials, so many pounds for so many marriages, so many pounds for so many hours of counseling.

They are rather supported to be freed up to serve, and the freedom to serve entails, as we’ve seen from the first hour, the study of the Word of God so you can teach the Word of God. If, in fact, he is not studying the Word of God so as to be able to teach it, if indeed he is merely functioning as a kind of organic biological tape recorder, passing on somebody else’s recording, then he is not taking the money under honest pretenses.

That is, he is not actually growing in grace and in the knowledge of the Word. He is not studying and becoming a student of the Word, learning how to better handle it. All he’s doing is cherry-picking other people’s sermons. You might as well find out where these sites are because sometimes you can learn some things from them; sometimes, also, you can check some people out.

Sermoncentral.com is probably the biggest site, with something like 80,000 sermons all nicely indexed on the web for topic and season of the year and liturgical expression and biblical text and so on. Some of them aren’t really all that bad, too. What surprised me when this chap’s malfeasance came out is how many bad ones he picked. On the other hand, he was dismissed in part for stealing sermons, but in addition to one or two other things, he had also become addicted to Internet gambling.

It started with just a little bit here and there, but it got worse and worse and worse, and eventually, he refinanced his house when the interest rates came down and refinanced the maximum he could get and blew all of that and cashed in some of his retirement and blew all of that and then ended up embezzling $50,000 worth of the church’s poor fund and a further $20,000 from two women in the church, one of them a widow.

He could do this in part because he was a clever man and was trained as a lawyer, so he set up appropriate dummy corporations, and the money from the poor fund was being channeled allegedly to some housing estate that was helping poor people and so on and so on. In fact, it was all a dummy corporation that came back to his own pocket. This, of course, was not only immoral; it was illegal. Eventually, the police were called in and so forth as well.

Why have I blessed you with this opening story? We are not exempt from temptations in the area of money, not least when the economy is going reasonably well and others are getting wealthy around us. Money can be a sore issue. Moreover, we have to learn how to think about money if we are to teach about money in our local churches.

Some of our churches are quite poor, but some of our churches have some people in it who are really quite wealthy. Unless we have very firm views on these areas, quite apart from the matter of guarding our own hearts, we are not going to be able to handle these things well when we teach in the local church, and these things, too, have a bearing on the vitality of Christian life.

At the risk of oversimplification, the church of Jesus Christ has regularly gone from one extreme to the other of error. One side is the kind of health, wealth, and, prosperity gospel side. After all, you’re a child of the King. You should be living like a king. Doesn’t God bless Old Testament saints with lots and lots of sheep and lots and lots of cows and lots and lots of donkeys and things?

The modern equivalent is several cars in your garage and decent retirement benefits. After all, there’s seed faith, isn’t there? You’ve sort of given some money and God blesses you. He’s not going to rob anybody. Pretty soon, you are encouraging a kind of prosperity gospel. In many parts of the world this is tied, actually, with the perception of missionaries.

In some of the Melanesian Islands, for example, there are various kinds of cargo cults, they’re called. That is, forms of religion where locals have seen that missionaries bring stuff into the country for their own consumption in cargo boats, so if you pray with the right sort of religion and in the name of Jesus and with the right sort of incantations and all the rest, then you can have some cargo coming to you as well. They’re cargo cults. It’s another form of materialism, isn’t it?

The difficulty with this, of course, is that it ignores quite a large swath of biblical texts that warn against consumerism and greed and materialism. Isaiah 5, verse 8: “Woe to those who add house to house and house to house till there is no place in the land for anybody else.” That’s a damning indictment of a certain form of capitalism that excludes all the little people, isn’t it?

Or Amos warning against the rich people who are withholding the wages of the poor. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, says some very trenchant things. Then all the biblical material on suffering and living with eternity’s values in view. Jesus’ teaching that insists we should be laying up treasures in heaven. There’s another side to all of this sort of extreme, isn’t there?

On the other hand, in the Christian church there has sometimes been a flip-side error, a kind of ideal of utter personal penury. We remember, for example, Jesus’ words to the rich young ruler in Matthew 19: “Go and sell all that you have and give to the poor. Then you shall lay up treasures in heaven.”

We have the books of Richard Foster and so on where we encourage this kind of ideal of living as simply and as poorly as possible. Well, yes, there’s some truth to that, and one shouldn’t forget what Jesus said to the rich young ruler, but one also has to remember he didn’t say the same thing to everybody.

He didn’t say that, for example, to the woman at the well. He didn’t say to her, “Go, sell all that you have, and give to the poor, and you shall have treasures in heaven.” He said to her, “Go and call your husband,” which suggests Jesus has a penchant for putting his finger on the sore spot in each life, and in some lives it might be sex and in other lives it might be consumerism, and there are a lot of other idols, too.

Moreover, there are some very wealthy believers in Scripture who are not despised or marginalized because they are wealthy. What they do with it is another issue. Not only in the Old Testament with a man like Abraham or Job or Solomon but also in the New Testament a man like Philemon, for example, with a household church in his own home precisely because he has the kind of facilities that can do that sort of thing.

The truth of the matter is both of these positions are too narrow. Each is based on a selection of biblical texts and sometimes the distorted reading of them. If you want to read one exposition which, in my judgment, is one of the most balanced in this whole area of understanding biblical teaching, I suggest the work by Craig Blomberg, Neither Poverty Nor Riches. That gets an awful lot in balance and proportion.

One passage on this subject that establishes a great deal of coherence is the one in front of us. At one level, of course, Paul is still dealing with the errors of the false teachers he’s combating in all of three of these Pastoral Epistles. What is so interesting here is how Paul very quickly links corrupt teaching, corrupt behavior, and financial motives.

Look at 6:3. Corrupt teaching. “If anyone teaches false doctrines and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching …” Then corrupt behavior. Verses 4 and 5: “… he is conceited and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions, and constant friction between men of corrupt mind, who have been robbed of the truth and who think …” Corrupt finances. “… who think that godliness is a means to financial gain.”

The church has always faced these things, of course. Sometimes our scramble to get into bigger and bigger and bigger churches is driven, at least in part, by a lust for power or a lust for bigger salaries. Some people are really, really gifted at planting churches, but they don’t want to plant churches all their lives because they’re always small churches, so they find themselves promoted to a larger church where their gifts may not be so good but their income is better.

Of course, it’s inevitably rationalized away. “I now have a bigger sphere of influence and that’s for the cause of Christ.” Well, that might be part of the motive, but it might also be part of the excuse. Our hearts really are quite deceitful in these areas, aren’t they? How do you wrestle with these kinds of things?

In the early second century, a document called the Didache recognized the problem. In those days there were no universities like our universities today. Rather, you had learned people who would start giving public lectures in the marketplace and maybe ultimately hire a certain kind of teaching center, a house of some sort, and then rich people would send their sons (occasionally daughters, but usually sons) to learn from them.

Of course, if you were really good you would attract more students. Then you could charge higher fees, and then you could attract the really rich students. Then you were really important. When a Paul came along and insisted on preaching the gospel without charge.… “Well, clearly he isn’t first class as a teacher because he’s not charging enough money.” The whole cycle of expectations affected things no end.

Then as the church began to grow, we needed itinerant teachers because there were so many brand new Christians in new places where there weren’t enough instructed elders or pastors around, so you’d have to itinerant teachers. Pretty soon, the itinerant teachers who were just like the sort of intellectuals of the day (the roving preachers) would go in and teach Christians for a little while and collect a fat fee.

On the one hand, Paul says those who are ministering the gospel ought to live from the gospel. They should be supported by the Christian church. Of course. On the other hand, now he’s warning against people who are interested in godliness just for their gain. It was the ancient equivalent of televangelists.

The Didache begins to say, “If anybody comes into your area wanting to be a teacher, if he wants to stay for more than three days, chuck him out; if he wants a whole lot more than room and board and wants a fee structure, chuck him out; and if he teaches anything contrary to the blessed gospel of our Savior Jesus Christ, chuck him out.” You can see why the first two are bound up in part with money, because of the expectations of the day.

How are we to understand these things? On the one hand, we’re told by the Pastoral Epistles that God gives us all things richly to enjoy, and on the other hand, we’re told you can use religion as a means to financial gain. How are we to think about these things and how are we to teach them in the church?

In fact, if we get this straight, the principles extend so far out in our ministry that they will change our way of looking at things. We’ll first look at the danger that springs from wanting material things, then secondly, the devotion that springs from wanting eternal things, and finally, the duty that springs from possessing material things.

1. The danger that springs from wanting material things

Verses 6 to 10. Paul begins with contentment. Over against this combination of corrupt financial motive and false teaching and strife in the previous verses, Paul writes, “But godliness with contentment is great gain.” Contentment is a great thing, but it is easy to lose. You can start lusting for more, keeping up with the Jones’. Sometimes it’s bound up with a lust for power or prominence. It can produce a kind of snobbery, can’t it?

It means you always want to get into more influential circles. But let’s be quite frank. Sometimes you can have a kind of inverted snobbery too. “Oh, I’m not like those stupid, aristocratic, up-your-nose white-collar types. I want to be only blue collar.” Then you can have a very kind of inverted snobbery, can’t you? Snobbery is a very tricky thing. This lust for power, money, and prestige all glommed together here can be ever so tricky because our hearts are tricky.

A friend in my youth had a father who had been a Canadian missionary up on the Manchurian border since the late 20s. His name was George Bell. He was there during all the tough years and then was incarcerated by the Japanese during World War II and continued in ministry after the Second World War until he was kicked out under the Mao regime. He was one of the last of the Western missionaries to leave in 1951.

When he came back to Canada, he was a well-known figure. He was supported for so many years. He had come back so seldom but had communicated well with supporters back home. He himself had been in a really poor part of the country and had lived with the people and had planted churches and had been faithful and lived in thought and acted in so many ways just like local Chinese.

Then he came back to Canada to a relatively prosperous country and everybody wanted him to serve in their church. “Okay. If he isn’t going back to some other Chinese part of the world, where will he serve?” He looked around, he looked around, he looked around, and then he took a job as a day laborer with the Canadian National Railways, and he did that for almost three years before he would consider taking responsibility in a church.

The reason, when you asked him, was very simple. Having lived with poverty for such a long time, he was afraid he would be too hard on the Canadians who had so much relative wealth compared with that poverty up on the Manchurian border, reflecting a kind of inverted snobbery. He would be saying, in effect, “I’m much more holy than you are because I’ve been poor all this time. Why are you fat cats driving nice cars?”

This business of poverty and of arrogance and prominence and lust for things is so deceptive, isn’t it? Over against all of that stands contentment. That’s why Paul, in Philippians 4, can say, “I have learned in every circumstance to be content.” He has had to learn contentment when he’s poor, and he has had to learn contentment when he’s well off. Isn’t that remarkable? Some of us learn contentment when we’re poor and then forget there is equal danger of losing contentment when we’re well off, because then there’s always a lust for more. Always more.

A young couple begins and they’re struggling away. Two incomes, barely making ends meet, but eventually they say to themselves, “If only we could scrape together a down payment to have a small two-up, two-down row house that would be terrific. I’ll never want more than that, if we could only have that.”

But pretty soon, of course, the up-down row house has to become a semi-detached and then a detached and then out in the country. There’s always a reason for more, isn’t there? “I mean, there are more kids coming, and it’s my retirement benefit.” They all might have justifiable reasons, but somewhere along the line, this itch for more, this itch for more, this itch for more may reflect a want of contentment.

Paul says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” In the context, where all things in Philippians 4 means, “I can be content in every circumstance,” because his contentment was no longer grounded in circumstance but in God himself. Godliness with contentment is great gain. Here, however, the apostle then proceeds to provide negative reasons to stop lusting after material things.

They are transient. Verse 7: “For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it.” If you’re living with eternity’s values in view, you don’t want to be tied up with a worldview that is circumscribed by only so many years. It reminds us of the Old Testament saints (Hebrews 11) who were looking for a city whose foundations were eternal, whose architect and builder is God. One remembers Job, even when he loses everything. “Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I will depart.”

A few years ago, a Christian I know who works for Bell Research Labs asked me to come in and lead some evangelistic Bible studies. The Bell Research Labs have about 2,000 scientists and an astonishingly high proportion of Nobel laureates. They are some of the best research labs in the world.

This particular friend worked in the switching department doing frontline research. There were 37 adults working on electronic switches, which is a very high order of sophistication. As far as he knew in this group of 37 research scientists, he was the only one who was a Christian. He observed in the noon hour the company had encouraged people to create their clubs. There was a club for philately, stamp collecting. There was a homosexual club. There was a club for all kinds of things, so why couldn’t he start a Bible study club?

Even that showed a nice, creative flair, didn’t it? He invited everybody in his switching unit to come for this six-week Bible club in which I would come in and sort of present the Bible. About 12 or 13 of the 37 showed up every week for six weeks. Within the first few minutes I discovered where they all were. They were biblically and theologically illiterate.

They included one failed Catholic and one failed Lutheran, I think. There was a failed Muslim and a failed Buddhist, and all the rest were raw secularists who didn’t know anything about anything. They didn’t know the Bible had two Testaments. They were bone ignorant, although they were brilliant scientists. The way things proceeded was I provided them with texts, and I went through various bits of the Bible for 20 or 25 minutes. Then it was 20 minutes of free-for-all discussion while they munched their sandwiches. Then they all scattered and went back to work and I drove back to Trinity.

I will not forget the day I was working through parts of the Sermon on the Mount. The game rule was you would hold your questions to the Q&A period. We got about halfway through this. We had an Indian chap who was there. He was the failed Hindu. He suddenly stopped right in the middle. “Excuse me. Do I understand what you’re saying?”

I said, “Well, what do you think I’m saying?” He said, “Well, here in the Bell Labs, most of us have planned out our lives pretty well. We’ve done docs and post-docs. Then we have this post and we’re doing frontline research. We’re publishing pretty constantly. Some of us even have hopes for Nobels. We’re working at the front end of things.

Then we retire at 65, and some of us will continue doing some research on the side or consultancy work. By that time, we’ll probably have grandchildren (most of us). After that, things get a little dim in our expectations and planning, but if I hear you correctly, you’re saying Jesus taught us we shouldn’t plan for 65. We should plan for 30 or 40 billion, or we should plan with eternity in view. But, don’t you see? If we do that it will change everything we do here! Is that what you’re saying?”

Do you see? If you are bound up with the transient, then your values are all transient. That’s what the text says. If all you hope for, if all of your self-identity is bound up with things which are all scheduled to perish, then of course, implicitly you’re signaling the world, you’re signaling your children, you’re signaling your family, you’re signaling your church.… You’re signaling those are the things you value most and you don’t really live with eternity’s values in view.

That’s why godliness with contentment is great gain, for you brought nothing into this world, and you’re not going to take out any more than I’m going to take out. Absolutely nothing. All those wonderful temples in Egypt with Tutankhamen surrounded by gold and riches so he would have lots of things to accompany with him in the great journey.… You might as well rob the grave. It’s not going to do him any good.

Then material blessings (Paul is not naÔve) have certain degrees of necessity bound up with them. Verse 8. It’s not as if we can live so abstemiously we don’t have necessities, we don’t have food or drink or we don’t have clothes. No. “But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.” That’s a generic sort of description for the physical necessities. Paul knows we live bodily existence.

In some parts of the world that means you’re going to have to have transportation. Yes, of course, it does. Certain kinds of jobs you’re going to need certain kinds of things. You’re going to need in certain parts of the world certain kinds of equipment or certain kinds of tools if you’re a mechanic or certain kinds of books if you’re teaching and so forth.

Over against the kinds of necessities of life which do come in degrees and are part of our bodily existence, which Paul elsewhere applauds.… After all, he’s pushing toward a resurrection. Nevertheless, he does not want us to get snookered by a simple desire constantly for more of the merely transient, for that’s the danger of them. Verse 9.

They illicit greed, the incessant cry for more. “People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” Wealth, of course, leads to access to different circles. We know that. If you have more money and move to a different estate because of it, then you have access to a different circle of friends, don’t you?

You might have access to better schools for your children. You have access to better forms of entertainment. It’s not longer down at the pub with your mates. No. Now you’re wanting to go into the city and listen to a concert. Maybe you travel to London and see some of the opera there and so on. Everything changes with more money, and of course, the more you get the more you’re exposed to another higher up. Eventually, more breeds the lust for more and more and more, and not one element in the whole list is intrinsically wicked!

There’s nothing wrong with opera, believe it or not, but on the other hand, somewhere along the line you balance off the fact that this can be a creative expression of people made in the image of God for which you thank God, for which you praise God! You go to an art museum and enjoy all of the signs of creativity that are stamped on human beings made in God’s image. That’s a good thing, and yet, and yet, and yet, after you put it all together, there is also the danger of just constantly wanting more.

It’s a sinkhole that sucks everything in. It’s not that any one bit of it is bad. It’s why, at the end of the day, you can’t simply establish rules here to get things right. “Well, once you get to this salary level, then cut it off there and be content, and then you’ll be fine.” But that’s not the issue. You could be very, very materialistic at that salary level and you could be very, very non-materialistic at twice that salary level depending on what you’re doing with it.

Everything depends on the human heart and what you’re valuing, what you’re idolizing, what you’re pursuing, what you’re passionate about. Do you see? I have been in many, many countries around the world. I won’t tell you which one in my view I think is the most materialistic one I have ever been in, but it’s not one of the Western ones.

It’s a country where there’s a great deal of poverty and a great deal of wealth, but every single conversation I had with just about anybody was bringing up stuff: how to get it, how to move to a country where you could get it, how to get more. The self-identity was bound up entirely with acquisition of stuff. Materialism, thus, is not merely a question of having materials; materialism is bound up with a lust for more, at whatever level you find yourself. It is so, so disgustingly distorted.

Most of us (let us be quite frank) in churches are only going to get to a certain level of income and we’re not going to die rich. That’s the way it is in the ministry, so in one sense, this does not apply to us directly, does it? Although, when it’s a matter of the heart it can apply to us directly, but there is an element where we have to think this through in terms of how we live and how we teach it to our people, too. A very small matter.

There is not a single country in Europe now … not one … where the traditional population has a birthrate of 2.1 or better. A birthrate of 2.1 is what is needed for sustenance of the population at zero growth rate. The highest is 1.9. The lowest is 1.1. That means the economies and cultures of Western Europe, without exception, are in decline because you need more workers to sustain the economy. That’s the way it is.

Especially in countries with large social commitments, you need more workers at the bottom end to pay for the retirement benefits of the people at the top end. That’s also true. Of course, if you don’t have them, then you have to bring in lots and lots of immigrants. With the exception of Spain, which gets a lot of its immigrants from Latin America, most immigrants in Europe nowadays are coming from the Muslim world, which means in France today, 2.5 times more people worship Allah on any weekend than Catholics worship God.

France, if current statistics continue, which you can’t count on, will be majority Muslim by the year 2050. Do not misunderstand what I am saying. I am not a xenophobe. I love multiculturalism. I love the diversity of languages and smells and cultures and all the rest. Do not misunderstand what I am saying here at all.

I am saying this low birth rate is, in part, a function of sheer materialistic greed … we can’t be bothered with kids … so we find rising percentages of the population who are, so-called, DINKs: double income, no kids. So you can have your twice-yearly vacation somewhere or another, but don’t bother me with kids in diapers and smells and teenagers. The combination is lethal.

Where instead is the joy of family living? Of passing on a heritage? Do you not hear the element of selfishness in all of this? It’s huge! We haven’t even begun to address it! I’m not saying we ought to revert to the Middle Ages and aim to have at least 16 kids. I’m not suggesting any of that. I’m not saying there is no place for birth control. I’m not saying any of that. I certainly don’t want to engender a new form of xenophobia. I’m certainly not saying that. I am saying the materialism of our age is engendering another form of selfishness, and we haven’t even begun to address it.

Then we have all kinds of people coming up to retirement. They have enough money to exist. Maybe not well.… In some cases, they might not have very much then the church will have to help them, but in some cases they have quite a lot, thank you very much, and what are they doing with their retirement? We’re living longer. We’re living better.

Why aren’t we challenging the socks off our retired people to go and spend some time working with the poorest of the poor in South Africa or to help look after missionary kids in Pongo Pongo or to commit themselves to visiting the sick and the elderly and the infirmed in Sheffield and so on?

Do you have a right to endless laziness because you have a decent retirement fund? Do Christian principles quit when you turn 62? Somewhere along the line doesn’t there have to be a challenge that asks people what they’re doing with their lives, whether they really believe what Jesus says about living with eternity’s values in view?

2. The devotion that springs from wanting eternal things

 Verses 11 to 16. This is more powerful yet. “But you, man of God, flee from all this.” That is, all the things already described. Instead, what you’re supposed to pursue is not more and more stuff, whether more and more stuff comes to you or not, and sometimes in Paul’s case it does! He openly says so in Philippians, chapter 4. Sometimes he’s abounding with stuff, and sometimes he doesn’t have very much.

No. “You are to pursue, however, righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith.” In other words, the assumption is this one’s going to be a tough one to handle. You’re going to have to work hard at it. It’s going to be a disciplined struggle to maintain these goals, these pursuits. “Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses.”

That’s another Pauline way of saying what Paul elsewhere says, again to the Philippians, “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” knowing full well, of course, that it’s God working in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” So, there? “Work out your salvation …” Here? “Take hold of the eternal life …” The eternal life. The life that is already yours, that you already have but which stretches into eternity. Take hold of it, the very life to which you committed when you confessed Christ publicly.

“In the sight of God, who gives life to everything, and of Jesus Christ, who while testifying before Pontius Pilate made the good confession …” That is, Christ supremely lived with eternity’s values in view when he could insist on the eternality of his kingdom before Pilate himself even when he was heading to the cross. “… keep this command without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ …”

There are several things that need to be said about this passage. The first, of course, is once again it is calling us to maintain an eternal perspective. Just as the previous paragraph warned us against fastening our affections on transient things, the flip side of that, the complementary side of that is, “Keep this command without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

That is, you’re moving toward the end, toward the new heaven and the new earth. You’re living with eternity’s values in view. Do you remember what the teaching of the Lord Jesus is in this respect? It’s a passage, I think, that is sometimes misunderstood. We’re told in the Sermon on the Mount not to lay up treasures for ourselves on earth where moth and rust corrode, where thieves dig through and steal, but to lay treasures up for ourselves in heaven where moth and rust do not corrode, where thieves do not dig through and steal.

Then Jesus adds one line: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” I think that line is often misunderstood. It’s often taken to mean, “Guard your heart, watch your heart, or watch what your heart fastens on because, after all, your heart directs you.” There are biblical texts that say exactly that. “Guard your heart, for out of it are the wellsprings of life,” we read elsewhere.

But this text strictly speaking does not say, “Watch your heart.” It says, “Watch where your treasure is because your heart will go after it.” In other words, if your treasure (your summum bonum as the philosophers say), your best good, the thing you want the most is here, then for all of your Christian theological commitments and your affirmation of eternity and your anticipation formally in creedal statements of the resurrection of the life to come …

For all of that, your heart will actually go after the stuff you really, really cherish, which means part of our mandate as Christians personally and part of our mandate as teachers in the church of the living God is to get people to treasure eternal things. It’s to hold up in front of people the glory of the eternal.

I think we’ve lost a lot of that. Partly, you see, we’ve been so concerned that we not be like those people who are so heavily minded they’re no earthly good that we become so earthly minded we’re good for neither heaven nor earth. For the fact of the matter is, from a Pauline perspective, if you really are heavenly minded it will change how you act on earth.

To be genuinely heavenly minded with treasures over there will affect how you handle your neighbor, it will affect what you do with your money, it will affect how you distribute your time because you’re heavenly minded. Do you see? But if, in fact, you constantly emphasize how Christianity changes how we live here, it changes our dynamics and our relationships and what we do with our families, all of which things are true and none of which I want to diminish in the slightest, but with the eternal dimension lost, sooner or later our hearts get drawn to the transient.

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” One of the entailments of this, then, is one of the important ways we foster godliness, we encourage righteousness in the church, is by making eternal things, heavenly things, gospel things, God-centeredness so attractive that everything else looks shoddy and cheap.

At a time of moral declension, at a time of moral confusion we are all tempted in such times to start imposing more rules in the church, preach more law. Now there is a place for reminding people of the dos and don’ts of Scripture (I’m not denying that either), but if, in fact, the only way you can engender a little less promiscuity, if the only way you can drive people away from a little less self-indulgence, if the only way you can get people away from thinking about material things all the time is by imposing rules and thundering law and threatening judgment, you don’t have a gospel solution. You don’t have a gospel solution.

The gospel solution not only prepares us for eternity but exposes to our views the glory of Christ, the wonder of forgiveness, the sheer delight of the new heaven and the new earth, the prospect of existence with God for all eternity, and delighting in holiness and transparent love with the communion of saints that is made up of men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. Don’t you hunger for that?

In fact, we’re used to thinking about the fact that heaven is made up of people from different tribes and different nations. Did you hear that? Every tongue and tribe and people and nation. People often think when you get to heaven we’re all going to speak the same language and then start having debates about which it will be.

I don’t think we’re going to speak the same language in heaven. The Bible says there will be people there from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. I think we’re going to have a long time to learn a lot of languages. It might take me a million years to master Mandarin, but I’m looking forward to it myself!

The fact of the matter is the diversity itself becomes an intrinsically good thing. God imposes the division of Babel when the unity of the race proceeds to idolatry so that diversity becomes a kind of curse, but fascinatingly, at Pentecost when the curse is removed, he doesn’t give everybody the same language back again; he gives the same message but the multiplicity of tongues.

In the new heaven and the new earth there will be such love and such diversity and such wonder we will learn from each other, we will grow together, and all the time gathered around the throne praising our Redeemer who has bought us at the cost of his own blood. I think it is a mark of grace in this fallen, broken, damned world that God lets people so often die slowly so he detaches them from this world and makes them more and more homesick for heaven.

But it’s a homesickness for heaven we ought to have all through our Christian existence if we have the eyes of faith. That is what breaks addictions. I don’t care whether they’re pornographic addictions or drug addictions or addictions to gambling. I know when you have addictions to Internet gambling you have to do some security things. I know that.

You take away a person’s access to a computer unless he or she is supervised. You have things password protected. You put in the program called Covenant Eyes so every place you go on the web somebody else can check out. Do you want to break your addiction to porn? Are you serious about that? That’s the way you do it. You put in that program and you give two or three other people the key to the program so they can see every site you’ve been to.

Oh, yeah. There are some rules you can impose. There are some things you can do to start breaking addiction to porn, and I’m all for all of them, but at the end of the day, what we need the most is the gospel solution that makes holiness and eternal things so gloriously attractive that porn no longer is attractive; it just looks sleazy and smutty and dirty and, at best, mediocre and transient in passing. It’s no longer attractive. It just becomes degrading.

Do you see? Those are gospel solutions. This text is insisting serious Christian leaders will pursue righteousness, gentleness, forbearance, love, faith. These things become imminently glorious to our eyes. Do you know how it all breaks out at the end? After mentioning this eschatological expectation, “… the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which God will bring about in his own time,” even that reflection makes the apostle break out in this superb doxology.

“God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever.” You cannot live with eternity’s values genuinely in view without massive doxology. You cannot do it.

3. The duty that springs from possessing material things

Verses 17 to 19. There are some people who are going to be rich. There are! They’re not to be despised or thought second-class citizens. The question is.… What should they do with their wealth? Wesley used to say, “Earn all that you can; give away all that you can.”

Some of our people are only good at the first line, and then they need to reread Paul. “Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life.”

In other words, by giving away this treasure you store up for yourselves treasures in heaven. Which treasure is more enduring? Which treasure is more important? I’m speaking now as a foreigner. Forgive me if I stick my foot in it. I think one of the reasons why the level of Christian giving in this country is behind the level of Christian giving in many other countries of similar income is because, as recently as the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the biggest part of Christian giving came from very, very rich people.

The culture was so stratified. All the way back to the time of Whitefield, for example. The Countess of Huntingdon and all the wealth she gave.… This happened again and again and again. Well-to-do families from the aristocracy with lots and lots of money, and ordinary Christians never really learned to be generous. They learned, rather, to give their two-bob, or whatever. I think this is something this country needs to learn again.

We’re commanded to be generous, to figure out how much we can give away. That shouldn’t be a new rule. It shouldn’t be a new imposition. “Unless you’re doing this percentage, then you are threatened with damnation itself!” The danger with that, of course, is once you reach that amount then you start patting yourself on the back for being so generous. The corruptions of our hearts are everywhere, aren’t they?

No, no, no. What we need is an attitude toward eternal things that recognizes, especially those of us who are blessed with more things, how to be generous and give stuff away. Do you want the gospel in Yorkshire Partnership Programme to multiply? One of the things it’s going to need is money. Challenge the socks off people to see that. That’s right. That’s good. That’s living with eternity’s values in view.

In addition to begging God for new leaders who see the field is white unto harvest, we must break down this assumption that if we’ve thrown in our five pounds we’ve done our duty. No, no, no. There are some generous Christians amongst us. I know that. There are some self-sacrificing Christians amongst us. I know that. God be thanked for them, but there’s a sense in which this must be the norm for our churches, mustn’t it? Simply because we live with eternity’s values in view, so we have, then, the duty of those who are blessed with material blessings. Let us pray.

Open our eyes, Lord God, that we too may live with eternity’s perspectives always before us and not be snookered by the transient things of the passing age that will one day all pass away. Yet make us faithful within this age, not people who hate all these material blessings, for indeed they come from your hand, and they are good gifts, and they can be used so wisely. Yet people who are not snookered by them as if the current age is the only age or physical blessings are the only blessings.

Teach us, rather, to be so drawn to our Savior who abandoned the glory of heaven itself that he might become one of us and then die the ignominious death of the sin-bearer on the cross that he might be raised and appointed to the right hand of the Majesty on high where all worship him. Help us as followers in his train to remember if we suffer with him we will also reign with him. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.