Part 4: Christian Leaders and Money

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

“If anyone teaches false doctrines and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching, 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 that godliness is a means to financial gain.

Advertise on TGC

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. 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 a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses.

In the sight of God, who gives life to everything, and of Christ Jesus, who while testifying before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you to keep this command without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which God will bring about in his own time—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. Amen.

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.

Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith. Grace be with you.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

Last summer, a pastor was asked to resign from a church in the metro Chicago area. The reasons were threefold. First, he was swiping his sermons from the Internet. He was simply plagiarizing them. There are some excellent sites if you wish to indulge in this practice, but I have to warn you that sooner or later you’re likely to get caught. Moreover, what you’re doing is not only immoral, but actually illegal if you start taping them in your church and selling them, too.

The second reason was that he had gotten into Internet porn and was making sex dates on the Internet. The third reason was that he had gotten into addictive Internet gambling, and so much so that when he refinanced his house to pay off some of these multiplying debts the money that he made in refinancing with the downturn in the APR, in fact, went into paying debts. So he cashed in his retirement and lost that as well.

Then he managed to embezzle about $50,000 from the church, the fund that was really being used for the protection and provision of the poor and the destitute. Then he managed to embezzle another further $20,000 from two single women in the church, one a widow. All this time, he was preaching.

Now not for a moment am I going to suggest that the Internet has invented a whole new category of sins. You could swipe sermons before the Internet came along. You could get into gambling before the Internet came along. You could get into porn and prostitution before the Internet came along, but you have to say that the Internet has made it all a lot more accessible.

I don’t think I’m likely to be out of bounds if I suggest that even in a small group like this there are probably one or two who are really struggling with Internet porn. Did you know that there’s more money spent per year on porn than on cigarettes, alcohol, and hard drugs combined? The heart of all of this is still more money, isn’t it? How do Christians look at money? How should Christians look at money, even theoretically, let alone practically?

Historically there have been two extremes plus all kinds of intermediary positions. One extreme manifests itself today in the health, wealth, and prosperity gospel. “You’re a child of the King; therefore, you ought to live as a prince! If God will withhold no good thing, and these are good things, well then, God won’t withhold them from you either.”

It is a kind of over-realized eschatology: “Ask in Jesus’ name” and other bits of magic. It’s not only in the West. In many parts of the world, they have something equivalent to what in the isles of Southeast Asia are often called cargo cults where tribals have seen missionaries who have goods arrive on cargo ships, so somehow they get it in their minds that if you become a Christian, then you get cargo. They develop their own home-brand form of prosperity gospel. Cargo cults. That’s one extreme.

Mind you, it’s really hard to square that sort of approach with texts like Isaiah 5. “Woe to those who add house to house until there is no room in the land.” And Amos and Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and Paul on contentment in Philippians 4 and all the emphasis on “If we suffer with him, then we’ll reign with him.” It is really hard to integrate some of those texts, isn’t it?

The other extreme has been the ideal of utter personal penury, exemplified sometimes in those forms of monasticism that swore an oath of personal poverty, often grounded on texts like Matthew, chapter 19, verses 16 and following, the rich young ruler. Jesus said, “Go, sell all that you’ve got. Give to the poor and you shall have treasure in heaven.” That’s what Jesus said.

Of course, you’re going to have to face the difficulty that is not what Jesus regularly says. Jesus seems to say different things to different people depending on what their particular idols were. Moreover, there are some very wealthy believers in the Bible: Abraham; dear ol’ Job; who is called tam, a perfect man; Solomon; and Philemon.

The truth of the matter is that both of these positions are too narrow. Each is based on such a narrow selection of texts, and sometimes a distorted reading of these texts, that at the end of the day you cannot really call such approaches biblically mandated, except in the most superficial sense.

If you’re looking for a book on the broader subject, in my judgment, the best one now available is by Craig Blomberg, Neither Poverty nor Riches in the NSBT series. For the sake of clarity in this regard, I edit the series, but I don’t push every book in that series. There are some books that I think are acceptable but not first class. That one is first class.

One passage on this subject that establishes a great deal of coherence is the one we’ve just read. At one level, of course, Paul is still dealing with the errors of the false teachers. What is so interesting is how quickly Paul links together corrupt teaching, corrupt behavior, and corrupt financial motives. Do you see that?

Verse 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 …” False behavior: “… 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 …” Corrupt financial motives: “… [they] think that godliness is a means to financial gain.”

Now once in a while, at least on the short-term.… I don’t think it works very well in the long-term, but in the short-term, you can get people who are very greedy who are still nominally orthodox. Eventually, a wheel comes off, even on the doctrinal front. Sometimes you get people who are heterodox who are apparently quite self-denying. Yes, you can have lust for power rather than lust for money. Lust for the innovative rather than lust for cash.

Yes, sin arises in many, many, many forms, yet it is not all that uncommon to have strange esoteric distortions, even bizarre interpretations tied finally to strange ethical patterns, and then finally, corrupt fiscal appeals. All you have to do is watch most of the televangelists, but of course, you can find it already in the pages of the New Testament, can’t you?

Dear old Simon Magus, “Give me this power.” I mean, he was really impressed! He made his income from dispensing power. If he could only dispense power like that! Which then elicits Peter’s response, “Your money perish with you.” Which in modern idiom simply means, “To hell with you and your money.” You can’t say it that way because it has different overtones today, but that is exactly what Peter means.

In the second century the problems continued. They didn’t have universities in the ancient world in our sense, though they had a lot of traveling lecturers. These lecturers would then set up in some town or other, either in the market square or eventually in rented accommodations, and they would begin to lecture. The well-to-do families would send their sons, usually, to such lectures in order to be instructed, to give them the basics of rhetoric and the basics of understanding.

If the teacher was really good, then obviously he could charge more, and if he charged more, well then he must be really good. Eventually only the well-to-do could go. It became a sort of an elitist center. Eventually how good you were was bound up at least in part with how much you charged.

That is one of the reasons why Paul gets into so much trouble in 2 Corinthians 10:2–13. He refuses to charge anything when he is preaching the gospel to outsiders because he wants to get across the notion of grace. He accepts money from previous churches as a sort of missionary outreach to the future, but he refuses to receive money from those to whom he is preaching the gospel because he wants to get across the notion that it’s free. Well, that just means dear ol’ Paul can’t be all that hot because he doesn’t charge much. Heck, he wants it free.

I mean, if you don’t pay for it, it’s not worth much, is it? So you see that this notion of lecturing and speaking and taking in money was part of a whole cycle in a culture in the first century which meant that eventually as the church was multiplying and there were little centers everywhere, you began to have bands of roving itinerant preachers, something like the old Methodist circuit. Ideally, that helped a great deal when there were too few well-trained local elders, but it also opens you up to all kinds of charlatans.

This is why early in the second century a document called the Didache starts laying down rules about what to do with these people. If they come and they want to stay for more than 3 days, don’t trust them. If they ask for money, don’t trust them. If they say anything other than the blessed gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, don’t trust them. You can understand exactly what is going on. You have false teachers who are making a nice little bit of cash out of this Christian business.

After all, wasn’t that part of the problem that I described earlier this afternoon in Seoul? As recently as eight or nine years ago, when you did massive assessments in South Korea as to which religious group was most admired, the Protestants came first. Probably 80 to 85 percent of the Protestants there are evangelical, mostly Presbyterian of one sort or another. Protestants came first, Catholics came next, and the Buddhists came last.

This was in part because so many of those Protestant pastors lived through the years of suffering and persecution and violence and had borne up so well. But now (I’m told.… I don’t read Korean, but when I go there my Korean brothers tell me) the polls say it is exactly the reverse. Buddhists get first draw, Catholics next, and Protestants last. You know why? It’s because they are so successful. Their buildings are everywhere; they’re huge.

With this Confucian underlay that I described this afternoon with who is up and who is down, who is in and who is out, many of them are drawing enormous salaries with enormous perks and enjoy tremendous authority. Then all you get is one or two public scandals and that mess, and suddenly you’ve blown the whole reputation.

You realize how easy it is to undo a half-century worth of work because of the love of power and money. In other words, where money is to be made, there you will find charlatans, and there you will find ambiguity in motives. So what does Paul lay down? He establishes three principles: the danger that springs from wanting material things, the devotion that springs from wanting eternal things, and the duty that springs from possessing material things. Let’s take them in that order.

1. The danger that springs from wanting material things

Verses 6–10: “But godliness with contentment is great gain.” Contentment is a precious thing and easy to lose. The lust for more easily trips us up. Sometimes it is lust for more power or more prominence. Sometimes it is simply lust for more goods. You start off, in some cases, dirt poor with a single little walkup flat and very simple things, and you’re happy as kites together in your new marriage.

Pretty soon you’ve got three kids, and they are going off to college and you’re wondering about the second mortgage now that you’ve got to pay college fees and the first car is breaking down. Meanwhile, the Joneses, especially the pastor Joneses who are in a much bigger church and pulling in a lot more money, “Boy, it doesn’t seem very fair when they’ve only got one kid, and that one got a scholarship to college so that they don’t have to pay the kinds of fees that I have to pay!”

Gradually, then, the lust for more comes in and robs us of our contentment. Sometimes it is a kind of inverted snobbery. One of my best friends when I was a young man was himself born in China. His father had been a missionary right up on the Manchurian border and was one of the last to be kicked out once the Communists took power. He was a Canadian. He was kicked out at the end of 1951, one of the last to leave.

He had been up there for 20 or 25 years, a long time. He’d lived right through the Japanese internment in China. They had seen an awful lot of suffering, and they had been, even in the best years, in situations of rather dire poverty. Now he came back to Canada in late 1951, and he was something of a legend in the group of churches that had supported him. It wasn’t long before there were churches that were giving him invitations, “Well, you could come and serve us, and maybe the Lord will send you elsewhere, but come and be our pastor.”

He came and looked around and took a job with the railway as an ordinary worker for two solid years before he accepted a church. The reason, he said, is that if he had come back and taken a church right away, he would have been far, far, far too hard on all those Canadians with so much. That is a kind of inverted snobbery, isn’t it?

You see, the problem in this case was not that he was going to be discontent with having so much; he was going to blame all these people for having so much, and himself feeling guilty because now he had so much as well compared with what he had previously. Contrast this with the wisdom of the apostle Paul in Philippians, chapter 4, “I have learned,” he says, “to be content, whether in plenty or in want.”

There are some people who are discontent in want, and they just want more. There are some people who are discontent when they’ve got plenty, because then they feel they’re guilty, that they shouldn’t have so much. Either way, they’re just discontent, but there is a sense in which the deepest contentment is independent of circumstances. You can be discontent in plenty, and you can be discontent when you’ve got little, but the deepest contentment springs from contentment that is not based on your physical circumstances.

Now we still have to distinguish this contentment from what was often advocated in Paul’s day. One of the strongest worldviews of Paul’s day was the Stoic worldview, and they had certain strong views about contentment. They argued that one of the things that is so hurtful to human beings is that we want stuff all the time, and often we can’t have it. We’re frustrated. We want this, we want that, we want something else, we only get a part of it, and so we are frustrated, and we are discontent.

Therefore, the solution, they said, what produces contentment is the kind of independence of things that means that we don’t want. Stop wanting. If you don’t want, then you can’t be disappointed when you don’t get. In that sense, you see, they valued contentment, but the solution was to stop wanting stuff.

But that is not quite what Paul says. Paul does not say, “Contentment is great gain.” He says, “Godliness with contentment is great gain.” He’s going to unpack what the godliness means down in verses 11 and following. He hasn’t got there yet; that comes in the second point. It is important to see already that Paul is advocating is not mere Stoicism. There must be a center to one’s contentment that is as immutable as God himself, but we’ll come to that point. Meanwhile, he does want to talk through what it means to lust after a whole lot of physical things.

A) Material things are transient.

Verse 7: “For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it.” When I die, I will take out with me absolutely the same amount of material goods as Bill Gates when he dies, which isn’t saying a whale of a lot. The notion is found in the Old Testament as well. Job well understands, “Naked came I from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart.” That is one of the reasons why Jesus himself insists in the Sermon on the Mount, “Don’t store up goods here where moth and rust corrode and thieves dig through and steal. Store up for yourselves things in heaven.”

Material goods eventually fall away or the stock market goes down or you lose them because you die. Something. They are transient, so if all of your contentment, your self-identity, your hope is bound up with things that are as fickle as material goods, then inevitably, sooner or later … it may be later, but it may be sooner … you will, in fact, become discontent. The Patriarchs themselves had to learn to look for a city with foundations whose architect and builder is God.

B) Material goods, material things, come with different degrees of necessity.

Verse 8. This has to be thought through. “But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.” That is, necessities. It’s a bit of a shorthand expression for necessities. Of course, in a more complex society, necessities might embrace a few more things than that. On the other hand, do they necessarily mean moving up to a bigger house or a posher car or making our kids go to the very best of schools? Where does it stop? It just never stops, does it?

C) Material goods elicit greed.

The incessant cry for more. Verse 9: “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.” Wealth often leads not only to a higher comfort zone with more stuff, so that it’s the next level of acquisition that suddenly seems desirable, but it also moves us into different company, into different strata of culture, which different strata often have different rules, different cravings, different distortions, different forms of one-upmanship.

If you’ve spent any time moving around to different strata of society, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The thing that looks like greed for a blue-collar worker on minimum wage will simply be a necessary thing for someone in the middle class. Then you move up a little bit, and now you’re in the higher echelons of management, and if you don’t have a BMW or a Lexus or something, then somehow you’re letting down the side.

Of course, the real question is whether you go for a Jag. It is one thing to have a house, of course, a posh house, but then, do you also need a penthouse flat, a ski chalet in Vail, and on and on and on? “Would you like to join me on my yacht this summer?” Where does it stop? There’s always more, isn’t there?

Then pretty soon, you’ve got to find out where you are on the Forbes 500 … or Forbes 400 … or Forbes 300 … or Forbes 200. There is no end. None. Meanwhile, hear the Word of the Lord. “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”

Most of you know, I’m sure, that I come from a Christian home. My father, indeed, was a pastor, and my mum and dad worked at a time and place in Canada where things were really quite difficult, and they were so far below the poverty line they would have needed field glasses to find it. I can remember all kinds of situations where when I was just a lad my parents literally gathered the family together and prayed that we would have somehow enough for the next meal. I remember that.

But you know what I don’t remember? It’s one of the best things now as I look back on my childhood. I can tell you all things that went wrong, you know. No family is perfect. I could tell you all the things where, in my judgment in retrospect, mistakes were made. Yes, I can tell you those, but you know one of the best things in my heritage? I never knew I was poor.

I graduated from high school and my parents said, “Go to college, but the only way you’re going to get there is either pay for it yourself or win a scholarship. We don’t have the money.” I’d been working after school at Canadian Tire, trying to save some money, and the last thing I did before I went off to college was to go to a second-hand store and buy my first suit.

I went off to university and wore it the first Sunday I was there. People still did stupid things like wearing suits in those days, you understand? Other students laughed at it. That was my first conscious awareness that I came from a poor home that had no clothes taste, no class, and no money. On the one hand, I was feeling sorry for myself. On the other hand, I was feeling, “Thank God for my parents.”

So if you find yourself in a small church and without much money and that sort of thing, for goodness’ sake, pass on the grace of contentment to your kids. Stop whining. In fact, in our family when our children were growing up, if you started whining for anything.… We developed a pattern in our family. If anybody whines about anything in our family, then everybody else says, “All together now, one … two … three.… Awww.” You got that?

Try it in your family. If anybody whines, “All together now, one … two … three.… Awww.” Yes, yes. Self-pity is out, because we look at things from a different perspective, and we’re just beginning to learn in the light of eternity that godliness with contentment is great gain. Well, this is the negative side of things, the danger that springs from wanting material things, and that brings us to the more positive emphasis.

2. The devotion that springs from wanting eternal things

Verses 11–16: “But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness.” You see, it is not enough to turn from sin; there must be something more attractive than what you’re giving up. That is why we are told to overcome evil with good. You don’t beat evil by simply stopping it. You beat evil by overcoming it with good.

So you’re a pastor, and someone comes to you in your church who has a horrible gambling addiction on the Internet, fed by greed but also now habit and fear along with lust and self-loathing and self-promotion … all kinds of sins. Or correspondingly, someone comes to you with just a horrible addiction to pornography on the Internet. What do you do? What do you say?

Let us assume this person wants to break it. This person claims to be a Christian. What do you say? What do you do? Well, of course, there are some negative steps that have to be taken. Yes, I understand that. For instance, in the case of this pastor where I am deeply involved, one of the things that had to be done was to cancel all his credit cards. In their home, the computer became password protected, and only his wife had the password. Then they got rid of the computer entirely.

He is given $5 of pocket money a week. That’s it. Full stop. Now after close to a year, he is permitted to open an account jointly in his name and his wife’s name so that he can learn to start paying bills again, but only she has the password and checks it every week. Every cotton-picking cent is accounted for.

You’ve got to break some bad habits. Yes, I know that’s true. You’ve got to go in and impose some discipline. There are similar things that have to be done with people who are sold out to pornography or all kinds of other vicious sins. All of those things have to be done. I understand that, and it is not nearly enough. All that is is moral turning over a new leaf. It’s important, but it’s not enough.

Somehow what you must do is so kindle afresh love for the Lord Jesus and his gospel and all the glories of transformed living under the authority of the Son of God that everything else just seems tawdry and cheap. I know that’s the gracious, powerful work of the Spirit of God, but it is mediated through teaching such as this, is it not?

“But you, man of God, flee such things …” Yes, yes, yes, there’s a place for fleeing them, for putting up the barriers if you’re too attracted to them. Yes, yes, yes, by all means, but then there are certain things you’ve got to pursue: righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. Yes, yes, we need controls. Yes, yes, but we must be utterly consumed by what is of eternal significance if that which is of merely transient significance is to be seen in its right proportion, and that in this context is what it means to fight the good fight of the faith.

“Fight the good fight of the faith.” Now that expression has already occurred in this book. It’s found in chapter 1, verses 18–20. There, fighting the good fight of faith involved Timothy in confronting false doctrine. Fighting the good fight of the faith meant making sure that he understood what the faith was and confuting those with errors.

But fighting the good fight of the faith also means pursing all that is excellent and ethical conduct. This is fighting the good fight of the faith, too. Pursing love and generosity and gentleness, because these things, for Christ’s sake, are attractive. They are lovely. They are what you want to be, to display, and you fight for them. Now within that framework, then, look at the helpful structures that the apostle lays out.

A) Maintain an eternal perspective.

Verse 12: “Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses.” It seems to me that in this context the good confession is Christian confession, perhaps even at his baptism when he made public confession of his faith in the presence of many witnesses. He was committing himself to the gospel of Jesus Christ and all that that meant. Now take hold of that. In one sense it is saying, “Keep your word!”

Do you see? We are so easy to break our word nowadays. You cross your fingers, and it doesn’t really count any way. “Whatever …” But your baptismal vows in this sense are part of what keeps you straight. You promised before God and this congregation what you would pursue. Do not go back on your vows! This is a covenantal promise. I know that you got there by God’s grace, but by God’s grace you promised. “Now you lay hold of that eternal life, which you confessed in this good confession in the presence of many witnesses.”

B) Follow the example of Christ Jesus himself.

Verse 13: “In the sight of God, who gives life to everything, and of Christ Jesus, who while testifying before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you to keep this command without spot or blame …” Do you want the final instance of someone who is committed to following the will of his Father?

Not only through the test provided by Pontius Pilate, but all he signified. Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate. The whole passion is bound up with this word. Small wonder, then, that the writer to the Hebrews can say, “You have not yet resisted unto blood.” You haven’t fought that hard yet. He was tempted, even by material things. “Do you not understand that you can have all of these kingdoms? I’ll pour them out on you if you’d just bow the knee to me.”

C) Hunger for Jesus’ return at the end.

Verses 14–15a: “… keep this command without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which God will bring about in his own time …” I know that an earlier generation 50 years or so ago fought constantly about eschatology, how many instances of pre– you got before mill was really quite important in those days, but nowadays, by and large, we’re not in terrible danger of that sort of divisiveness.

Nowadays, we’re so much more in danger of such a high order of inaugurated eschatology we don’t really feel very passionate about the end in any case. How many preachers, how many sermons, how many churches, as a habit, make us feel homesick for heaven? How many times do we wake up in a week and think, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Jesus came back today, this Monday, soon.”

We’ve now become so sophisticated that we say, “Well, of course, we know he’s coming back. That’s a creedal point, but meanwhile, I’ve got to plan my strategy for the next 10 years. There is a sense in which you need to plan your strategy for the next 10 years, and there is a sense in which God help you, you jolly well better earnestly hope for his appearing.

Do you remember what the Lord Jesus says in this regard in the Sermon on the Mount? I referred to it once already. He says that we are not to lay up our treasures on earth where moth and rust corrode, where thieves break through and steal. We’re not to lay our treasures there. “We’re to lay up our treasures in heaven,” he says, “where moth and rust do not corrode and where thieves do not dig through and steal for,” he says, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Now that line is often misunderstood. It’s often thought to mean something like, “Guard your heart,” and there are passages in the Bible which tell us to guard our heart. “Guard your heart for out of it are the wellsprings of life.” Yes, yes, yes, but that’s not what this one says. This one does not say, “Guard your heart.” It says, “Choose your treasure, because your heart will go after your treasure.”

If what you treasure the most, creedal points aside, that’s this compartment.… If what you treasure the most is your reputation, getting a bigger church, the size of your library, your car, power, or influence, well, that’s where your heart will go. That’s what you’ll think about. That will shape your ethics. It will shape your priorities.

But if what you treasure the most is all the glories yet to come and all that will be unpacked of these glories in the new heaven and the new earth, where you have invested heavenly because of the teaching of the Word of God and the proclamation of the gospel and people to whom you have witnessed and offered a cup of cold water in the name of the Lord Jesus, and you can hardly wait to get there to see how God has brought all of this thing to fruition for his glory and his people’s good.… If that is what you treasure, then that’s where your heart will go.

If what you treasure is the next pornographic picture on the cathode-ray beam or on the flat screen in front of you, that’s where your heart will go. Which means that increasingly our job as teachers and preachers of the Word of God is to make people hungry for heaven. Now you don’t do that by whipping people. You don’t do that by saying, “Now you people, you’d better be hungry for heaven!”

Rather, you unpack Revelation 21 and 22. You unpack the anticipatory vistas in Isaiah 65 and elsewhere. You unpack the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness. You unpack the sheer centrality of God, who alone makes heaven, heaven. Then you don’t have to tell people you have to be hungry for it. They will be. All of that the apostle here presupposes, because he ends up at the end of the day by saying, in effect …

D) Never, ever forget the sheer Godhood of God.

Verses 15b–16. He can’t even mention the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ which God will bring about in his own due time without adding, “God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal …” over against all those transient things.

Fifty billion years into eternity will it matter what kind of car you drove? “… and who lives in unapproachable light …” All the glittering, new, shiny chrome on a Harley Davidson, all those leather-bound bindings you’d love to have in old books in your library. Fifty billion years from now will it matter too much?

No, no, he alone lives in unapproachable light, he alone is immortal. “… whom no one has seen or can see.” Over against all the material goods, which you can see all right, and they all rot in dust like everything else. “To him be honor and might forever.” Here, unless God is our delight, our pleasure, what we desire just because God is God, so that all of our descriptions are so small and paltry, so thin that we run out of ways of describing him.

He alone dwells in inapproachable light, yet we will see him face-to-face. He alone is immortal, but he gives us immortal resurrection bodies. He alone is God, and yet he has made us as his image-bearers, children of the great King. You suddenly realize that the fundamental issue here at the end of the day is just one thing: idolatry. God or anything and everything else.

This is Paul’s way of getting at exactly the same point that John gets to at the end of his first epistle. Do you remember how 1 John ends? All this stuff about gnostic errors and a false Christology and stupid ethics and not loving people and on and on and on, cyclical arguments and profound thoughts and all the rest, and then he comes to the very end, and he uses a word that he hasn’t used for the whole epistle.

He says, “My dear children, keep yourselves from idols.” Because what he’s saying is if you don’t have this at the heart, this gospel, this God, this Christ, this truth, this transforming power, this holiness, this love for the brothers and sisters. If you don’t have this, all you’ve got at the end of the day are idols. Either God is God or you’re an idolator. So here, then, is the devotion that springs from wanting eternal things. Finally, much more briefly …

3. The duty that springs from possessing material things

Because at the end of the day, there are going to be some well-to-do people in our churches. In verses 17–19, Paul asks the question, “What do you tell such well-to-do folk?”

A) God and God alone must be the center of their hope.

Verse 17: “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 …” That is, hope is the looking forward to the blessing of what comes next, and the blessing of what comes next for them must not be the next round of investments or the next return on the stock or whether the Dow goes up or down.

No, no, no, their hope must be in God. They’ve got these blessings.… Fine! God gives these things richly to enjoy, but at the same time, don’t put your hope in them. You’ve got special temptations upon you because you’ve got more cash. Don’t put your hope in it. God and God alone must be the center of their hope.

B) God must be the object of their thanks.

Verse 17: “… to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.” So that if God has given you the Lexus or the BMW, don’t, for God’s sake.… I mean that. For God’s sake, don’t go around as if somehow you deserve it.

Isn’t it easy when you go up one notch in the market, whether in a car or in a house or in anything, that somehow you look at others who are one notch down as not having got quite so far? One notch up in church, and “We’re all brothers in Christ, aren’t we?” Then deep in some little nasty recess of our heart we’re thinking, “Yeah, but my church is bigger.”

Meanwhile the other is feeling all sorts of inferiority and insecurity, “You know, I betcha he thinks his church is bigger and he’s looking down on me.” You have all of these conflicts and nasty motives, because at the end of the day there is simply no gratitude. It is God who gives all things richly to enjoy. That, of course, is the end of some sort of dogmatic monasticism.

C) They must be generous.

Verse 18: “Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share.” Those who have much are responsible to give much. That was Wesley’s philosophy of course, and he was exactly right. “Earn as much as you can,” he says, “and give as much away as you can.” Some people remember the first part of Wesley and forget the second part of Wesley, but that’s what he says, and he is entirely correct in this regard.

Now there is a love of giving, of doing good with this material, and I have to tell you, be very careful of another trap. Now most of us in this room, maybe all of us in this room, are not going to be snookered by this particular trap, but there may be the odd person in our church who will be, so I’m going to tell you about it anyway.

I know a man—if I’d mentioned his name you would probably know him. He’s gone now, but you would probably recognize his name. When he died, he left, if memory serves, $187 million. That might be a low estimate, but that is what my memory tells me. It was a lot of money. During his life he had been pretty generous.

When he died, he was a very conservative Christian. He tried tying up this money in trust funds and endowments and this sort of thing that would only serve confessional, strong, Christian causes and worldwide evangelism. He tried every which way. He had batteries of lawyers in there to tie up all of his stuff. And then he died.

Today, the overwhelming majority of that estate is being frittered away on really stupid things of peripheral interest to the matters that the old man himself was concerned about. You know how the game works. You appoint certain people on the foundations, on the board, and they appoint other people. Is it really evangelism, or does it include the study of evangelism? So you start a research center on evangelism.

Now nobody is doing any evangelism, but now you have a “Center for the Study of American Evangelicals and Evangelicalism,” or the like. These things multiply and multiply and multiply, and what this chap wanted his money to be used for is just about not being used. Moral? Give most of it away before you go, because you sure can’t control it after you’re gone.

D) All of this is essential if their grasp of the life to come is to be firmly founded.

We are told, “In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves [in heaven] as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life.” Now isn’t that an interesting utterance? With a little perversity I could turn that into salvation and rewards by merit. The more you give away, oh, the bigger your rewards in heaven.

“Do you want a firm grasp of eternal life? Be generous. Otherwise, God help you. Who knows where you’ll end up?” A superficial reading could almost teach you to read it that way, couldn’t you? It’s not quite the point. Besides, Paul is the sort of man who has another view of the gospel in any case.

Look at the very next chapter, 2 Timothy, chapter 1, verse 9, to pick only one of many, many references in the Pastoral Epistles. We’re told, “God has saved us and called us to a holy life, not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace.” This is the gospel. But then what on earth does Paul mean by this? You don’t evacuate it of all significance, do you? Or shall you use simply a safe formula?

“Well, this is the evidence of the gospel.” Well, yes, yes, yes, it is the evidence of the gospel. That’s not false, but there are some ways of sharpening it up without in any sense making this sort of thing the ground of our reward. I may have told you in the past of the example that C.S. Lewis gives. If I have, bear with me, and if I haven’t, you’re about to hear a good one.

C.S. Lewis pictures two men. One man goes to the red light district of town, finds a woman, pays his money, and has his reward. The other man spots a young woman, gets to know her, woos her, falls in love with her, is always respectful, always dignified, secures the blessing of her family. The families are intertwined. Eventually he asked for her hand in marriage. There is a wonderful, happy, glorious festival of marriage, and he has his reward. What is the difference?

In the first case, the payment is so incommensurate with the reward that the transaction is obscene. In the second case, the reward is nothing other than the culmination of a relationship. Now pursue that just a bit farther. This is the culmination of a relationship that has certain dynamics to it, all of which are authorized by and grounded in grace.

Doesn’t Jesus himself say that it is by dying that you live? It’s by losing your life that you find it? It’s by denying yourself that you find yourself? It’s by taking up your cross daily that you know resurrection life? And it’s by giving that you receive.