DAY 317 - Money, Money, Money, Or …

Matthew 6:23-25 (NIV) ²⁴ “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

Ephesians 1-8, 12, 22 (NIV) ³ Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. ⁴ For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love ⁵ he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— ⁶ to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. ⁷ In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace ⁸ that he lavished on us. In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, ¹² in order that we, who were the first to put our hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory. ²² And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, ²³ which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

We are born seekers. And one of the things we seek most diligently is security and protection from hurt and harm, which also includes an inner sense of safety and well-being. Early in life we learn that money and material things go a long way in providing us with security. But many of us also learn somewhere down the line that money cannot buy total security. It cannot ultimately protect us from sickness and death. It cannot guarantee us a good marriage, a happy home, close friends. Furthermore, if we have ever looked deeply into what it means to be secure we also know that real security cannot be found in things that we can lose or that can be taken way from us.

So for many of us it begins to dawn on us that there just may be a God who stands beyond this fleeting and temporal world, and that the way to real security is to be found by having our life anchored in God. We hear this person Jesus promise that if by faith we belong to God, are adopted through His death and resurrection as children of God, then nothing in life can hurt us permanently, no loss is lasting, no defeat more than for the moment, no disappointment conclusive. We begin to believe this, or at least begin to want to believe, but time and time again that sense of security we had hoped to find in God eludes us. Our lives neither know nor reflect the joy, the confidence, the boldness of the early disciples who knew without a shadow of a doubt that their lives were permanently and totally secure in God.

What has happened? Why the breakdown? Why can’t we know the security Jesus promised and the security the early disciples discovered? Jesus puts His finger on the problem: we seek security in both God and money - we know money cannot buy security and yet we are not totally convinced that God is the only security we need. It is a mystery, yet when we decide to seek our security in God, and God alone, all things necessary for real security is somehow provided for us.

From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope

© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell (Broyles)