Yet, so wrong is the common definition that we don’t even recognize greed when we live it out. Here is an example:
Sally goes to church, reads the Scriptures, and has a job at Road Runner Logistics. She goes into work early, leaving family behind in order to make money. She stays late for the extra $2 per hour in overtime. When offered time at work this weekend, she accepts, sadly missing her daughter’s soccer game so she can make an extra 80 bucks after taxes. When a transfer opportunity is offered to her, one that would require her to move her family three hundred miles away, away from the kids’ school, away from her friends, away from her and her husband’s parents and siblings, she takes it because it pays more. How much does it pay? Five dollars more per hour. An extra $200 a week, or $800 a month, was all it took for her to leave the most important things in order to “advance my family’s financial situation.” Eight hundred bucks! And that’s before taxes.
Do not misunderstand me; I am all for doing whatever it takes to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. There are wonderful parents raising kids out of their cars as they work any job that will have them. Even though they may need to work long hours, they are doing what they can. I respect them for doing what they need to do, and it should be appreciated! A child raised in a tent city where his parents read the Scriptures to him and teach him the ways he should live has a much better life than a kid in an exclusive neighborhood with parents who ignore his upbringing.
My point is not that we should ignore our families’ needs—we shouldn’t—but that what we are doing many times is not the right thing, for us or our families, and in many cases it is actually the greedy thing to do because it only focuses on our needs and not the greater needs we, as believers, should be focusing on.
I remember once, after I gave a presentation, someone came up to me and said, “Josh, I don’t need millions of dollars, I can get by very nicely on forty thousand a year.” To which my response was, “That is great and I’m glad you have your needs met. There is a children’s hospital in town, and that hospital needs more money to help more kids. There are unsaved people around the world who need to have a missionary share with them the Gospel, but the missionary needs money in order to go. If you care about God and others, life is not about what is enough for you, it is about living out God’s purpose for your life, and a billion dollars, at that point, would not be ‘enough’ for you.”
Working Hard for the Money
The problem is not that everyone needs to make a billion dollars in order for them to live out God’s will for their life. Nor is the problem that if you make $70,000 with your needs met but no one else’s that you must be greedy. Both assertions would be foolish.
Let me be clear: Your salvation has nothing to do with your income. You cannot buy a position in Heaven. You are not worth less if you don’t have money. The point is that if you are working, you are working for money. If your employer stopped paying you, you would stop showing up. We also know that money, while not one of life’s most important things, is still important, yet we pretend it is not, or pretend we don’t need it, or couldn’t use it. When we pretend these things we are living outside the will of God.
God uses rich people—look at the stories of David, Solomon, Moses, and Joseph. He also uses poor people—for example, the poor widow with the two coins, Ruth, and the widow with only olive oil and flour who took care of Elijah. Nowhere does the Bible command us to take a vow of poverty. (If you are thinking of Yeshua’s lesson regarding the rich man entering Heaven, see my discussion of this verse in its full context in the FAQ section of this book.) We are to work for a living. If we are to work for a living, it would be irresponsible for us not to want to do our best. If we do our best and we are not controlled by an employment situation, many times our best will lead to a certain amount of wealth. It’s not bad, it’s not evil, and it may come and go in seasons according to God’s will for your particular life (Job and Joseph come to mind).
Greed, or too much money, really isn’t the issue; the issue is engaging in revenue generation in such a manner that takes us away from the most important thing and replaces those things with a situation that abdicates time with family, time with God, or time pursuing your calling, and more often than not places you in a detrimental financial position.
This problem is not just that of the individual, either. Churches are falling for greed as well. Any church that has the audacity to ask for or accept money without teaching the proper perspective of money and its generation is ignorant at best, and if they continue to build on debt while they witness their congregation suffering financially, it is bordering on greed. Sadly, this is the vast majority of churches. No wonder so many are in financial trouble!
[T]he Bible talks more about
money than it does Heaven.
It is time we refocus our efforts and redefine “greed.” The situation in which we find ourselves now is that we believe money isn’t important, so we go about earning it in the wrong way (more on this later). However, because to us money really does have importance, we sacrifice time with God and family in order to get more of money, meanwhile failing to realize that while we are earning money, we are costing ourselves what we say is more valuable. Instead, we should realize that the Bible talks more about money than it does Heaven. The Bible tells us: “A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children” (Proverbs 13:22).
Newsflash: That is wealth! We have already covered how poverty is a curse and prosperity is a blessing. When four out of five churchgoing people are at or near poverty, are we experiencing the blessing or the curse? When most people don’t have six hundred bucks in the bank, let alone the ability to leave an inheritance for two generations (his “children’s children”), are we blessed or cursed? Wouldn’t it be better, if instead of dancing around the issue or pretending it doesn’t matter, or worse, blaming God for our lack of success, we approached money as a tool to accomplish our larger priorities and the goals associated with it?
| EVANGELPRENEUR ACTION STEP |
Since we are so ingrained in our perspective of money, we need to work on reexamining what money is, how we personally use it, and how we can use it in ways that would be outside of our normal routine. So, in the next twenty-four hours, do the following to expand your perspective a bit. It might seem a bit silly at first but it will give you a fresh perspective:
| Yes, you can do all that in twenty-four hours! You do not need to use big amounts, either. You could accomplish the entire task list for less than the cost of this book. It is not about the amount but rather getting you to experience different uses for money in the shortest amount of time possible. Because we’re in the rut of “Go to Work—Buy Groceries—Pay Bills—Tithe—Go To Work,” we tend to forget what we can do with money. I promise, at the end of twenty-four hours you will feel great and you will have more awareness of the fact that money is a tool. |