I loved Kevin's cartoon in the bulletin last week. If you didn't see it, it was a picture of a little boy on Santa's lap. Santa looked a little confused as the boy was saying, "All I want for Christmas is more than my brother."
That's a cute cartoon and we can chuckle at the thought of the truth of that scenario on Christmas morning. It's also an incredibly sad reminder though, that unfortunately many of us never grow out of that line of thinking. We may not verbalize the words exactly like that, and most of us aren't still crawling into Santa's lap with our selfish requests, but deep down the desire to continually just have more keeps us constantly begging life for more...occasionally we even pretend to be sitting in God's lap as a faithful child when we make our self-centered pleas.
How blessed would we all be if we could let Solomon's advice really sink in!? How tragic for Solomon that it took most of his life before he came back to the truth that he knew when we started out as a man of God.
I'd like to leave the conversation on this one open because it's an incredibly easy to understand principle...and yet so hard to live and to teach. Tie this statement to Jesus' teaching about a rich man getting into the kingdom of heaven and laying up treasures in heaven as opposed to earth because "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" and we realize that this is a BIG deal!
"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." (1 Timothy 6:10)
Solomon puts it just as bluntly as it can be put. Chasing after riches is absolutely meaningless. We can make every excuse and come up with umpteen million justifications for why we need more money or more stuff, but deep down we know the truth. Those desire are meaningless.
Here's what I'd like to do. I want to open the comments below to suggestions and questions on how to teach ourselves and our children to trust in God instead of in riches. To end the meaningless pursuit of more that begins on Santa's lap and usually doesn't end until the death bed. How do you combat this in yourself? How are you training your children in this? What areas are especially hard that you would like advice about? I won't know many if any of those answers, but there are some incredibly Godly men and women who read this that will. Start that conversation below by clicking the comment button and let's VOW to pursue things that will never be described as "meaningless" !!!
If I could approach this notion from another angle...
ReplyDeleteI personally think one of the reasons why "the love of money" is so prevalent amongst our people is that it's so closely tied with the idea of "the pursuit of happiness." That is, we're more willing to spend our resources on what makes us happy on the immediate short term than do without it on the immediate short term (dare I say "suffer") if it makes us happy in the distant long term
We're so used to being able to pay for what we need with lightning speed that we expect to get what we want with the same lightning speed.
It's like we're so used to transactions being so fast and immediately gratifying that we don't put any value on the items themselves but instead on the transaction itself: how much can you give me for what little I give you?
And honestly, I wish I knew how to win every time, but I haven't figured that part out yet.