More on Money

Money is something I've been convicted about for a while now. The Spirit's work has been ongoing, and my heart and actions are changing slowly. I feel like there's a lot of hypocrisy in the Western church with respect to money, so it's hard to go against the flow, and it's also hard not to compare myself with others in this area. What matters is God's position in my heart, not whether I'm doing better than "them." The balance between generosity and wise stewardship is hard to find. I know Jesus does not want us destitute, like so many in our world are, but neither does he want us depending on wealth for security.

We see the well-off in the early church giving out of their plenty to those in need here. We also see the danger of deceit and legalism with respect to giving in the story of Ananias and Sapphira. That story can be found here. It looks like church sponsored socialism at first but I don't think it is. People have no choice whether they want to join in or not with socialism. As followers of Christ we have a choice. Is it good to give? Absolutely. Is it required for salvation? No. I think it's a mistake to form doctrine out of examples in scripture, but we do need to take what the early church did in their time and place, their context, and wrestle with it and apply it to ourselves.

I think money is something we don't talk about enough in the Western church. We need to be struggling through this as a community instead of ignoring it. We need to stop skirting the issue and confront our wealth in the face of the overwhelming poverty across the globe.

Sarah and I's current goal is to give back to God as much as we can, and to provide for our family in such a way that we can function effectively in our context. Note that it's our goal. We've nowhere near arrived yet. It's not necessarily wrong to be comfortable, since we see people making each other comfortable in the early church, but we want to push that line back as far as I can. With my income, if there's not plenty left over for generous giving then we know we need to re-evaluate. We want to test our purchases and savings by their worth in our service to God, not by their "necessity" in the eyes of our neighbors.