Money Habits 1: Live Generously

Thanks, Stephen. We’re going to talk about money. Yeah, exciting stuff. I’ve said this is coming and some of you in our connect groups have already started on this journey and maybe you’ve spoken enough about money in the last couple of weeks, you’re already done. We’re going to spend a couple of weeks on it in our sermons and I want to approach this carefully. I think there’s a number of reasons we need to approach money carefully. One of them is that the pulpit, the preaching in churches, has at times abused their influence in terms of money. I think I would say that this is probably more a generational thing as well. If you are in the older ages, that’s probably heavier for you than it is for most younger people. We think about the era of televangelists and televangelists that abused their platform and used their platform to gain wealth. For some of you, this is much more an emotional thing than younger people that didn’t grow up as much in that space. I want to acknowledge that there’s some of that going on.

There are other dynamics that make speaking about money difficult. I want to acknowledge that speaking about money is difficult for me and difficult for you to hear because of my position in the same way. My livelihood is funded by your giving. As much as possible, I want to not come across like the street busker that’s putting my bucket out and saying, “I think my performance today is worth at least $5.” If you can do that before you leave the building, that would be great. I want to be careful of that. I also want to acknowledge it’s not so much to be fair. We have some safeguards in our church for that. If you give more generously, I don’t get a Christmas bonus, for example. Just so you know. My funding isn’t gauged based on how much you give and if people give more generously I get more money. But on the other side, this is part of the church system. Like many people, I wrestle with workaholism and pride in my work. The difference for me and many other people is pride in my work is tangled up in gospel convictions as well. You can be hungry for your job and maybe feel like that’s not a godly thing. If I’m hungry for my job, it’s easy for me to justify and go, it’s all about the kingdom. It’s not about me. I want to be successful, but it’s actually about the kingdom. That’s a wrestle for me. And I recognize that. I recognize that when I’m preaching about money, that people that give more generously and give sacrificially can have an impact on how many staff I have reporting to me, how much we can do. Let’s just put that on the table. I recognize there are personal interests here and I want to walk carefully in that space.

In that, I want to say that while we’re talking about money, we’re not just talking about giving to church. We’re going to be really clear about that at certain points. In fact, we’re going to have Compassion Sunday happen to land in the middle of these weeks on money. We’re going to invite you to consider giving directly to that involvement. I think it’s really healthy for Christians to have, for example, a sponsor child and have something like that you’re giving to. We want to think about that as well.

Here’s where we’re going. We’re going to talk about money. I’ve been convicted and I’ve said this before that it’s essential. Talking about money is not just a necessary evil. It’s actually something that we’re called to do. I think there are two abuses that happen in the church. One of them is people who abuse their platform to ask and manipulate people for money. But the other one is neglect. That is, we don’t talk about money and we actually neglect our platform to talk about a real issue that affects every single one of us in some way. In fact, Jesus preached about money. Depending on how you categorize the parables, you could say his parables were either 25% of his parables were about money or up to 50% of his parables were about money. The story we just read, the rich ruler, isn’t even a parable. So that’s not counting the teaching about money. If you look at the whole of Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, John has a slightly different vibe. Matthew, Mark and Luke, you would say 10% of those gospels are about money. 10% of the verses are focused on money. If you look at the whole of the New Testament for example and we think about topics that are preached on in the New Testament, 180 verses in the whole New Testament for example about prayer, 250 verses in the whole New Testament about faith, 450 verses in the whole New Testament about money. You think about some of the big topics that you might have in your head that the New Testament speaks on. Money is up there, if not the highest topic that is spoken on in the New Testament. I think it’s essential that we talk about money.

We’re going to do that through this book we’ve been talking about, which is The Barefoot Disciple. The reason for that, I want to just be clear on this. The title is obviously brought off The Barefoot Investor, but the two books are completely different. In fact, if you know The Barefoot Investor, the concept of The Barefoot Investor is essentially figure out what your life goals might be. Figure out what you want out of life and then make your money work for you to achieve those goals. In one sense, we would say that’s an anti-gospel. Being wise and healthy and thinking about our money is good, but just setting our goals for our life and trying to achieve those goals is not what a Christian is called to do. The Barefoot Disciple takes that concept and starts again saying instead of thinking about our goals and how we achieve them, The Barefoot Disciple is saying what is a disciple called to do and how do we make our money serve our calling. Leveraging the marketing value of The Barefoot Investor, The Barefoot Disciple is a totally different beast.

We’re going to go through this in four sermons, but this is the five habits that are listed in The Barefoot Disciple. We’re going to merge the last two. Today we’re going to talk about live simply. Next, we’re going to talk about give habitually, spend missionally, and then the last two we’re going to merge together as being good stewards long term of how we use our money. That’s where we’re going over the series. If you’re in a connect group, you’re working through the 10 steps that he has within that. Through it all, we’re really trying to spend our time in scripture more than in The Barefoot Disciple. I encourage you, it’s a good book. It’s an easy read. It’s got lots of practical things and it’s extremely nuanced. If you hear through either your discussions at your Bible study connect group or through sermons that he is pitching a one-size-fits-all model, that is not the case at all. It’s more that we’re drawing on particular examples that he gives for discussion and consideration rather than one-size-fits-all. I would encourage you, we’ve got a few copies. They’re cheaper on Kindle, on digital copies as well. You might like to do that. I also want to commend the author. Yahel Frank lives by this. In fact, the contributions towards the book don’t go to him. He gives that away to charity. He is seeking to live by this.

You Are Most Likely The Rich Man

I want to walk carefully in certain places, but to be fair, I also want to walk boldly when we need to be challenged because I think the big challenge with this is we do need to be challenged. The person who lies to you the most is you. That’s classically we justify things in our own hearts and minds. We want to be careful. I want to look this morning at the story of the rich young ruler. It’s a reasonably well-known story. The guy goes to Jesus. He says, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus challenges him on his wealth. As we look at that story, you most likely in that story are the rich man. Most likely.

You Are Wealthy

First of all, you’re most likely the rich man because there’s a good chance you are wealthy. One of the struggles with talking about wealth is it’s massively comparative. For starters, you ask the question, what is rich? You think someone’s rich if they’re richer than you? That’s classically the kind of thing we think. This person’s rich because they’re richer than me. The reality is every single person in the world bar one can say that. There’s got to be one person at the top, but everyone else has someone richer than them. It’s easy to say there’s someone richer than me. It’s easier to say, do I live a lavish, extravagant life? I can think of someone who lives a more lavish and more extravagant life than me. So, no. I say no to things. Look at them over there. Wealth is comparative, but it’s also comparative in the sense that it costs different amounts to live in different places. The cost of living impacts what your money can do. Your buying power of your money changes depending where you live.

I grew up on the mission field in Papua New Guinea and it’s comparatively far cheaper. They are far poorer than many of us in Australia, but it’s comparatively far cheaper to live there. You buy your fruits and vegetables from a market. You’re helping fund the local people who are growing it in their backyards and bringing it in. It’s comparably far cheaper to eat in a country like that. I did some research to try to pull this out and it’s a really difficult number to analyze what is wealth based on different spectrums. This is a graph. It’s obviously not every country in the world. In fact, it’s deliberately a staged looking at a spectrum of countries. The orange one there, the text is quite small, but the orange one there is Australia. The bar represents the top is kind of our median wage, the middle and the bottom is minimum wage. You can see Australia has quite a high minimum wage compared to many other countries. The USA for example is the one directly left of Australia and you can see their minimum wage is quite low. In fact the yellow dots are what is considered the poverty line. The USA has set minimum wage as the poverty line although states have their own rules. That affects different things. The ones on the far left you can see the poverty line is just flat there. That’s because they don’t have an official poverty line. That is just the international poverty line, which is why some others go below that because they have an official poverty for that country. That is to say, if the poverty line is set on what it costs to survive, you can see in Australia, the gap between minimum wage and poverty is actually quite significant. That is to say, even if you are living on the minimum wage in Australia, you are in the top 10% of earners in the world. If you think of the top 10% people in Australia, you would think that’s the wealthiest of wealthy. If you’re earning median, you’re in the top 1% of earners in the world. Which is to say, we are generally speaking, and I know that all of us have different challenges to our wealth, but we are generally speaking quite wealthy even in a space where we are in a cost of living crisis and high interests and challenges that we face. I’m not trying to suggest there are not challenges, but we’re most likely in that space of wealth.

You Want Both Jesus and Wealth

You’re most likely the rich man because you’re most likely somewhat wealthy. But you’re most likely the rich man because like the rich man, you most likely want both Jesus and wealth. If we’re to be fair to this story, this man is a genuine, sincere seeker. Look at what the story says. It says he ran up to Jesus is the words that Mark gives us. He ran up to Jesus. He fell on his knees before him and he says, “Good teacher.” Now, Jesus ultimately challenges his words because of good teacher because Jesus is challenging his worldview. But if we’re to take this man at face value, he is a genuine sincere seeker. He has heard the legend that is Jesus going around and he must have had some idea what was happening there. Jesus isn’t walking around in extravagant wealth. He knows what he’s running up to. He genuinely wants it. What is his response when Jesus challenges his wealth? His response is verse 22. He went away sad. This guy doesn’t when Jesus says, “You have one other problem going on. You got a lot of money.” He didn’t go, “Oh, that’s right. I’m set. I’m fine. I’m happy you reminded me I’m wealthy. I’m going to go away and live in my wealth.” That’s not what happens. This guy is genuinely torn by what is happening. Ultimately in the story, we hear that he chooses his wealth over Jesus. But he is genuinely torn. We would openly say I think it’s fair to say in an ideal world we want both wealth and Jesus.

In fact this whole passage is so difficult for us to think about because it’s such a difficult thought experiment for us. If I asked you the question, if you were given the decision, Jesus or you get rid of everything you are and give it all away, that’s what this man’s told, to be faithful to Jesus or to stick with your wealth. It’s almost impossible to say, “I definitely choose Jesus.” It’s such a difficult conversation. To be fair, some of us have experienced that at certain points. I know some of you have made decisions in your life where it is being purely that. We think of the space where missionaries go overseas and depending on the context some go overseas and have a house building value in Australia still and have something to come back to and others don’t. There is that decision in a very tangible way. But asking the question, if you haven’t experienced it, what would you say is a little bit like asking the question, if a gun was put to your head and you said deny Jesus or die, what would you do? You have an idea of what you’d like to say, but what you’d actually say, it’s a difficult thought experiment for us. It’s hard for us to put us in that category.

You Are In Danger of The Snare of Wealth

But it’s right to say that we recognize that there is a challenge there because we like the rich man we are most likely in the same category of him that we are in danger of the snare of wealth. For in one sense for the very reason I already said wealth is comparative and so it’s hard for us to even get our heads out of that space. For another reason we are totally absorbed in the western world in consumer identity and it’s everywhere and it’s everything. I think for example of the movements that happened against photoshopping. You remember it’s still there but there was a real push at one point that we got this world of supermodels and they then get photoshopped. We pick the most beautiful people in the world, we put them under the most perfect lighting we can find, and then a computer guy still finds blemishes to get rid of. We put that in front of all of us and we go that’s what you should look like. Go get it. We recognize there was a problem there and it’s still there but it has changed significantly and we are seeing a lot more of more normal-sized bodies to some extent happening in shopping and advertising. Some of that has shifted. I don’t think we’ve even started to have the conversation on unrealistic lifestyle expectations.

What’s worse is not only is marketing putting it down our throats, it’s not just constantly you can dress better, you can have a nicer lounge in your house. You can have a nicer kitchen in your house. Not only is that happening all the time, but with social media, we’re doing it to ourselves. We’re doing it to each other. I’m not suggesting it’s vindictive. It makes sense that when you’re on holidays and you see a beautiful view, you want to share it with other people. But what we’re constantly telling people is look at my great holiday. Look at the great hotel room that I was able to get. Look at the beautiful thing that has happened in my family. We’re doing that all the time. There’s this real challenge that says we only put our best forward on social media and within reason. You brush your hair before you go out in public. You’re not going to just purposely put the ugliest moments online, but this is what we consume all the time from each other. You’re sitting in a cubicle on a hot day in the office in the city looking at social media when you shouldn’t be and you’re seeing a photo of your friend who’s in Europe living a beautiful holiday. It’s hard not to have this all the time on us and it ends up impacting our identity without us even realizing it. It ends up impacting how we think others think of us and how others might look at us. When we see others in our life have nice things, it’s hard not to want to also have nice things. We are in danger of the snare of wealth. The biggest liar to us is ourselves. We trick ourselves into that.

We most likely are this rich man in the sense that we’re most likely rich to some extent comparatively, we most likely want Jesus plus wealth, and we most likely are in danger of the snare of wealth.

Jesus Wants To Challenge That

Jesus wants to challenge that. He wants to push us. First of all, he wants us to push us to depend on him. We read this story in Mark 10. But if you flip just back the paragraph before this story, you get the story of Jesus and the little children. Little children are coming up to Jesus and the disciples try to get rid of him. Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me.” This is the words Mark gives us. Mark 10:15, “Anyone who doesn’t receive the kingdom like a child will never enter it.” That’s the story that comes directly before this. You can see some of the parallels of what’s happening there. Anyone who doesn’t receive the kingdom like a child will never enter it. How hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. You see the language that’s going on there? This is not an accident. These two stories have been put together because it is showing us a comparison of what’s happening there. The ideal way to come to Jesus is dependent on him with an openness to him like a child.

In fact, it’s the very thing that causes the danger of wealth. One of the things we see in this passage is and I think almost surprising with Jesus is Jesus constantly pointing out the danger it is for wealthy people to be pulled away from the kingdom. In fact, often I think when we think about those who are furthest from the kingdom, we’re much more likely to think about people that are living openly obvious sinful lives. We’re thinking of the people that are just they’re really you can see their lives are opposed to Jesus. The person that he sees the biggest problem with is not that group but the wealthy. In fact, I think we’re often in danger of thinking the wealthy are closer to the kingdom than others are because they look like they have their lives together. I think one of the things that happens, it’s just a phenomenon of finances is people that are lower on a financial spectrum typically their problems come outdoors much more, seem more obvious. In the lower socioeconomic groups, much more likely to have drunkenness on the street for example, gambling in a public place like the pokies. The wealthier things go, basically the thicker you can build your walls on the house, the more you can hide your sins from the world around you. Domestic violence is much more hidden and there’s a desire to keep up appearances in wealthier areas. Gambling is much more often private and done in small groups behind closed doors. Alcoholism is often handled in the house. Often the danger is that wealth hides more of the problems than poverty does. We face some of those challenges in our perspective generally.

But more importantly, Jesus wants to say the very thing that draws us to wealth is the very thing that draws us away from Jesus. That is our ability to control our lives. The very thing that draws us to that control is the very thing that leads us to want to arrogantly assert our independence from Jesus. In that sense, wealth in itself becomes the challenge. The thing Jesus is challenging this man on is to depend on Jesus. It’s not some sort of works-based religion that says if you give to the poor, you will receive salvation. This story is the exact opposite. It’s because you are trying to do works. Your very question, what must I do to be saved? That very question is the problem that this man faces. Jesus says how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. He says that so much that the disciples are just shocked by that. They’re thinking if anyone can enter the kingdom of God, it’s the rich people. They’re the ones that have their lives together. Jesus challenges that idea. He uses that illustration. It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. Basically saying it’s impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. So the disciples say well then who then can be saved and Jesus makes the ultimate point here. He says what’s impossible with man is possible for God. That is the good news is it’s not about our works. It’s about putting our trust in what Jesus has done. The very thing that draws us to wealth is the very thing that draws us away from Jesus.

Give Your Whole Heart To Him

Jesus wants us to depend on him and he wants us to give our whole heart, our whole life to him. The examples in this passage, there’s the example of the little children beforehand, but the real example that’s drawn on in this passage of what it means to be a follower of Jesus is his followers at the time. It is the disciples. They have done the very thing Jesus asked this rich ruler to do. It’s not just a thought experiment in this moment. Peter and Andrew, brothers, when Jesus meets them and he says come follow me I’ll make you fishers of men. We’re told the words we’re given, they dropped their nets and followed him. We’re not even told they kind of packed them up and put them in storage. We’re just told they dropped their nets and they followed him. James and John sitting in a boat with their father. The words we’re told is they left their boats and their father, presumably to pack up the nets, and went and followed Jesus. Levi is a tax collector. We’re told when he meets Jesus, he is literally sitting at his tax collector booth. When Jesus says, “Come follow me.” The words we’re told in the Bible is he got up and followed him. He left a lucrative career to follow Jesus. That’s the very thing that these guys were called to do because Jesus was calling them to give all of themselves.

Now, there was a specific calling to them in their day in that moment to actually physically follow Jesus in sense of the man around in preaching. For all of us, our calling is in different ways to Jesus. Yet the same thing applies. He is asking for our whole self. He’s asking for our all. Because of the snare of wealth, if we don’t have an action plan, we are likely to end up in that mud of wealth and trying to figure it out for ourselves. It’s one of the places I think that The Barefoot Disciple has some helpful things to say. One of the things that he challenges on in The Barefoot Disciple is purely that idea of our approach towards wealth. He says we often act more like owners than we do like managers of what God has given us. The theological idea is that God gives us everything. Everything comes from him. He owns it all and he has just gifted us a portion to use in our life and to use for his glory and we’re just managers of that. The Barefoot Disciple, Yahel Frank, challenges the idea that often when we approach that we end up we say that we agree with that. Yep. I’m just a steward of what God has given me. But then we act more like owners than we do managers.

This is the illustration that when a company comes into a windfall of finances, more money, who gets to decide what happens to those finances in the world of a business? In the illustration, an owner has the full say of what happens to those extra finances. The manager doesn’t get to say, “Cool, I’ll give myself a bonus because we earned more money than we expected.” Oh, great. There’s extra money here. I’ll decide what we do with it. The manager can delegate to him those extra funds. He can give him a bonus. He can say, “You invest it back into the company how you see fit.” But it is the owner’s decision. The challenge Yahel gives is that when we come to our own stewarding, it’s like the more we earn, we feel like I earn more. My wealth has gone up. I have the freedom to do with it as I wish and invest it in my life as I wish. We fall in this trap that the more we earn, the more we feel like we need, the more we spend, the more our life capacity requires those funds to continue on. We discussed this in my connect group and even then it’s complex. We know that there’s inflation, money goes up, costings go up. Of course, over time we need to spend more on things just because of the nature of the world we live in. But we can acknowledge that we have this extra level on top of that. That the more we have, the more we inflate our lifestyle and actually the pain of withdrawing that becomes a higher sacrifice than it was in a previous life, previous part of our life.

To be fair, I think of times in my life where I didn’t have enough money to pay my rent and I was in a situation where I had generous landlords that allowed me to fall behind in my rent. I’m thankful to be in a place where I’m not stressing over how I pay the rent each week, each month. There are places where we get into being able to afford things that we need to pay for and yet we also if we’re honest with ourselves recognize we add things that we like to pay for and eventually those likes feel like they become needs and our life inflates in that sense.

The First Habit: Live Simply

The first habit of The Barefoot Disciple is to consider living simply. Even before we start thinking about living generously is to think about how we minimize how we spend and think about a life that is focused on the necessities. If you use some of the ideas of, one of the phrases he uses is, “Live simply so others can simply live” as we think about generosity or the idea that we’re challenged to live large in this life and really the idea of living simply is to seek to live small in our finances so we can live large for Jesus and think about what that looks like. The first habit is to live simply.

Let me round it up with this with just some ideas. Once again, I will say these are very, finances are very nuanced. This is not a one-size-fits-all. One of the challenges of Barefoot Disciple is to look at what the minimum wage is. At the moment in Australia, it’s just under $50,000. If that’s been examined as enough for someone to live off, then is that enough for you to live off? Maybe you would say no. Maybe you’ve already got financial commitments that make that impossible for you and there’s thinking through there. But that’s the question. Is that a place to start? If that isn’t possible, there’s other approaches to it. One question to ask is what can I reduce? Looking at my life, what do I feel like has inflated more than it should have? Where can I reduce that? Another question to ask is what time do I need to reduce that? Sometimes our commitments, you say like a car payment plan can’t just go away overnight. What time do I need to reduce that? What things are unwise to reduce for financial longevity? It’s worth saying that sometimes it’s better to buy a reliable car that will last a while than an old car that requires constant upkeep. There are moments to say it’s not just about buying the cheapest. It’s about buying that which has the most value for our lives for longevity.

You might want to ask the question, where is there sacrifice in my life? You want to ask the question, how am I breaking out of consumer life cycle? How am I breaking out of the consumer identity? You might want to ask, if we’re called to live as strangers, foreigners, travelers in this world, how does my spending, my lifestyle, how does that reflect that? If someone else was to look at me, would they see where my priorities lie or would they see something else? There’s just some questions to think about.

I think this is a helpful thing. I know that finances are often a private thing. In some ways, the monologue from the front helps in this kind of scenario because it’s sometimes easier than the dialogue that happens. But I want to encourage those dialogues. I want to encourage the connect groups and if you’re not in one, I want to encourage you to connect into one and take the opportunity to share life with each other, including being honest about where we stand in these things. Are you the rich man in this story? Perhaps you’re not. But there’s a good chance considering where we are in the world that you are reasonably wealthy. There’s a good chance because of the way our hearts work that you are wanting both Jesus and wealth and trying to figure out how those priorities land. Jesus wants you to desire him. He wants you to be dependent on him and he wants you to be satisfied in him.