Reflections on God and Money: March 2015

Friday 27 March 2015

CONTENTMENT (24): Paul's Focus

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me - practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.

Philippians 4:8-9

Last week, we reflected on Paul's trust in God, expressed in Philippians 4:4-8, which ended with the peace of God guarding our hearts and minds. God's own serenity founded on His infinite knowledge and unlimited power: this peace is available to us when we make our requests known to God in prayer and it is no wonder that Paul says it 'surpasses all understanding'. This peace frees us to think on the great things that Paul now directs us towards, taking us from the peace to God to the God of peace being with us.

St Paul now directs us to focus on what’s true, honourable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent and worthy of praise. To elaborate on these things would require a new series of Reflections but I think we can summarise what Paul meant by quoting what he wrote to another church at about the same time (Colossians 3:1-2).

‘If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.’

Paul’s words remind me of what Jesus said, recorded in Matthew 6:19-34. In the Sermon on the Mount, immediately after Jesus said that we should accumulate treasure in Heaven, not on earth, and before telling us that we can’t hope to serve both God and money, he explained this.

‘The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!’

What we see feeds our thoughts. Most of us live in consumer societies that constantly parade before us goods and services that people want us to buy. In fact, the way of life in many countries is kept going by getting us to buy what we don’t need and didn’t previously want. And if we can’t afford what we want, we can usually find someone to offer us credit so we can buy it anyway! If we begin to think on this way of life, we’ll soon submit to the discontent that defines our society and want the same things.

It’s not just the adverts we see on television but the ways that products are placed in all the programmes and the attitudes of the characters that make it seem normal to want to buy them. Our streets and shops are filled with advertisements. Adverts often pop up when we’re on the internet and in many countries we’re plagued by telephone calls, texts and emails trying to sell us stuff or to find out if we might be persuaded to buy. No longer do we need to look around to covet our neighbour’s wife, house, field, employees, animals or anything else that he has for the temptation is brought right to us in ways that are impossible to avoid.

While we cannot avoid all this materialism and consumerism, we need not dwell on it but can focus on the higher things that Paul direct us to. That’s how he learned ultimate contentment and we can practice these same things and learn it to. ‘And the God of peace will be with you.’

What is freely received should be freely shared and not sold for profit, so please feel free to copy these Reflections freely and without cost to others. Unless otherwise stated, Scripture quotations in these Reflections are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Friday 20 March 2015

CONTENTMENT (23): Paul's Confidence

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:4-7

This Reflection will cover some of the points I made in ‘Paul’s Rejoicing’ that I posted last year on 14 November but I think the repetition is a useful reminder as we come towards the end of this series on contentment.

Studying this letter to the Christians at Philippi, I’ve been repeatedly amazed by the scope and security of Paul’s confidence in God. He could rejoice at the preaching of the Gospel by insincere Christians wanting only to make life more difficult for him in prison; he could rejoice at being ‘poured out as a drink offering’ in his ministry for people who were deserting him. He told his readers to rejoice in the Lord, to rejoice always. He was able to do this because he kept his eye on the big picture, the great things that God was and still is doing. I don’t think that Paul’s profound contentment is possible without this quality of rejoicing.

Although we're to rejoice in all situations, we’re not to rejoice over sin except as God can use it for a good end. The Jewish leaders sinned when they arrested Jesus and petitioned the Roman authorities to execute Him, Pilate sinned when condemned Jesus, the soldiers sinned when they flogged Him, mocked Him and nailed Him to a cross. But the crucifixion was pivotal in the redemption of all Creation and for 2,000 years Christians have rejoiced over it. But God isn’t someone who focuses on the big picture but overlooks the details. As Jesus told His disciples, ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows’ (Matthew 10:29-31).

Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil and to redeem the whole of creation from the devastation caused by sin and He’s able and willing to redeem anything that can happen to us. It's in this confidence that we rejoice!

By prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, we can make our requests known to God. The phrase ‘prayer and supplication’ is a way of saying different kinds of prayer, including worship and praise as well as requests. The requests we make should be consistent with how Jesus taught us to pray in the Sermon on the Mount, in what we often call 'The Lord's Prayer' (see Matthew 6:9-13). When we pray for the coming of God's Kingdom, it must be with the recognition that if we want to see His will done on earth as it is in Heaven and we must do our bit. When we ask for provisions, such as our ‘daily bread’, it must be with the thankful assurance that He already knows what we need for this life. When we ask for forgiveness, it must be with a determination to forgive those who've wronged us. When we ask for deliverance from temptation and evil, it must be in the confidence that God wants to deliver all His people from evil. Sometimes He will guide us to avoid the temptation and evil, sometimes He will guide us through it, but in all our praying we must keep in mind that God is our Father and we are to be like Him.

When we fail in this, however, when we become anxious and unreasonable, we should also remember that God remains faithful to us. He'll help us to recover our confidence in Him because that’s the sort of God He is. And His peace, the peace of God which surpasses all understanding, will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Friday 13 March 2015

CONTENTMENT (22): Paul's Example

Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us. For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself. Therefore, my brothers, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm thus in the Lord, my beloved.

Philippians 3:17-4:1

If we wish to experience the same degree of contentment that St Paul enjoyed, we need to follow his example in every area of our lives. ‘Join in imitating me’, sounds a rather audacious invitation, one we may not appreciate from many pastors today, especially if, like Paul, they're in prison and being rapidly deserted by their followers.

I don’t think it’s going too far to interpret Paul’s invitation as really meaning, imitate me as I’m imitating Christ. Earlier in his letter to Philippi, Paul described all that Christ gave up on His way to crucifixion, all His rights and privileges as God, and then explained what he had given up to cooperate in Christ’s great mission of redemption. It’s this sort of imitation of Christ that Paul now calls his readers to imitate.

I think we can usually distinguish Christian leaders who make us feel bad about ourselves, guilty and needing to do better, from those who quietly inspire us by their persistent lifestyles. I'm not even referring to Christians who are persuasive in recruiting workers or who seem to have an especially effective gift of preaching or praying for people. I mean Christians who makes us want to be holy! While I'm sure that I must have missed many such examples due to my own lack of spiritual perception, one thing that gradually became clear to me about those I have noticed is that their godliness was independent of their theology.

I must be careful about this point. I’m not saying that it doesn’t matter what we believe: quite the contrary! After all, the entire New Testament was written so that we can have a sound theological basis for our faith and intimacy with Jesus. But it seems to me that whatever theological bias Christians have, it does not seem to keep them from genuine fellowship with Christ and profound godliness. The few I’ve known have come from different Christian traditions and backgrounds.

I’d like to think that when we see Christians with their minds set on earthly things, feeding themselves to their own destruction, that we would know better than to imitate them. It is, of course, too easy to sit in judgement on these 'enemies of the cross' but there was nothing judgemental about Paul’s attitude towards them: the thought of them made him weep! They had not stood firm ‘in the Lord’.

Somewhere between these examples we know to avoid, and the examples we should imitate, come most of us. In Luke 18, we read a parable that Jesus told to encourage His followers, ‘that they ought always to pray and not lose heart’. I think the simple conclusion from that statement is that if we pray, we don’t lose heart but stand firm. If we fail to pray, however, we’re vulnerable to losing heart and a fall may follow. If we pray but lose heart, it’s because we’ve not prayed effectively: perhaps, like the Christians that James criticised, we may have prayed for something ‘to spend it on [our] passions’ (James 4).

Our challenge is to imitate St Paul, not just by striving for his quality of contentment, as if we can achieve this in some sort of isolation from every other aspect of our lives, but only by comprehensively imitating him in imitating Christ.

Friday 6 March 2015

CONTENTMENT (21): Paul's Gain

Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ… [That] I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own...

Philippians 3:7-12

I think it’s useful to round off this short ‘series within a series’ of Reflections on St Paul’s ambition to know the Lord Jesus Christ by returning to something he said at the start of the passage. ‘Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ... For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ...’

We know what Paul meant by all the ‘gain’ he had given up. It was his dual birthright as a Jew and a Roman, his learning and status as a Pharisee and promise of all this would bring him as his career developed in the future. But just what did Paul mean when he wrote that he wanted to 'gain’ Christ?

Jesus expected an exclusive commitment from His disciples and often described this with unsettling concepts. In Mark 8, we read that He called the crowd to Himself and said to them, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me'. Matthew 10 records him saying that, 'Whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me'. Taking up a cross was a concept not just demanding but horrific to Jesus’ original audiences, yet it was the only way to be ‘worthy’ of Jesus.

We gain a thing by being worthy of it. In today's consumer society, this usually means paying for it, but owning something isn’t quite the same thing as gaining it! A popular example in recent years in the UK is the payment protection insurance (PPI) that was mis-sold to very many people: insurance they paid for but either didn’t want or was of not use at all to them, such as the retired and unemployed people who insured against losing their jobs. Gaining something includes the ability to benefit from it.

We need to be careful when we talk about gaining people because they are not property to be owned. We may talk about gaining a friend by some act of benevolence, referring to the mutual benefits of the relationship. While we cannot hope to comprehend all that Jesus Christ brings into a relationship, we begin to glimpse it when we reflect on what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 3:21-23. ‘For all things are yours…the world or life or death or the present or the future―all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's'.

The church at Corinth was preoccupied with the extent to which they could enjoy life like everyone else in the city. Pushing the boundaries of what we might call ‘Christian’ liberty, they attended pagan festivals, defrauded each other, sought redress in the civil courts and even indulged in sexual promiscuity that disgusted the pagans. Paul agreed that ‘all things are lawful’ but prescribed the bounds of Christian liberty by what was helpful, addictive and constructive (see 1 Corinthians 6:12&10:23) and then pointed them to something greater ― Christ, Himself. The Corinthian Christians were focusing on the wrong things! It was seeing this that motivated Paul to give up everything he had and might gain in the future for an acquaintance with Christ.

Paul also wrote this, giving us a glimpse of the centrality, supremacy and completeness of Christ. ‘He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created... And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together... For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell...’ (Colossians 1:15-20).

When we begin to understand who Christ is, we begin to see that a relationship with Him is not only all the gain we need but all the gain there is to have. This may sound like pious idealism amidst contemporary consumerism but it’s the only ground for trusting God in all our circumstances. But, like Paul, we each need to say, ‘I press on to make it my own’.