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Root of the Problem

by Rubel Shelly

Have you heard that there are economic problems afoot in the United States? Have you heard about people buying big, expensive houses with almost no money down and going into foreclosure? Have you heard about the subprime mortgage industry meltdown and its repercussions on Wall Street?

Oh, of course you've heard all those things. You probably understand them far better than I do, for I have no formal training in economics. I just know about the gyrations in the stock market, the plunging value of houses in the part of the country where I live, and the number of people losing their jobs.

There is no way I can explain the complex economics of it. But we all understand the ethical implications of what has happened. There is an evil impulse that has percolated through human hearts from the beginning of time. The Bible says: "[T]he love of money is a root of all kinds of evil" (1 Timothy 6:10 NIV).

Our culture has addicted itself to leveraged debt. Big corporations, small businesses, churches, homeowners, individuals -- all have been guilty.

We are enticed by the sort of radio commercial I heard day before yesterday. "Come to our big home furnishings sale this weekend. Fill your house with beautiful new furniture. No down payment. No payments for two full years. And we even pay the sales tax for you!" So we have had people borrow 110% of the value of a new house, fill it with furniture from stores like that one, and abandon both to foreclosure and repossession. What's wrong with this picture?

Americans spent some 10.8 percent of our after-tax money on servicing debt back in 1982. Today the average consumer must spend more than 14 percent of after-tax income just to stay current on household debt.

Long ago and far away, thrift was a virtue. On what must have been another planet, saving was encouraged. And I've even heard of people who actually refused to buy houses, luxury cars, and jewelry they couldn't afford!

Stinginess is not virtuous. Tightfistedness is not a good thing. Parsimony is not to be envied. But thrift, financial prudence, and thinking about long-term consequences over short-term gratification will have predictable outcomes: You are more likely to have money for your own needs and with which to serve God by helping others.

The single driving force that will prohibit these good effects is the same one that has put us in the mess we face: greed.

Posted: 04/03/2008
URL: http://www.heartlight.org/articles/200804/20080403_rootgreed.html

(c) 2008 Used by permission. From Rubel Shelly's "FAX of Life" printed each Tuesday. See Faith Matters for previous issues of the "FAX of Life."

(c) 1996-2006, Heartlight, Inc.

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Be Compassionate

By Joel Osteen

Scripture

"How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?" (1 John 3:17)

You've probably heard the saying that "you may be the only Jesus someone ever sees." There may be a desperate person who is in need of something as small as a smile or a little money, and you might be the best or the only example of Jesus' love to them! With this in mind, look for ways today to live with true compassion and a caring attitude toward others. That's how you can plant seeds of God in someone. You may not be around to see the seeds grow into a large and beautiful plant, but you could make a life-changing impact where you are!

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Questions of Influence

by Dr. Myles Munroe

The law of association states that you become like those with whom you spend time. We often underestimate others’ influence in our lives. There are two words that most accurately describe influence: powerful and subtle. Often, you don’t know you’re being influenced until it is too late. Whether you realize it or not,however, the influence of those you spend time with has a powerful effect on how you will end up in life, on whether you will succeed or fail.

What we call peer pressure is simply this: people with whom we associate exercising their influence on us, trying to direct our lives in the way they want them to go. We should stop telling young people that they alone have peer pressure. Adults have it too. They find it hard to disregard other people’s opinions. There are people who are sixty, seventy, and eighty years old who give in to peer pressure; almost everyone is affected by it.

You must be careful whom you allow to influence you because your vision will be either encouraged or destroyed by others. There are two kinds of people in this world: those who are with you and those who are against you. I have learned that people have the potential to create your environment. Your environment then determines your mind-set, and your mind-set determines your future.

Therefore, you must choose your friends wisely, selecting those who are with you and not against you. You should generally choose friends who are going in the same direction you are and who want to obtain the same things you do, so you can reinforce one another. In light of this truth, I want you to ask yourself three questions.

First, “With whom am I spending time?” Who are your closest friends; who are the people you are confiding in?

Second, “What are those people doing to me?”

In other words, what do they have you listening to, reading, thinking, doing?

What do they have you settling for?

Most important, what is being around these people causing you to become?

For example, if you associate with people who spend more money than they make, the chances are high that you also will spend more than you make.

Third, ask yourself, “Is what other people are doing to me a good thing in relation to my vision?”

When you start telling people where you’re going to go and what you’re going to do, they may (even unconsciously) begin to say things to try to hinder your dream.

You need to ask and answer these three questions for yourself truthfully–and regularly– as you progress toward your vision.

Kingdom Quotes: A Weekly Teaching by Dr. Myles Munroe - BFMI
originally published March 6th, 2004
Bahamas Faith Ministries International
Website: www.bfmmm.com

Whose Side Are You On?
by Rabbi Micah Greenstein

The God of Moses and Jesus is a big God, whose larger concern is not that we all believe what is right, but that we do what is right no matter what we profess to believe….

My dear friends, have you ever considered that we are now witness in this new 21st century to the bleakness and barbarism of the Middle Ages. We have seen, without a hint of remorse, waves of homicide bombers vaporize innocent human beings; we read of terrorists and insurgents who will murder and maim not only outsiders, but their own defenseless countrymen as well. For Islamic extremists in the Middle East, hatred of the non-believer permits no exceptions. Finding truth outside of Islam is for them impossible. Challenging religious authority is a transgression against God. Absolute certainty leaves little room for disagreement, broadmindedness, or tolerance.

The atrocities we are witnessing in the Islamic world and the Middle East really are the worst we can imagine. But forget radical extremists abroad for a moment. What about us? Not all of us in the Western world are wholly exempt from regimented thinking and religious arrogance. A mindset has surfaced here in our own country, where we should know better, and, more importantly, where we can certainly do better.

It wasn’t too long ago when religious officials insisted that America will prevail, no matter what we do in the world, because “God is on our side.” That kind of thinking presumes that only one kind of people in this country possess the truth, and the rest of us do not. I don’t know about you, but people who are convinced they always know the will of God scare the daylights out of me. As the priest says, when Rudy, the dejected Notre Dame football player, asks him why he didn’t make the team again, after giving it all he had, “There are two things of which I’m certain, there is a God, and I’m not Him.”

Humility is the religious virtue seriously lacking in too many faith circles. By that I don’t mean thinking little of one’s self, but being aware of a reality greater than one’s self. The reality of a Big God means that we are all minorities in God’s eyes, even 2 billion Christians when considering a global village of over 6 billion. In order for dialogue among different faiths to ever happen, we must all be willing to concede that none of us alone can ever know as much as all of us together. We must move the emphasis from claiming that God is on our side to worrying more about being on God’s side of compassion, grace, justice, acceptance, and love.

Yes, my friends, we need to worry less about whether God is on our side and worry more about whether we are on God’s side. When I speak at evangelical churches where this message is often lost, I usually mention three things. First, I say that while they may be surprised to see Jewish people in heaven, I just hope they won’t be disappointed. Second, I tell them that missionizing among Jews is a bad idea because there aren’t that many of us and, trust me, the ones they will get will drive them crazy! Finally, when the laughter dies down, I urge them to consider that there is something more important than saving others’ souls. That is, being worthy yourself of being saved—by the life you lead and the deeds you do.

Once, while looking at the WWJD bracelets, I posed the question, What would Jesus do about the most vulnerable members of our society, the widow, the poor, those hurting in our inner city? What would Jesus do? Just pray for them and then abandon them? And if Jesus were to come back tomorrow, what makes you so certain that he would want you to be way out here in the suburbs near the gun show sign I just passed? Don’t you think he’d want you to be with the defenseless in the heart of the city? Isn’t that where he would be? Instead of a preoccupation with absolute certainty, what about being absolutely dedicated to transforming the city, county, and world that is into the city, county, and world that may someday be?

Absolute certainty, the over-enthusiastic fanatical conviction that “God is on my side,” is the fundamental flaw of religious extremism of any kind. Literalism is also impossible, since 400 words in the Old Testament alone are indecipherable when you study the original Hebrew. This means that pastors who claim to be reading a literal translation of the text are really offering their own interpretation or someone else’s uncertain interpretation of it. The search in Judaism and Christianity, I would contend, has never been for the literal. The search has been for the eternal as applied to our own time and place. Our task as people of faith is to do the most that we can with the time that we have in the place that we are and leave the rest to God. We are to pray as if everything depended on God, but we are called to act as if everything depended on us.

Being on God’s side means asserting that God has put us here at this time and in this place to heal broken hearts and lift up the fallen because God has no other hands than ours to do just that. The challenges of yesterday do not exhaust the challenges of today, which is why being on God’s side means realizing that God’s language isn’t just about the holy book. Human beings are God’s language too. We commit bibliolatry by making a God out of the bible rigidly and wrongly interpreted.

God left each generation to apply timeless truths to the here and now.
God, as Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan taught, is that aspect of reality that elicits from us the best that is in us and enables us to bear the worst that can befall us. Human beings are God’s language, that is why whatever befalls our city and world, the religious response is what matters most. Otherwise, if the world is sinking, if the Titanic is sinking, why rearrange the deck chairs.

Being on God’s side means being God’s healing voice on earth. The voice of Isaiah’s love and God’s love.

We are ministers of the sacred when we demonstrate the moral potential God has given to human beings. May we be worthy instruments of God’s will in this world, by remembering that human beings really are God’s language, and therefore, what we do with our faith… will determine whether we move the world closer to the Messianic Age, or backward to the Middle Ages. God wants us to move forward, not backward. May we all be on God’s side, with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our might.

Amen.

Delivered April 30, 2006 at Idlewild Presbyterian Church, Memphis Tennessee .

:: Sacred Secrets ::

Matthew 13:15-23

The Message (MSG)

Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson

The Meaning of the Harvest Story

I don't want Isaiah's forecast repeated all over again:

   Your ears are open but you don't hear a thing.
      Your eyes are awake but you don't see a thing.
   The people are blockheads!
   They stick their fingers in their ears
      so they won't have to listen;
   They screw their eyes shut
      so they won't have to look,
      so they won't have to deal with me face-to-face
      and let me heal them.

"But you have God-blessed eyes—eyes that see! And God-blessed ears—ears that hear! A lot of people, prophets and humble believers among them, would have given anything to see what you are seeing, to hear what you are hearing, but never had the chance.

"Study this story of the farmer planting seed. When anyone hears news of the kingdom and doesn't take it in, it just remains on the surface, and so the Evil One comes along and plucks it right out of that person's heart. This is the seed the farmer scatters on the road.

"The seed cast in the gravel—this is the person who hears and instantly responds with enthusiasm. But there is no soil of character, and so when the emotions wear off and some difficulty arrives, there is nothing to show for it.

"The seed cast in the weeds is the person who hears the kingdom news, but weeds of worry and illusions about getting more and wanting everything under the sun strangle what was heard, and nothing comes of it.

"The seed cast on good earth is the person who hears and takes in the News, and then produces a harvest beyond his wildest

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