Did you know that more Americans believe in the
afterlife today than did 40 years ago?
People are looking to have a connection beyond themselves. But are they finding what they are looking
for? If they were, wouldn’t we see
people who are happier, more at peace, more full of love? But when I look around, I don’t see
that. I see fear, anger; people who
don’t seem very happy at all.
Here we are in the richest society in human history,
yet so many seem so unhappy. Why is
that? It’s because we live in a culture
caught in a delusion, a delusion that promises happiness and fulfillment that
it can never provide. In fact, it provides
the exact opposite.
What is this delusion, and more importantly, how do
we free ourselves from it. In this
powerful prayer from, David, one of the Bible’s greatest figures, God shows us
the way. Let’s hear what God has to say.
No society in human history has had more luxury,
more wealth than ours. Yet people don’t
seem to be content. Lots of folks are
more discontented than ever. Why is that?
In this passage, God shows us why.
Our discontent comes because too many trust in what cannot be trusted,
rather in the One who can. And they
don’t see how utterly addictive and deadly their false trust is. But in David’s actions, God shows us the path
to freedom, a path out of the delusion that binds up our world. What is that
delusion? To see that, we need to
understand first, what David does here, and more importantly, why David does
it.
If you read all the stories about King David in the
Bible (and after Jesus himself, no one gets more attention than David.) one
thing becomes clear. David had one
overriding desire for the people he led.
He yearned for them to experience the presence of God as intimately as
he did. That’s why the very first thing
David does after he becomes king is to bring the Ark home.
Centuries before, God had told Moses to build this container,
this Ark of the Covenant, to hold the Ten Commandments that God had given to
Moses, to have it as a sign of God’s presence among them. But by David’s day, the Ark had become more
of a divine good luck charm, than anything else. In fact the ark had ended up in a remote town
on the outskirts of Israel. That geographical
distance said everything about the people’s relationship with God. God had become remote, distant, more a boss
or a lifeguard, than a friend or a lover.
You do what God says, sure. You
call upon God when you are in trouble, definitely. But you’re not all that close. You don’t
really have a relationship.
A few weeks ago, I had a little daddy-cation. My wife, Chantal, went, with our son,
Patrick, to visit her parents in Canada.
And I liked having the time, just to do guy things, to eat food I
shouldn’t eat, watch sports and Netflix to late in the night, but very soon it
began to wear pretty thin. I missed the
companionship. I missed my wife’s smile,
my son’s exuberant play. The house felt
empty, even lifeless. I missed
them. I really missed them. I couldn’t wait for them to come home. But how
sad it would have been, if that had not been the case? It would have been painfully clear that whatever
our marriage license said, whatever the names on my son’s birth certificate, the
reality of our relationships had become something far different.
That is exactly where Israel is. God has been away so to speak, but the people
of Israel have hardly missed him. How
can they? They hardly know him. So,
what does David do? He brings God home,
by bringing the ark home, to Jerusalem, the center of the nation. In that act, David is declaring. God
can’t be somewhere over there. You’ve
got to have God close. God has got to be
personal or he’s nothing at all. But David didn’t want to stop there. He wanted God not just to be home. He dreamed for God to have a home right in
the midst of the people, a temple where God could become up close and
personal.
And now, decades later, at the very end of David’s
life, it’s finally happening! God is
becoming real and personal. But it’s
not happening because of the temple.
That’s not built yet. It’s
happening because of what David does here to build the temple.
What does David do?
He empties his pockets. He says,
not only is the government going to give, I’m going to give. In fact, I’m going to give everything, every
ounce of gold and silver that I have. Now just to give perspective on what
David gave. A talent represented ten
years wages for a worker, and David is giving thousands of talents. In today’s dollars, he is giving billions and
billions. And David isn’t simply giving
to a building. David is giving to a ministry.
The temple not only served as the center of worship, but as the center
for care for the poor, for the widow, for the orphan.
And this act of radical generosity so blows away the
people, that they start giving like never before. Their giving, thousands and thousands of
talents, means that a good bit of the entire nation’s economy is going to ministry,
to worship of God and care for the poor.
But more than what they give is what the Bible tells
us about how they give. It says that
they gave freely and whole-heartedly.
Do you get what that means? Their
giving actually liberated them. It freed
them from some sort of bondage. And
this word whole-heartedly, literally is shalom-heartedly. Shalom means a sense of utter
fulfillment. These people are giving out
of a deep sense of joy, of satisfaction.
What has happened to them? David’s radical gift has broken the delusion
that bound them, the same delusion that binds us. In giving up their wealth, the Israelites had
realized. Wealth did not hold the
meaning and security that they thought it did.
In fact, it promised security and meaning, but all it really gave them was
the opposite, meaninglessness and insecurity.
The heart of the human problem comes down to
this. We trust in the wrong things to
give us significance, and a lot of that wrong trust comes down to money. Let’s say, you think that people liking you,
approving of you gives you significance.
Well, money helps out with that.
Or let’s say, your significance comes from a sense of control, of
safety. Well, having money can seem to
help with that too. Heck, that’s why they call it financial
security, right?
But
don’t you see that’s actually a delusion.
Money can’t provide love. Money
can’t even provide security. Can money
stop cancer? Can money stop
divorce? Money can’t really stop
anything. But because we think it can,
because we buy into that delusion, money has power over us. We don’t really have money. Money has us.
How
much does money have us? We spend more on
our garbage bags, than 90 nations in our world spend on everything. We have
twice as many malls as we do high schools.
And parents spend six hours shopping each week, not even counting
on-line shopping. And they spend 40
minutes playing with their kids.
Our
families are smaller today, but our houses are bigger. So how do we pay for them? We work more hours than anyone else. so we get bigger houses, but we don’t spend
much time in them, because we are working so hard to pay for them. And even then, we still don’t have enough
room for all our stuff. So now we have
30,000 self- storage places where 40 years ago we almost had none. Our
households now contain and consume more stuff than every other household in
history combined.
And
what has all our stuff gotten us. More
Americans declare bankruptcy every year than graduate from college. And forget the financial bankruptcies, the
family and relationship bankruptcies blow that away. American couples talk to each other just 12
minutes each day. And then because a lot
of those minutes are fights, often over money, they work longer hours to avoid
the drama. And so the divorce rate has
tripled in the last 50 years. And teen
suicide has tripled along with it. Tens
of millions take pills for anxiety or depression. And with all our gadgets to save time, we
have less time than ever. We even sleep
less, 20% less than people did a hundred years ago.
The
more people fill their lives with things, the emptier they become. "More than ever we
have big houses and broken homes, high incomes and low morale (David Myers). We
excel at making a living but we fail at making a life. We celebrate our
prosperity but can’t find our purpose. We cherish our freedoms but we can’t
find connection. In an age of plenty we are hungrier than ever."
Yet we still don’t get it.
Jesus talked about greed way more than he did adultery? Why? Because you know if you’re committing
adultery. But if you’re caught up in
greed, a lot of times you don’t.
It’s like no one thinks they’re selfish. But let me ask, if someone takes a group
photo, where do you look first? And how
do you judge if the picture is good? If
you look good, right? In fact, if you look bad, don’t you want to take another? And so it is with greed. If you don’t think you’re caught up in greed,
it’s guaranteed that you are. That’s how
you can live in the most affluent society in human history, and still complain
you don’t have enough.
But on that day, when David emptied his back account, his radical
gift freed his people from that. Instead
of hoarding their money or spending it on themselves, they gave it away to
glorify God, to care for the poor. Money
became just money, so God could finally become God.
But how do you and I become free?
Our wealth makes it even harder.
That’s why the wealthier people become, generally, the stingier and more
selfish they get. That’s how powerfully
wealth enslaves you. So how do you
break free?
The answer lies in a question.
Why did David, who dreamed of this temple, even funded it, never build
it? God told him not to. God
said. You’re a man of war, and I need a
man of peace to build this temple. I
need this temple to point to a time when wars will cease, when my peace, my
shalom, will fill the entire world. And
so God said to David: When your days are fulfilled to go to be with your
ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, one of your own sons, and
I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for me, and I will establish
his throne forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me.
I will not take my steadfast love from him…but I will confirm him in my house
and in my kingdom forever, and his throne shall be established forever. (1 Chronicles 17)
Now
David thought this had to be Solomon.
And Solomon did build a temple, a house for God. But Solomon’s kingdom did not last
forever. It lasted a few
centuries. So who is God talking
about? God is talking about a Son to
come, who will call God his father, whose kingdom will last forever, who not
only will build a temple. He will become
the temple.
When
Jesus was beginning his ministry, he said something strange. Standing in front of the temple in Jerusalem,
he said. This temple will be destroyed,
and in three days, I will raise it up.
And people thought he was crazy.
This temple took decades to build, they said, and you’ll build it again
in 3 days? But Jesus wasn’t talking
about that temple. He was talking about
himself.
What
is a temple? It’s a bridge between God
and us. In the temple, human beings encounter
God up close and personal so they can know God not as a boss but as a lover, as
a friend. And, in Jesus, God was giving
the ultimate temple, the ultimate bridge.
And to build this temple, God didn’t just empty his bank account, he
emptied his life. He became utterly
poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich, rich in security, in peace,
in fulfillment. And as you grasp how
radically, how infinitely, God has given everything for you, everything, you’ll
realize you don’t need money for security or safety or approval or
fulfillment. You already have all that
and more in the God who has radically given it all up for you. And as you let the reality of that radical
gift live in you, it will shatter the delusion that money has. And you will give to glorify God, to care for
the poor. You will give so radically,
so generously that it will stun you. But
you’ll give it freely because you have become free, free so that money can be
just be money, and God can finally be God.
No comments:
Post a Comment