Tag Archives: money

THE GOSPEL OF LUKE – HAVE YOU ACTED THE FOOL?

March 7, 2020Bible Studygood servant, money, returnLuella Campbell

HAVE YOU ACTED THE FOOL?

“When He had their attention and because they were getting close to Jerusalem by this time and expectation was building that God’s kingdom would appear any minute, He told this story:

“There was once a man descended from a royal house who needed to make a long trip back to headquarters to get authorisation for his rule and then return. But first he called ten servants, gave them each a sum of money, and instructed them, ‘Operate with this until I return…’

“When he came back…he called those ten servants…to find out how they had done.

“The first said, ‘Master, I doubled your money.’

“He said, ‘Good servant! …I’m making you governor of ten towns.’

“The second said, ‘Master, I made fifty percent profit on your money.’

“He said, ‘I’m putting you in charge of five towns.’

“The next servant said, ‘Master, here’s your money safe and sound. I kept it hidden in the cellar. To tell you the truth, I was a little afraid. I know you have high standards and hate sloppiness, and don’t suffer fools gladly.’

“He said, ‘You’re right that I don’t suffer fools gladly – you’ve acted the fool! Why didn’t you at least invest the money so I would have gotten a little interest on it?’

“Then he said to those standing there, ‘Take the money from him and give it to the servant who doubled my stake.’

“They said, ‘But Master, he already has double.’

He said, ‘That’s what I mean. Risk your life and get more than you ever dreamed of. Play it safe and you end up holding the bag…’ Luke 19:11-27.

Another kingdom story that turns what we value on its head and exposes some of the faulty thinking of the church!

Jesus told a number of stories about noblemen or landowners who entrusted their property to servants before going away for a period of time and then returning. To His disciples, He spoke plainly of His return to the Father for an interval before He came back to claim His kingdom and restore all things to their original perfection.

This same idea is reflected in the Hebrew marriage custom where the bridegroom-to-be, after proposing to his prospective bride, returns to his father’s house to build his bridal chamber in preparation for the consummation of his marriage. After his father has approved his work, he is released to marry his bride and carry her over the threshold into the bridal chamber to become one with her.

What is the significance of the interval before His return? In this story, Jesus focussed on the responsibility of the servants to carry out the Master’s instructions while He was away. To every believer, He assigns a task in keeping with his gifting and role in God’s kingdom.

His commission to every believer is to know Him and to make Him known wherever He has placed us in the world. He has woven into every person unique abilities in seed form. Like the sums of money given to the servants in our story, we can either multiply or bury what we have been given, but we will not escape accountability. We are not only given gifts, but we have also been given time…time to use those gifts to make His name known in our world.

Unfortunately there has crept into the church’s thinking an escapist mentality – the world is bad so let’s just hole up and hold on until Jesus comes to get us out of here. This mind-set is in keeping with the general attitude of the world – we do not take responsibility for what we think, believe and do. We are merely the victims of other people’s actions or our circumstances. We are part of the ‘White Knuckle Club” that cowers in the corner and waits to be rescued!

This is contrary to Jesus’ intention for His church. His idea is that we are serving our apprenticeship in the interval until He returns. What we do with the resources He has entrusted to us will determine how much responsibility He is able to give to us in the life to come.

So what is our job in this life? To develop our unique gifts so that we may know Him and make Him known.

“Now this is eternal life that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” John 17:3 (NIV).

“He said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.'” Mark16:15 (NIV).

This involves making all sorts of sacrifices; time, money, name, reputation, comfort, ambitions, family, or whatever else it may cost to obey the Master.

As always, Jesus takes the long look, taking into account the eternal rewards for present suffering. Is the sacrifice worth it? It all depends on where your focus is – you can rationalise and take your ease now, like the third servant in the story, but there is a terrifying price to pay for this kind of faulty thinking. The servant blamed the Master for his laziness but his reasoning didn’t stick.

So, what’s the bottom line? Jesus didn’t intend for us to spend the time in between desperately hanging on, waiting for Him to pull us out of a bad situation. He left us here with a commission to live out our lives where He has put us, in the energy of His Holy Spirit, and to do whatever we can, through our unique abilities, to show the world what He is like. When He comes, will He find the resources He has entrusted to us much more than we started with, and will He, with confidence, be able to entrust greater responsibilities to us according to our faithfulness in the small things?

THE GOSPEL OF LUKE – IT WILLCOST

February 7, 2020Bible Studybuild, foundation, moneyLuella Campbell

IT WILL COST

“Is there anyone here who, planning to build a new house, doesn’t first sit down and figure the cost so you’ll know if you can complete it? If you only get the foundation laid and then run out of money, you’re going to look pretty foolish. Everyone passing by will poke fun at you: ‘He started something he couldn’t finish.'” Luke 14:28-30.

Jesus says a lot and reveals a lot about Himself and being His disciple in this statement. Unlike His arch enemy, there’s no fine print in His invitation to follow Him. Satan carefully conceals the cost of believing his lies in a sugar-coated pill that kills as surely as swallowing a cyanide capsule. Not so Jesus! He leaves no-one with illusions about the cost of following Him.

‘Before you make any commitment to me,’ He says,’ be sure you understand what is involved and what it will cost you. Don’t wait to find out when you have already been joined to me because the separation is painful and permanent if you decide to pull out.’ Isn’t that just like Jesus? He doesn’t lure us into commitment to Him under false pretenses and then reveal the conditions after we have believed Him and been born into His kingdom.

Being a disciple isn’t a bed of roses. There is a cost involved, not money or good works but nothing less than dying. It’s not the dying so much that is the problem but what has to die – our right to the ownership of our own lives inherited from our forefather, Adam. He rejected God’s right to make the rules and chose to make his own and, in that choice, he wrote his own obituary. He died to God, to eternal life and to all the wonder of a life lived in union with and directed by a loving heavenly Father. Satan neglected to tell him what rebellion would cost!

Jesus urges, ‘Before you blindly plunge into a commitment to discipleship, be sure you understand what it involves. Then, when tough times come and the requirement to submit and obey your Rabbi eat into your will, your sense of ‘fairness’, your idea of God’s love, what you think is best for you, how you treat other people, how you wear Jesus’ yoke, how you handle the stewardship of your money and possessions and all the myriad ways you consciously or unconsciously reveal who you really are, you won’t chicken out because you didn’t know what to expect.’

Being a disciple of Jesus requires a daily dying to yourself. Jesus called it ‘shouldering your cross.’ Your cross is not some difficult or painful circumstance you have to bear over which you have no control, like an impossible spouse, a wayward child or a physical infirmity. Shouldering your cross is purely voluntary. Jesus did not have to go to the cross but He chose to. He had every opportunity to evade His persecutors and escape their murderous intentions, He could have saved Himself but He didn’t.

Not only that but He absorbed in Himself all the injustice, venom and cruelty that human beings could dump on Him without revenge or retaliation. That is the majesty of Jesus’ sacrifice. He could have died cursing and swearing just like the criminals who died beside Him, but He did not. “He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so He did not open His mouth.” Isaiah 53:7b (NIV).

But…what we pay for, we receive. The price we pay, dying to ourselves, will receive something far greater in return. That’s how it is with God. What we pay in surrender, we receive in the fullness of God’s life and all the blessings that go with it, freedom from guilt and fear, His love, His joy and His peace. These are priceless compared with the unwillingness to allow Him to steer us through the allurements or sin which conceal the terrible price of death.

The choice is yours….

THE BOOK OF ACTS – A HANDOUT…

March 7, 2019Bible Studya hand-out, beggar, miracle, moneyLuella Campbell

CHAPTER 3

A HANDOUT…

“One day at three o’clock in the afternoon, Peter and John were on their way into the Temple for prayer meeting. At the same time there was a man crippled from birth being carried up. Every day he was set down at the Temple gate, the one called Beautiful, to beg from those going into the Temple. When he saw Peter and John about to enter the Temple, he asked for a hand-out. Peter, with John at his side, looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘Look here.’ He looked up, expecting to get something from them.

“Peter said, ‘I don’t have a nickel to my name, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk!’ He grabbed him by the right hand and pulled him up. In an instant his feet and ankle joints became firm. He jumped to his feet and walked.” Acts 3:1-8 (The Message).

Such an everyday event…beggar asks for money, hand in the purse, toss him a few coins, go on their way! But for Peter and John and the rest of the church it proved to be the turning of the tide for them all.

There is no hint in Luke’s record of how long the new-born church enjoyed the favour of the people of Jerusalem…a few weeks, a few months, perhaps even a year or two, at the most. They were still living like Jews, keeping to their dietary laws, observing the feasts and going to the Temple for their daily prayers.

Up to this point they had done little to rattle the cages of the Jewish religious leaders. To all intents and purposes, the fuss surrounding Jesus the Nazarene had died down. Many people from their ranks had believed but didn’t seem to be making waves until a beggar at the Temple gate asked for a hand-out.

How many times had Peter and John walked past this man on their way into the Temple? Sometimes, the very familiarity of a person’s plight dulls our ears to his cry. Perhaps the apostles were so used to feeling helpless that they simply ignored the man and went on their way after dropping a few coins into his outstretched hand.

What made this occasion different? What awakened in them the awareness of a new disposition, a new presence in their inner being, a new confidence in the Jesus whom they had seen doing the very miracle this man desperately needed? For them it was a light bulb moment!

They realised in a flash that this man needed more than a hand-out. They had been elevated to the same position as sons as their Master had been. They could do what Jesus did because the same Spirit that worked through Jesus was in them. This time, they had no money but they had something far better – the very nature, disposition and power of the Healer.

Compassion and confidence exploded into faith that declared, ‘Get up and walk.’ Action matched command; Peter helped him to his feet and the miracle was complete! The kingdom of God was in action, restoring a man born into the realm of a fallen world into which Jesus had stepped to undo what Satan had done.

That was the moment when these followers of the man the religious hierarchy had crucified as a blasphemer set the cat among the pigeons. They could no longer be ignored or tolerated because they were now challenging the very foundations of their religion and their power…

Money – The Overflow Of The Heart

March 10, 2016Christian Lifeattitude, disposition, evil eye, eye of light, moneyLuella Campbell

MONEY – THE OVERFLOW OF THE HEART

Money! Strange, isn’t it, that Jesus spoke more about money and possessions and His disciples’ attitude to them than He did about the subjects we would have thought important to Him as His followers – “spiritual” things like faith and love and prayer. Why did He have so much to say about money? I think He had a pretty good idea about what drives the world and what controls the hearts of people, then as it does now. Perhaps the problem is not so much money as the love of money which, said Paul, is the root of all kinds of evil.

As disciples of Jesus, we need to have the correct attitude towards our money which arises, first of all from what is central in our lives; either our love-relationship to God as our Father and the trust that flows from that love, or our doubts and fears about Him which cause us to trust the money we can see rather than the God we can’t see. We become preoccupied with the things that the pagans run after when we are unsure about our heavenly Father’s trustworthiness towards us as His children.

Consider this chiasm to which we have already referred:

A No one can serve two masters.

B Either he will hate the one and

C Love the other, or

C’ He will be devoted to one and

B’ Despise the other.

A’ You cannot serve both God and Money.

(Matt. 6: 24).

Either money or God will occupy our affection – not both and. Jesus was adamant. It’s not primarily about who or what we serve. It’s about who or what we love. We cannot – it is impossible to – serve God and money.

Before we can consider the ramifications of our attitude towards money and the way we use it, we must get this one thing straight. Either we love God or we don’t. Either we trust Him as our heavenly Father or we don’t. There is no middle road. Our priority love for God or money will direct everything we do with the resources we have been given.

We also need to have the correct disposition. The part that money plays in our lives is determined by our basic disposition. The godless person is essentially selfish and self-serving. He does not recognise the goodness and grace of God in the world around him. He is self-absorbed and cannot see beyond the end of his nose. His eyes look inward, not outward and he concentrates only on his own wants and needs. In Hebrew thought, this was called “the evil eye” which was diagnosed by its attitude towards money and possessions.

The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If, then, the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness! (Matt. 6: 22-23)

Jesus has rescued us from the dominion (control) of selfishness and greed (darkness) and transferred us into the realm of God’s rule which is generous and full of mercy (the kingdom of light – Col. 1: 13-14). He has given us a new disposition – “the eye of light”.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come. (2 Cor. 5: 17)

The ”eye of light” is able to see beyond its own needs to the needs of others. It recognises God’s goodness in its own life and participates in His goodness by sharing it with others. It understands that to give is the way to enter into the flow of God’s goodness. It builds and strengthens the disposition of light.

Jesus taught His disciples that God does not simply meet our needs when we ask Him. He has put in place a system which ensures that we show the world around us what He is like by being generous to others. God’s resources flow back to us when we use our resources to bless others.

Like our mouths, the way we handle our money is a mirror of our hearts.

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A Treacherous Association

August 27, 2015Bible Studybetray, chief priests, Judas, moneyLuella Campbell

A TREACHEROUS ASSOCIATION

Then Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve, went to the chief priests to betray Jesus to them. They were delighted to hear this and promised to give him money. So he watched for an opportunity to hand Him over. (Mark 14: 10-11)

Mmm! So Judas was among those who jumped on the woman for wasting her perfume on Jesus, was it? In John’s account of this or a similar story, he named him. But it is significant, isn’t it, that Judas chose this moment to leave the group and make his offer to the chief priests. Was it this incident that tipped him over the edge?

What was it with Judas that he was never really one with the rest of the disciples? Now and again the gospel writers named one or other of the disciples, apart from Peter, James and John who were the three in the forefront of the action and the conversation in the group. But Judas is not mentioned except for those times when his true nature was revealed. John said he was a thief – helping himself to money from the communal purse. One wonders why Jesus entrusted the bag to him.

On this occasion he was among those who had a lot to say about a woman who poured an entire jar of very expensive nard on Jesus’ head. Jesus openly rebuked them, defending the woman’s action with gracious words. Judas must have stung with the rebuke, especially as it exposed his callous heart. He had no sympathy for the poor. If he did, why did he not give of his own money instead of criticising her for her act of devotion to Jesus? Obviously he did not understand love like that.

What was Judas’ issue with Jesus that drove him to do such a dastardly deed to someone who had whom shown him nothing but love and friendship? What was Judas’ expectation of Jesus? Obviously he was a sympathiser with those who were anti-Rome. Like some of the other disciples, he could not wait for the day when the Romans were driven from Israel, as he and the other disciples expected from their Messiah. Their expectation was so high that they were continually squabbling among themselves about positions in Jesus’ new government.

Jesus had made it obvious that He had no connection with the current religious leaders because of their hypocrisy and double standards – so they would not have a place in Jesus’ cabinet. His disciples would feature prominently in the rulership when He took over, so he must have thought. Judas was the quiet one, not saying anything but scheming under the surface about what he wat going to do. He took no one into his confidence when he cooked up his plan to try to force Jesus’ hand.

Why did he decide to betray his Master to the ruling party? Did he really want to get rid of Him? It’s possible, since there can be no fellowship between light and darkness. Judas had an evil heart and not even his years in the company of Jesus had changed that. The more time he spent with Him, the great the rift became as Judas’ heart was exposed, time and again by the truth that fell from Jesus’ lips. Like the Pharisees, did Judas decide that the only way to silence his conscience was to shut the mouth of the one who pricked and prodded him?

Perhaps Judas was becoming frustrated that his political aspirations were not being fulfilled. Why did he decide to follow Jesus when he heard His call? Did he attach himself to the group initially, becoming interested when he listened to this man talking about the kingdom of God? Then, surprise, when Jesus chose His Twelve from among the many that followed Him, Judas found himself among the chosen ones. Did he want to be there? Perhaps, so that he could find out more about this kingdom He was proclaiming and be in on the planning and preparation to take over.

Imagine his frustration when Jesus spent not one moment scheming with His disciples on their take-over strategy. Instead, He spoke about heart attitudes and actions which hit Judas in the solar plexus, uncovering his greedy and wicked heart until he could stand it no more. This final prod, defending a worthless woman and exposing Judas’ callous attitude to a beautiful act of devotion, sent him over the top.

Off he went to the chief priests, determined to silence Jesus once and for all, or to set up the circumstances that would force Him out into the open. But, in the end, it was not Jesus but Judas that was forced to show his hand – Judas, the treacherous back-stabbing “friend”!

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