Phil Colgan: Pastors need to provide radical, biblical leadership in finances, starting with repentance!

“Leading is not just teaching. If we preach what the Bible says in this area and we’re living unchanged middle-class lives, we’re hypocrites. If we ask people to be generous but we ourselves are not giving generously, we’re hypocrites.

Leading in finances is not just using neat techniques to raise money to put on a youth worker, as good as that is. It’s bringing to bear those hard-hitting calls to repentance from the Scriptures on ourselves and our flock. Teach it boldly, and in repentance live it out.”

Phil Colgan in “Leading in Finances” article in Issue 402, November-December 2012 of matthiasmedia.com/briefing

“Why is it so difficult for the wealthy to enter the Kingdom of God? It is no doubt the reverse of the reason that the poor are honoured: the wealthy tend not to be dependent on God. Wealth cultivates self-reliance, leading to pride. The proud are opposed to God, who hates pride. Again, it is not wealth per se that is the problem. In fact, wealth is a good gift from God. But the lack of humility and lack of dependence that often accompanies wealth is the issue.”

Con Campbell in “The poor are always with you” article in Issue 402 November-December 2012 of matthiasmedia.com/briefing

“Whatever good thing you do for Him, if done according to the Word, is laid up for you as treasure in chests and coffers, to be brought out to be rewarded before both men and angels, to your eternal comfort.”

John Bunyan (1628-1688) as recounted by Bruce Wilkinson in “Walk Thru Eternal Rewards” (Atlanta: WTBM, 1987).

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field. Matthew 13:44

“It is only when he discovers buried treasure that his perspective changes.

Suddenly his possessions look cheap and paltry. A joy is rising in him and an excitement that makes his sweat and tremble. There may have been regret about a cherished piece of furniture or a family heirloom. But it is only momentary. The choice he faces lies between his worthless bits and pieces and the field with buried treasure.

There is nothing noble about his sacrifice. There would, on the other hand, be something incredibly stupid about not making it. Anyone but a fool would do exactly as the man did. Everyone will envy him for his good fortune and commend him not on his spiritual character, but on his common sense.

What I have called “his miserable bits and pieces” are the things of this life to which we naturally cling—money, property, cars, prestige or a good job…If we were to grasp the glories he has for us we would realize how silly we are to cling to such rubbish.”

John White in The Cost of Commitment (Downers Grove: IVP Classics, 2006) 38-39.

But the king replied to Araunah, “No, I insist on paying you for it. I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.” So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen and paid fifty shekels of silver for them. 2 Samuel 24:24

“David understood the religious imperative of true sacrifice. For him, religion that cost nothing was worth nothing, either to God or humanity…

In purchasing the Land from Araunah and then utilizing it for sacrifice to the Lord, David was apparently following Torah guidelines regarding the dedication of land to the Lord (cf. Lev. 27:20-21)…

Because of David’s decisive and costly actions, “the LORD answered prayer in behalf of the land and the plague on Israel was stopped.”

In making these sacrifices for his people, David foreshadowed the actions of Jesus, the ultimate son of David, who also gave sacrificially on a hill near Jerusalem for His people so that an even more tragic plague might be stopped.”

Robert D. Bergen in 1, 2 Samuel (NAC; B & H Publishing, 1996) 480.

“God is not glorified when we keep for ourselves (no matter how thankfully) what we ought to be using to alleviate the misery of unevangelized, uneducated, unmedicated, and unfed millions. The evidence that many professing Christians have been deceived by this doctrine is how little they give and how much they own. God has prospered them. And by an almost irresistible law of consumer culture (baptized by a doctrine of health, wealth, and prosperity) they have bought bigger (and more) houses, newer (and more) cars, fancier (and more) clothes, better (and more) meat, and all manner of trinkets and gadgets and containers and devices and equipment to make life more fun.

They will object: Does not the Old Testament promise that God will prosper his people? Indeed! God increases our yield so that by giving we can prove our yield is not our god. God does not prosper a man’s business so he can move from a Ford to a Cadillac. God prospers a business so that 17,000 unreached peoples can be reached with the gospel. He prospers a business so that twelve percent of the world’s population can move a step back from the precipice of starvation.”

John Piper in Desiring God (Portland: Multnomah, 1987) 163-164.

“There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remains to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself. He only is our true good, and since we have forsaken him, it is a strange thing that there is nothing in nature which has not been serviceable in taking His place; the stars, the heavens, earth, the elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, pestilence, war, famine, vices, adultery, incest. And since man has lost the true good, everything can appear equally good to him, even his own destruction, though so opposed to God, to reason, and to the whole course of nature.” (cf. Psalm 49).

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pensées (Thoughts) #425, trans. W.F. Trotter.

“Like every human organization the Church is constantly in danger of corruption. As soon as power and wealth come to the Church, manipulation, exploitation, misuse of influence, and outright corruption are not far away. How do we prevent corruption in the Church? The answer is clear: by focusing on the poor. The poor make the Church faithful to its vocation. When the Church is no longer a church for the poor, it loses its spiritual identity. It gets caught up in disagreements, jealousy, power games, and pettiness…The poor are given to the Church so that the Church as the body of Christ can be and remain a place of mutual concern, love, and peace.”

Henri Nouwen in Bread for the Journey reading for October 31 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).

“The outcome of greed is poverty…People that choose wealth over freedom can have neither…People are satisfied by becoming reconciled to God, not by acquiring wealth…Idols of mammon invite us to place our hopes on wealth, tell us that taking is better than giving, tempt us to covet what our neighbor has, convince us that we have been wronged because we do not possess as much as we desire, and finally, pervert the sense of justice that alone can preserve peace. If we continue to worship them, the unrest and discontent that mark our society now are only a sample of the destruction that is to come.”

Herbert Schlossberg in Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture (Wheaton: Crossway, 1990) 132-139.

“Wherein blessedness doth not consist: it doth not lie in the acquisition of worldly things; happiness cannot by any art of chemistry be extracted here: Christ doth not say, Blessed are the rich, or blessed are the noble; yet too many idolize these things…Transitory things are not commensurate to the desires of the soul; therefore they cannot render him blessed; nothing on earth can satisfy. Eccl. 5:10. ‘He that loveth silver, shall not be satisfied with silver;’ riches are unsatisfying.

The soul is a spiritual thing, riches are of an earthly extract, and how can these fill a spiritual substance? A man may as well fill his chest with grace, as his heart with gold; if a man were crowned with all the delights of the world, nay, if God should build him an house among the stars, yet the restless eye of his unsatisfied mind would be looking still higher, he would be prying beyond the heavens for some hidden rarities which he thinks he hath not yet attained to; so unquenchable is the thirst of the soul, till it come to bathe in the river of life, and to centre upon true blessedness.”

Thomas Watson in Discourses on Important and Interesting Topics (Glasgow: Blackie, Fullarton, & Co., 1829) 38-39.