Rich toward God

Obey your thirst.

Life is short. Play more.

Just do it.

Hungry? Why wait?

All of these slogans above seem to focus on the same idea. Life exists for your pleasure.

While I believe that God desires for us to live an abundant life, I don’t believe we were created to live a life focused on entertaining and pleasing ourselves.

But you might think to yourself, aren’t those the same thing?

No. But our commercialized, market-driven, consumeristic society would want you to believe that. How else would they convince us to spend billions of dollars every year on things that we don’t really need?

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating that we all have to go home and get ride of every television, video game system, cell phone, and every other item that provides us with entertainment and recreation.

Rather, we need to consider how our spending and consumption align with the Kingdom of God. God has not provided written rules about what you can own and what you can’t. The Bible does not tell you what level of financial accumulation is right and what level is wrong. But, God does have a lot to say about what we do with our blessings, including this parable told by Jesus in Luke 12…

“The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’

“Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’

“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’

“This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”

The heart of the matter is, well, the heart. Life is not about taking it easy, eating, drinking, and being merry. Rather, life is about being rich toward God. And what does being rich toward God look like?

I would guess it looks a lot like the life of Jesus.

 

shine!
Jason