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Chapter 6: Materialism

In The Book of Signs, Dr. David Jeremiah offers answers to questions including:

• What does the Bible tell us about the future?
• How much can we understand about biblical prophecy and its application in our lives?
• What signs and signals will precede the end of everything as we know it?
• Which of those signs and signals have already come to pass, which are we experiencing now, and which are still to come?

An epic and authoritative guide to biblical prophecy, The Book of Signs is a must-have resource for Christians seeking to navigate the uncertainties of the present and embrace God’s promises for the future with a renewed sense of hope and purpose.

Chapter six. Materialism in March 2018, Forbes named investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett, the third richest person in the world.
Yet this man of great means has chosen to live more frugally than you might imagine.
Another article published a couple of months later tells us more.
Buffett has long been admired for his dogged work ethic, staying close to his Nebraska roots and for maintaining a relatively modest lifestyle, at least for someone with a net worth exceeding $80 billion.
He started out delivering newspapers seven decades ago in Washington DC where he lived as a teenager for several years while his father served in the US House.
Today, Buffett lives in the same Omaha home he purchased in 1958.
His emphasis on frugality and philanthropy has served as life lessons to those who follow him every bit as much as the principles of value investing.
He has preached for decades as chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Buffett, a self described religious agnostic might be in the business of making money and perhaps he does love money, but his lifestyle doesn’t lead observers to believe he’s particularly materialistic if only that were true.
Of everyone, including some Christians, money has a siren call that if answered is always destructive.
Letting the love of money run amok inevitably leads to a lifestyle of materialism which Merriam Webster defines as a preoccupation with or stress upon material rather than intellectual or spiritual things that lifestyle can involve hoarding money and increasing what’s in the bank at every opportunity or it can manifest as accumulating possessions, adding more and more belongings Whenever possible, it can also mean constantly upgrading possessions because of a desire for not just more but better materialism comes with a cost that is sometimes subtle and sometimes all too obvious.
For instance, materialism is the enemy of contentment.
When a desire for more and better outweighs the desire for financial stability, it can lead to crippling debt and the presence of discontent and debt can affect our general well-being and relationships for generations.
Far worse is how materialism can negatively affect our walk with God and how rampant materialism is and will become in these last days, Pastor and speaker, Doctor Mark Hitchcock pictures the inevitable culmination of this growing materialistic trend.
During the coming tribulation. The gulf between rich and poor will grow wider than ever before.
Food will be so expensive that only the very wealthy will have enough.
Famine will relentlessly hammer the middle class until the middle class disappears.
The vast majority of people will wallow in misery but the rich will continue to bask in the comfort of their luxurious lifestyle.
The world will be radically divided among the elite haves and the mass of the have nots this will make the suffering of the have nots even more unbearable as they watch.
The privileged few indulge themselves in the lap of luxury.
In his unfolding vision of the end times.
The Apostle John describes the extreme scarcity of basic human needs that will occur during the tribulation period.
Revelation 65 and six reads when he opened the third seal.
I heard the third living creature say come and see.
So I looked and behold a black horse and he was sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand and I heard a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying a quart of wheat for a Darius and three quarts of barley for a Darius and do not harm the oil and the wine in John’s Day, a quart of wheat was the minimum daily survival need for one person.
In the tribulation period. This survival minimum will cost a full day’s wages, which means common people will be forced to scrounge for cheaper less nourishing food.
Simply to avoid starvation, salt, cooking oils, meat or milk will be utterly unaffordable.
The rich on the other hand will not suffer these shortages. They will thrive during the tribulation.
Being able to afford ample food. The accouterments to make their food palatable and luxury such as oil and wine.
Considering materialism the Bible’s warnings against loving money and possessions are stern, direct and unambiguous in his sermon on the Mount Jesus summed it up as an either or choice.
No one can serve two masters for either.
He will hate the one and love the other or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other.
You cannot serve God and mammon.
Why is the love of money so terrible Irish clergyman Denay o’shea gives us a penetrating explanation.
Money means a lot of different things. It is much more than it appears to be.
It is God’s greatest rival. It is much more than the paper it seems to be or the metal or the plastic.
It is our love of things. It is our escape from dependence on people. It is our security against death.
It is our effort to control life. It is much easier to love things than to love people.
Things are dead so you can possess them easily. If you can’t love people, you will begin to love money.
It will never hurt your feelings or challenge your motives.
But neither will it ever respond to you because it is dead.
And after a while the problem will begin to show you will begin to look dead yourself.
After a while, you will be incapable of loving anyone and then you might as well be dead.
Money is neutral but an extreme attachment to it is not neutral. It is a kind of opposite religion.
The religion of God is the religion of love. The instinct of love is to share, to give away.
But the instinct of Mammon is to accumulate. Please don’t misunderstand the point.
As many often do, money itself is not evil. It is merely a convenient medium of exchange.
It’s the love of money. That’s the problem. You can have money and still love God.
But as Jesus said, you cannot love money and love God.
Money and possessions have always drawn people away from God.
But in our present culture, we see that problem running rampant and out of control, we can expect this headlong descent into deeper materialism to intensify as the end draws near.
The Apostle, Paul clearly saw it coming in the last days.
Perilous times will come, four men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud blasphemers disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving slanderers without self control, brutal, despised of good traitors, headstrong haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of Godliness, but denying its power.
Second, Timothy 31 through five, in this brief but prescient passage, Paul lists 19 characteristics which will dominate society prior to the return of Christ.
And he’s not speaking merely of non-religious people.
As he points out, many professing believers will have a form of Godliness, but this form will have no power in their lives.
They will claim to love God, but their lives will demonstrate that their real love is pleasure, power and possessions.
While it might be fruitful to examine all 19 of these ungodly characteristics, we must limit our attention to the first two which give us viable insights into the subject of this chapter.
Lovers of self. When we disallow God his rightful place as Supreme Lord of our lives, self moves in to replace him, self becomes our first love and God no longer holds the supreme place in our lives.
An old superstition claims that witches recite the Lord’s prayer backwards, beginning with give us this day our daily bread and ending with hallowed be your name and your will be done.
While on the surface. This may seem to be the same prayer. The inversion subtly alters its meaning.
It places self first and God last reflecting a complete reversal of priorities.
This simple inversion of a prayer demonstrates how subtly self love can worm its way into the hearts of Godly people and expand to the point that God is forced out it can happen even while we convince ourselves that our Christianity is intact because we’re still going through the motions though in our hearts, we have inverted our loyalties without realizing it.
This inversion is clearly occurring in today’s church.
Many now warming the pews project a facade of Godliness but live lives indistinguishable from atheists self-love is more obvious sometimes blatantly so in the second realm, the famous financial scammers of our generation, Bernie Madoff, Dennis Koslowski, Martha Stewart Kenneth Lay and Bernard Ebers committed their frauds solely to benefit themselves.
And the same goes for the hackers who steal identities and drain private bank accounts as well as phone scammers who con elderly people out of their life savings.
They don’t care who they hurt or how badly as long as they get what they want, they demonstrate the spirit of the age which Paul identifies as an ominous sign that the end times are fast approaching lovers of money.
It’s as inevitable as night following day, those who are lovers of themselves will also be lovers of money.
Why? Because money provides the means of pleasing oneself.
This explains why Paul warned Timothy that as the last day’s approach, people will increasingly become lovers of money.
This growing inordinate desire for money dominates today’s society. It’s the fuel that drives the engines of our rampant commercialism.
It’s the standard by which people’s status value and success are judged.
Wilfred Jahan observes how the management of money dominates our culture.
Doesn’t it seem he wrote unimaginable that an inanimate thing like money which at one time served only as a medium of exchange should become something so large and complex, requiring legions of people to manage the myriad arrangement of who owns it and who owes it.
This whole phenomenon is evidence of just how controlling the monetary system has become.
British philosopher Simon Critchley unveils the truth about what money has become calling it the dominant religion of our time.
He wrote in the seemingly godless world of global finance, capitalism.
Money is the only thing in which we really must have. Faith.
Money is the one true God in which we all believe.
And when it breaks down, people experience something close to a crisis of faith.
In a starkly revealing illustration, John Piper demonstrates the foolishness of putting unwarranted trust in the influence and prestige of wealth.
He wrote picture 269 people entering eternity through a plane crash in the sea of Japan. Before the crash.
There are a noted politician, a millionaire corporate executive, a playboy and his playmate and a missionary kid.
On the way back from visiting grandparents after the crash, they stand before God utterly stripped of mastercards, checkbooks, credit lines, image clothes, how to succeed.
Books and Hilton reservations. Here are the politician, the executive, the playboy and the missionary kid all on level ground with nothing, absolutely nothing in their hands, possessing only what they brought in their hearts.
How absurd and tragic the lover of money will seem on that day like a man who spends his whole life collecting train tickets and in the end is so weighed down by the collection that he misses the last train combating materialism.
According to the Bible, the antidote to materialism is generosity.
Let’s conclude by looking at four ways we can combat the ever increasing human tendency toward loving money and possessions more than we love God and others.
It all begins with how we view money change the way you think about money from the day we hold that first paycheck in our hands.
We wonder what will I buy for myself? We think of our wages as ours.
We earn our pay through our work. So it must belong to us.
We bristle at the amount withheld for taxes, health care and even our own retirement.
We look at what we actually take home and allocate it to rent bills and daily necessities and what’s left.
We’ll protect that with the ferocity of a lion guarding its kill.
And now we’re expected to just give some away to people or organizations who didn’t work for it.
And that’s a hard pill to swallow.
The most vital step we can take toward overcoming materialism in our lives is turning the way we think about money on its head.
When we remember that every good gift and every perfect gift is from above James 1 17.
We realize that nothing good is really ours to start with.
It’s God’s and he bestows it on us as a gift to be used to glorify him when we start thinking of money as just one of the countless good gifts from our father who loves us.
We can rest in the knowledge that he knows what we need.
He promises to provide and his storehouses are unending, think of it this way.
You make a pie chart to see where your money is going.
In this paradigm, the amount you have to work with is fixed and each expenditure in every category takes away from the hole until you’ve used up the entire circle.
It’s a closed system and there’s nothing for you outside that circle but God is infinite.
He doesn’t work in pie charts.
He works in rivers, rivers of blessing and he never runs out if he is the one who supplies all our needs and he never runs out of supplies.
We can stop thinking about our money in terms of a pie, being swiftly eaten up and start thinking of ourselves as conduits of His grace.
What he gives to us, we can pass on to others without fear that there won’t be enough left over for us before you do the big things and do the little things.
We won’t automatically become generous in a day, but we can begin to do little things we thought were unimportant consciously increase the amount you leave on the table for the waiter or waitress who serves you in restaurants, carry some money with you specifically to give away to someone in need and ask God to reveal ways to express love and generosity to the people you meet every day, make a commitment to support your church and discover the joy and impact of tithing.
In 1981 Albert Lexie started working at the children’s hospital in Pittsburgh, cleaning and polishing shoes for $5.
A pair satisfied customers often tipped him usually a dollar or 21 Christmas a customer gave Albert $50 for shiny, one pair of shoes, big tips like that were rare, of course.
And over the years as styles changed, Albert saw his business dwindle in 2013.
Albert retired after 32 years on the job. There was a farewell party.
Hospital staff and administrators spoke of how much he’d be missed.
But when he walked out the door on his last day, his influence at that hospital continued why?
Because during all those years of shining shoes, Albert Lexie donated more than 30% of his earnings to the hospital’s free care fund, which helps cash strapped parents pay for their children’s medical care.
And those tips he gave every single one to the hospital more than $200,000 in all we develop a habit of generosity.
In the same way, we develop any good habit through incremental adjustments we can maintain over the long haul.
It’s far better to start small and build up from there than to make one huge gift to a church or charity and fall into complacency because we’ve done our part.
Generosity isn’t a one and done situation.
Generosity is a lifestyle, start giving more than you can afford. The next step.
After giving a little is giving a lot in one of his letters to the believers in Corinth Paul.
Reported on the generosity of Christians living in Macedonia.
Now, I want you to know dear brothers and sisters what God in His kindness has done through the churches of Macedonia.
They are being tested by many troubles and they are very poor, but they are also filled with abundant joy which has overflowed in rich generosity for.
I can testify that they gave not only what they could afford but far more and they did it of their own free will.
They begged us again and again for the privilege of sharing in the gift for the believers in Jerusalem.
Second Corinthians 81 through four, the new living translation.
These believers gave not out of their abundance but out of their poverty.
And they weren’t content to give only a little, they wanted to give all that they had and more at this point you might be asking and just how much should I give?
Especially if you’re someone who budgets and tracks your expenses, you may want a hard and fast rule, a percentage.
You want to know how big a piece of the pie this generosity will require in his best known book, Mere Christianity.
CS Lewis tried to answer that question he wrote.
I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give.
I am afraid the only safe way is to give more than we can spare.
In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries amusements, et cetera is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own.
We are probably giving away too little.
If our charities do not at all, pinch or hamper us, I should say they, our expenditures are too small.
There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them.
The answer to the question, how much should I give is more than you can afford.
We all spend far more on things we don’t need than on the causes that are truly close to God’s heart, namely the spread of the gospel and the care of the poor.
Make sure you are moving toward your treasure.
Many people are familiar with the following words of Jesus do not lay up for yourselves.
Treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves.
Treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal for where your treasure is there, your heart will be also far fewer of us are intimately familiar with these wise words from the Apostle Paul, teach those who are rich in this world not to be proud and not to trust in their money, which is so unreliable.
Their trust should be in God who richly gives us all we need for our enjoyment.
Tell them to use their money to do good. They should be rich in good.
Works and generous to those in need. Always being ready to share with others.
By doing this, they will be storing up their treasure as a good foundation for the future so that they may experience true life.
First Timothy 6 17 to 19.
In the new living translation, you may not think of yourself as rich, but you are according to Forbes, the typical person in the bottom 5% of the American income distribution is still richer than 68% of the world’s inhabitants.
No matter what your income, you are either moving away from your treasure or toward it.
The Lord Jesus gives us a choice in the matter. Every heartbeat brings us one moment closer to eternity.
If we selfishly spend our lives in the pursuit of wealth on earth, then we waste our lives.
But if your treasure is in heaven, you are always moving toward it.
In many cultures throughout history, the dead were buried with items they might need in the next life.
Think of the lavish tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs, stuffed with gold, precious jewels, weapons and even food or the vast underground army of Terracotta soldiers buried with Quin Xi China’s first emperor meant to protect him in the afterlife, but no matter who we are or how much we amass on this earth, none of it follows us when we die.
Best selling author, Stephen King shared these words with the 2001 graduating class at Vassar College.
He wrote a couple of years ago, I found out what you can’t take it with you means I found out while I was laying in a ditch at the side of a country road covered with mud and blood and with the tibia of my right leg poking out the side of my jeans.
Like the branch of a tree taken down in a thunderstorm.
I had a Mastercard in my wallet But when you’re lying in the ditch with broken glass in your hair, no one accepts Mastercard.
We come in naked and broke. We may be dressed when we go out. But we’re just as broke.
Warren Buffett going to go out, broke Bill Gates, going out, broke Tom Hanks going out, broke Steve King broke, not a cry and dime all the money you earn all the stocks, you buy all the mutual funds, you trade, all of that is mostly smoke and mirrors.
It’s still going to be a quarter past getting late when you tell the time on a Timex or a Rolex.
So he wrote, I want you to consider making your life one long gift to others.
And why not all you have is on loan anyway, all that lasts is what you pass on this needy world is not a pretty picture, but we have the power to help the power to change.
And why should we refuse? Because we’re gonna take it with us, please.
A life of giving, not just money but time and spirit repays.
It helps us remember that we may be going out broke, but right now we’re doing ok right now, we have the power to do great good for others and for ourselves.
So I ask you to begin giving and to continue as you begin.
I think you’ll find in the end that you got far more than you ever had and you did more good than you ever dreamed.
Several years ago, a video was posted online of a woman selling roses on a New York City subway train for $1 each.
In the video. A man approaches her and asks how much for all the roses she has to sell.
He gives her 100 and $40 for the entire bunch.
But instead of taking his purchase with him, he asks the rose vendor to give them away to other people.
When the train stops, he steps off leaving the woman utterly stunned. She begins to sob.
Maria Lopez, the bystander who filmed the encounter told the Huffington Post.
She started crying from the relief of someone actually being generous. This one little gesture of humanity is so huge.
It’s a testament to the lack of love and lack of generosity in the world.
And I think people are yearning for that. Yes, people are yearning for it.
And when we hold the gifts of God in an open hand rather than clenching our fists around them.
And holding on for dear life.
We choose to show the world a better way, a better way to live the way of love.
In these last days, let’s make the move from materialism to generosity as we use the resources, we have to bless others and honor the Lord.