180923 Sermon on Luke 14:1-11, September 23, 2018 (Trinity 17)

180923 Sermon on Luke 14:1-11, September 23, 2018 (Trinity 17)

What a person wants is usually pretty important for what happens in a person’s life.  Some people want to have a lot of money.  That can determine how they live their life.  They choose to do certain things that will be profitable or prepare them for becoming more profitable.  They do these things instead of doing other things—like watching TV.  Some people want to live for pleasure.  Gratifying desires, whatever they might be, is the top priority.  Living for pleasure is often hard on the bank account and can be unhealthy depending on what those pleasures are, but living the way we want to live is a powerful force and most will not be deterred from what they want.

What should we want to live for as Christians?  The answer is wisdom.  But the word “wisdom” can conjure up all kinds of pictures in people’s heads.  Some might think of a bookish professor.  Some might think of an esoteric guru sitting on a mountain top.  Most people think that wisdom is something that is inaccessible to them because they are not smart enough to attain it.  But that is not true of the wisdom that the Bible teaches.  Some people whom the world thinks are stupid, are wise according to the what the Bible teaches.  Most people whom the world thinks are wise, are actually foolish as far as God’s Word is concerned. 

St. Paul says to the Christians in Corinth:

Consider your callings, brothers.  Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.  But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no flesh might boast in the presence of God.  And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

That rather lengthy quotation tells it exactly how it is.  The wisdom that we are to attain is not recognized by the world.  The world is looking for power, honor, glory, riches, and whatsoever else might improve a person’s quality of life.  The world has learned this from our first parents who looked with desire upon the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  They thought that this fruit might be useful to them.  They thought it would help them to get ahead in life.  They thought it would make them wise.

But what is happening at the exact same time that they are having these contemplations within themselves?  God is receding back into the shadows of their consciousness.  His Word, “In the day that you eat of it you will surely die,” no longer held the sway it once did.  Now it was being judged and evaluated alongside the words of the serpent who said, “You won’t surely die.”  Instead of God calling the shots, Adam and Eve were coming into their own.  They felt as though they were getting wiser by the minute, until the temptation gave birth to sin and they ate.

Adam and Eve’s fall into sin did not take away their powers of reasoning.  They were able to form ideas and make plans just as they could before.  Adam and Eve were able to seek out possessions and pleasures just as competently as they could before.  In fact, maybe they were even better at it now.  They were no longer preoccupied with thinking about their Creator.  In fact, they didn’t enjoy thinking about him at all anymore.  Now they were free (but really enslaved) to live for themselves, and more than anything, they determined to love themselves instead of loving God or loving each other.  They became greedy and self-centered, looking out only for their own advantage and whatever progress they could make in this world.  With the fall into sin, the wisdom of the world first came into existence.  The wisdom of the world is always looking out for numero uno, and if something doesn’t hold out promise for bettering one’s own quality of life, then the world, sinful Man, is not interested in it.

The Word of God has a different kind of wisdom to teach us.  As we heard earlier, in the quotation from 1^st Corinthians, St. Paul says that Christ is the wisdom that has come from God.  Just as the wisdom of the world goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden, so also the wisdom of God goes all the way back to the very beginning.  Adam and Eve had destroyed their relationship with God and the immutable Law of God cried out mercilessly for their death.  But God promised them and gave them his beloved Son who would be born of the woman in the fullness of time.  Although the Son of God knew no sin, he became sin for us, so that we may be redeemed from the curse of the Law and have our righteousness in Christ by faith.  God enables us to live a godly and holy life through faith in Jesus Christ and the forgiveness of sins and perfect righteousness that belong to him, but he shares it completely with us.

Jesus Christ is true wisdom—indeed, he is the only wisdom that there is.  He is the only wisdom that there is, because only his wisdom will endure forever.  No matter how clever or wise people might be in managing their affairs in this life, none of it will last.  No matter how much money a person makes, or how smart and successful they are, or how wonderful their children are, none of these things matter in the end.  We cannot take our money or property or whatever else we might enjoy about this life with us.  Only our resurrected bodies and souls will endure.  And while most people think that being reconciled to God and justified before him is not a very big deal, it will be clear at that point that that is not the case.  It is only because we have not yet experienced God’s full judgment that even we Christians do not know the surpassing worth of Christ’s holy, innocent, bitter sufferings and death on our behalf.  This precious work of Christ for us is just that—precious.  And we should grow in the knowledge of Christ’s cross and the blood he shed for our salvation.  That is wisdom.  Growth as a Christian is comprehending this love more and more, so that when you have died and are judged by God, you will experience what you were always reaching for in this life: the fullness of joy in our crucified and resurrected Lord Jesus. 

And this wisdom is accessible to all people.  The super smart people have no advantage over the child.  In fact, if anything, it appears that the child has the advantage over the strong and powerful, for Jesus says that unless we receive the Kingdom of God like a little child, we will by no means enter it.  The Christian message is incredibly simple.  Jesus is the Savior.  He will help you.  Jesus is the Good Shepherd.  You are his sheep.  He will protect and save you from the wolf—so stick close to him and to no one or nothing else.  Jesus is the name that is above every name, and you are wise if you remember it in every time of trouble, no matter how bad the trouble is.  Even if you are wracked with pain and dying and there’s no hope of getting better, call on Jesus’s name.  He will guide you through the gloomy portal of death into eternal life.  Nobody else can go with you in death.  Each is alone, except those who die together with Jesus.

So what do you want out of life?  It’s remarkable how people are able to get what they want, but nobody wants what’s actually good for them unless they have been enlightened by the Holy Spirit.  To speak in the broadest and most general way, sinful Man wants to make a paradise out of this world in one way or another.  You, however, are living with your eyes scanning the horizon, looking for the coming of the Lord Jesus, and anticipating the life of the world to come.  Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.  Where your treasure is, there your head will be also, and you will fill it with the wisdom that is necessary to bring about your desires.  The world has all kinds of wisdom that it teaches about living a good life.  The Bible has its own wisdom, and the name of that wisdom is Jesus Christ.

Many thinkers in the Christian Church have tried to prove that the wisdom of the world and the wisdom that is Jesus Christ are not opposed to one another.  But that is not true.  They oppose one another because they are directed towards different ends.  The wisdom of the world is always looking for its own advantage, but the Christian has renounced the god of this world and is looking ahead to the things that are above.  And this is not just theory.  It has implications even for everyday life. 

Consider our Gospel reading today.  Jesus has his finger on the way that the world’s selfish, self-aggrandizing thinking even enters into the Church and corrupts it.  He is at a dinner party that is being given by a leader in the church that is attended by several other important people.  He sees how they are all jockeying for position, and wanting to be at the forefront.  They each want to be thought of as the greatest, and are quite willing to ignore the man who suffers from dropsy—a kind of disfiguring and painful water retention—rather than having him helped.  Or they might even fight against Jesus’s healing of this man as a breaking of the Sabbath Law, because by being a stickler they can show how orthodox and pious they are in front of all the others.  But Jesus sees right through their hypocrisy.  He knows that they would all help their son get out of a well even if he fell in on the Sabbath.  They’d even help an animal in dire straits on the Sabbath.  Why can’t Jesus do good to this man who is suffering on the Sabbath?

And Jesus notes how they are all trying to get seated in the good spots, with all the right people—again, so that they can be thought of as the big shot.  This is a silly thing that people do, and yet there is nothing more common.  Nobody wants to be with the losers.  Everybody wants to be with the cool kids.  I suppose it is because if you sit with the losers, people will think that you are a loser, but if you sit with the cool kids, then you are probably one of them. 

This is something that people do their whole lives, but there’s no place that is so cruel in this regard as our K-12 schools.  People wonder why some of these kids go crazy and shoot their fellow students.  I don’t pretend to understand it all, or even mostly, but I will tell you one thing that all of intuitively also know to be true: all of them were mocked as losers.  They were not loved by their fellow students.  They were totally rejected, because our Old Adam believes that it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there and everybody has to look out for themselves and their own interests.

Not so with you.  Put your Christian wisdom to work: You are a son or daughter of the King.  You have a dignity bestowed upon you by God as an heir to the inestimable riches of eternal life.  You don’t need everybody to say wonderful things about you or believe that you are one of the cool kids to have your worth.  You are not living for fame or being a cool kid in this life, and so you are not harmed by associating with the lowly.  You can be friends and do good things for those whom others reject.  Might you get a besmirched reputation by the people at the top?  Maybe.  So what?  While they are living as though God does not exist, you know that he does exist.  And while they don’t give a rip about what happens to others so long as they are benefited, you know that God cares for the lowly, and wants you to care for them too.  God befriended you when you were a loser and had no hope whatsoever of moving up higher, and so you also should befriend those who need your love and support.  This is the mind of Christ, and it is the mind of Christ that will endure forever, while the backbiting and evilness of this present age will be finally be put away forever in hell.  “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”

I think a lot of people are kind of at a loss for why they should study the Word of God.  They know that they are supposed to do it, because they’ve been told to do it, but they don’t realize that the Bible teaches us a whole different way of living compared to the unbelieving world around us.  The Bible doesn’t teach us that we are different in any external way—that we eat a certain way or dress a certain way.  The difference is internal.  It is fear, love, and trust in God.  It’s a recognition of the fleeting nature of this life and all the things our flesh craves.  It’s the example of Christ, and how we learn more and more as his disciples.

And so the Bible is good for you, not because it will help you earn your way into heaven or because it is a burdensome obligation, but because it makes you wise.  And being wise is always a good thing.  It is always helpful.

180916 Sermon on 1 Kings 17:17-24, September 16, 2018 (Trinity 16)

180916 Sermon on 1 Kings 17:17-24, September 16, 2018 (Trinity 16)

Last week I spoke about the opening words of Psalm 14: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”  Most Christians believe that these words could not possibly apply to them, because they are quite convinced that God exists.  But there’s a world of difference between saying that God exists and believing that he exists, and then living by that faith.  Far from believing in God, all people by nature believe that they will be blessed and happy because of the things that they do.  This is why greed and scheming and cheating are so common.  It’s assumed that there is no other way to get ahead.  But Jesus tells us that he is the one who gives us our daily bread.  Just as God feeds the birds and clothes the grass, so also he feeds and clothes us.  Fools might believe that this is technically true.  They have the head knowledge that God is the creator and preserver of life.  But they don’t really believe it and therefore live by it.

Last week we had a very good example of someone who was not a fool—the widow of Zarephath.  She was in dire straits because the drought and the famine had left her with only a handful of flour and a little bit of oil.  When the prophet Elijah met her, she was gathering sticks to make one final meal with her son, before they would die.  But Elijah told her to make a little bread for himself first, before she fed herself and her son, and the Lord would see to it that she did not run out of food before the drought and famine were lifted.  The widow believed the Lord’s promise.  And so she and Elijah and her household ate for many days and the flour did not run out and the oil jug did not go dry according to the word of the Lord that Elijah had spoken to her.  Because she believed, she was generous even though she had so little. 

As I mentioned last week, a lot of people would judge this widow as being foolish.  They might even go so far as to say that she was being immoral.  She was taking the food out of her dying son’s mouth and giving it to someone she didn’t know.  But she was not being foolish.  She believed that God exists and that he does stuff.  The real fool is the one that says in his heart that there is no God, so it’s all up to me to make the kind of life that I want for myself.  Such a one is an idolater who believes that other things besides God are what will provide blessing and happiness.  This widow, in contrast, hangs everything she has upon God even as her life and her son’s life is on the line.  She is wise.

And she continues to be wise even though she is struck with calamity and heartache as we heard in our Old Testament reading today.  Our reading today picks up immediately after last week’s reading left off, and we find out that this poor woman’s son became ill and his illness was so severe that he died.  The heartache that this woman had was terrible.  Very few have been afflicted like she was. 

But she remains wise, and in the same way too.  She continued to believe that God exists and that he does stuff.  In this case, though, the “stuff” that God has done is rather frightening, and you can hear that fear in the widow’s words.  When her son died she went to Elijah and said, “What have you against me, O man of God?  You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!”  When the widow addresses Elijah, she is seeing him as a representative and an ambassador for God.  That is why she calls him “God’s man”—a more definite and direct way of linking him with God than even by calling him a prophet.  God has come to her in Elijah and the miraculous flour and oil that she has enjoyed is proof of that.  But now this same God has brought about the death of her son.  She acknowledges this and speaks about it in a very direct way.  God has reminded her of her sins (a bold and humble statement) and killed her son.

We are not accustomed to this kind of talk, and so we have a lot to learn from this wise woman.  While we might speak about the good things in our life as coming from God, it is very rare to hear anyone say that the negative things in their life have come from God.  This is especially true when it comes to death.  Almost everybody, including most of the pastors and teachers in the Christian Church, will say that God doesn’t have anything to do with deaths.  Instead there is a kind of stoic philosophy that gets applied.  Death, together with taxes, is just one of those inevitable things.  It happens to everybody.  It’s random, and you just have to accept it, and let’s not talk anything more about it.

I think the main reason why we are so touchy about saying that God has anything to do with death is that we want to be able to have a God that we can like and that we can feel comfortable with.  If God is the one who has brought about the death of the people that we love, then it is quite possible that we might have some strong feelings towards God.  We might resent him.  We might be angry with him.  We might even hate him.  But we like to believe that we are pretty pious people who only say the nicest things about God.  So it makes sense—at least to the Old Adam—that we should be very careful not to attribute anything we don’t like to God’s doing.  It’s a way to keep everything on an even keel.  We don’t want any unpleasant thoughts towards God, so we will politely ignore him.  We’ll politely pretend that he doesn’t exist—at least not insofar as death or destruction is concerned.  We’ll say in our hearts, “There is no God in this situation,” and think that God should thank us for this, because we are doing him the favor of protecting him from a bad reputation.

How different this is from the way that the widow of Zarepheth handles things!  She’s not a fool.  She knows that God exists and that ultimately he is always behind everything that happens.  And so she opens her heart wide to God and doesn’t hold back: “Why did you come to me God?  Why did you bring this prophet to me?  All that it has accomplished is that I should be in terror of you.  I’m a sinner, and this is why you have done this to me!”  Her words are raw, and there is so much pain and anguish in them.  Instead of being polite she is being honest.  Instead of being careful to guard herself and her own sense of piety she becomes completely vulnerable.  She collapses in desperation before God.  Only he can help her, even though he is the one who has brought this pain upon her.

I hope that you can see that we have a lot to learn from this very wise woman.  We’ve taken up the ways of the world and believe in luck and chance for whatever happens.  There’s way too much empty philosophy used to comfort people and direct talk about God is avoided.  For example, it is said of the deceased that they lived a good life, or that they lived a long time.  Perhaps they got to experience all the things that they wanted.  But is not life more than pleasure?  Is not life more than whatever it is that you might have wanted to accomplish?  The heart and soul of our existence is being ignored.

You are a creature.  God has made you.  He has a will and a way of living that you are supposed to follow.  You are answerable to him for how you have lived.  You will come into his presence one day when you die or when Christ comes again in glory.  These are stupendous truths that nobody wants to talk about!  And there’s at least one good reason for that too. 

The devil doesn’t want us to think or talk about such things.  The devil wants to keep us fools who say in our hearts that there is no God, that this present life is the only thing that matters, so let’s concentrate only on that.  The devil doesn’t want us to pray like this widow, and to open our hearts wide to God.  The devil knows how powerful prayer is.  He knows how God is moved to pity and compassion, like Jesus is in our Gospel reading when he sees the widow’s dead son who was being carried out of the town of Nain.  He wants us to remain shut up in our own hearts with our stupid, powerless philosophies and to take what comes to us stoically and silently.

And the devil will tell some good lies to bring about his ends too.  Nobody is so good at lying as he is, and so these lies have a ring of truth to them.  So he says that believing that God does all things in heaven and on earth makes God into an evil, blood-thirsty ogre who is responsible for all the evil that has happened over the centuries.  The truth, of course, is that it is not God who is responsible for this, but the filthy devil himself. 

He will tell you that your life is going to be awful if you believe that all things are in God’s hands.  You will always be afraid, and have no peace.  He will tell you that the comfort philosophy gives you is enough.  Plus it’s much safer and milder—no disturbing thoughts about what God might do.  And it is true that God will not let us have peace so long as that peace is in anything but himself.  That can make for a wild ride through life as we read about with all the saints’ lives that are described for us in the Bible.  But it’s not true that we do not have peace.  We have a peace that the world cannot give.  We have a peace that surpasses all understanding.  When we take refuge in Jesus, the Good Shepherd, the God of power and might and also the God who loves us so much that he suffered and died in our place; when we take refuge in Jesus, then nothing can touch us, nothing can harm us.  Sin, death, and hell—these awesome, powerful forces, are beneath our feet as conquered foes, because they lie beneath Jesus’s feet to whom we have been joined.

So don’t be tricked by the devil.  His first and preferred strategy is to keep you ignorant and apathetic about God’s existence and that God actually does stuff.  He’d like to keep it so that you just go with the flow and believe all the empty (but safe and mild) things that the world says about life, death, and the meaning of it all.  But if that won’t work, if you start to think about God and how he acts in your daily life, and how all things are brought about by him, then he will try to frighten you away from such thoughts.  Believing that God is directly involved in your daily life—that you are the object of his blessings and his punishments—is a bold thought. 

But do not be afraid.  Open wide your heart to God and speak to him honestly and plainly like the widow of Zarephath.  The One who sent her sadness, turned her tears to gladness.  The cup she was given to drink in the death of her son savored of bitterness, but she took it without shrinking, for she believed that after grief, God gives relief, her heart with comfort filling, and all her sorrow stilling.  What God ordains is always good.

It is foolish to say in your heart that there is no God, or that God doesn’t do stuff for you and to you—some of which is unpleasant, as we heard about with the widow’s death.  Ignoring God never helped anybody.  Learn from the wise and wonderful woman of Zarephath, who waited upon the goodness of the Lord, and also cried to him with anguish in her distress.  True piety is not polite.  True piety is bold and reaching—wrestling and holding on to the Lord until he gives you his blessing.  Therefore, do not be afraid. You know the goodness of the Lord.  He has given you his promises of forgiveness, life, and salvation which never fail.  And so do not give up.  In due time you will reap.  Therefore, open wide your heart to the Lord with honesty and vulnerability.  Call upon the Lord in the day of trouble and he will deliver you.  He will deliver you, even it should happen that you fall asleep in what the world calls death, because Jesus is the resurrection and the life.  Whoever believes in him will live even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in him will never die.

180909 Sermon on 1 Kings 17:8-16 Matthew 6:24-34, September 9, 2018 (Trinity 15)

180909 Sermon on 1 Kings 17:8-16 Matthew 6:24-34, September 9, 2018 (Trinity 15)

Psalm 14 begins with a line that perhaps you are familiar with: “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”  I’ve heard this line quoted by Christians when they are engaging atheists who promote the idea that there are no such things as gods—that everything has come about by chance from eternally existing matter.  According to King David, the composer of this psalm, they are fools because they explicitly say, “God doesn’t exist.  There is no God.”  But what David means with this sentence is by no means exhausted by only applying it to outright atheists.  That is way too restrictive of an application.  The fools that David is speaking about here are not just a few militant atheists.  He is speaking about all people as they exist by nature and according to their old Adam.

Perhaps you are thinking, “That doesn’t describe me.  I don’t say that God doesn’t exist.  No such words have ever come out of my mouth.”  And I don’t doubt that.  Probably nothing so wicked has ever been said by you.  But King David does not say, “The fool has said with his mouth, ‘There is no God.’”  Rather he says, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”  David is speaking about an internal reality—in the mind and in the soul.  That is something quite a bit different.  There are a whole lot of evil things that we hide in our mind and soul and we do not broadcast it to the entire world with our mouths.  If people knew everything that went on inside our heads we would all lose our good names and our good reputations.  We would have no friends and our families would be offended by what we have thought about them from time to time.  Really only a very small portion of what goes on in our heads makes it to our mouths.  The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”

But again, you are probably still not convinced that you are actually guilty of this kind of thing.  I’ll try to show you that you are indeed a fool by asking you just one question: “Why do you sin?”  Why have you and why do you do what you know is wrong?  If you were smart you would know that there is a God who sees all and knows all and hates every trespass and every disobedience and therefore punishes those who commit sin.  In the end, nobody gets away with anything.  Even if we are not punished eternally in hell for our sins because of the intercession of our Savior Jesus, at the very least we will still endure bitter shame and heartache for all that we have done.  Sin never helps anybody.  It might seem as though it gives you some advantage or some fast fleeting pleasure, but we cannot escape the punishment that is due.  God threatens to punish all who break his commandments, therefore we should fear his wrath and not do anything against them. 

Smart people would avoid sin at all costs.  Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.  I will be helped and blessed and happy even though I know this is wrong.  Everything will turn out fine in the end.”  We are no different than our first parents, Adam and Eve, who saw that the fruit looked delicious and that it held out promise for making them wise.  So they disregarded God in their hearts, took the fruit, and ate it.  You have all had similar experiences where your desire overruled your awareness of God and his will.  It’s almost like Satan blinds us and makes us deaf so that we become utter fools who believe that God does not exist.

So you should all be able to see that you are fools who have said in your hearts, “There is no God.”  The only other alternative is that you have had a perfect awareness of God and his commandments and have never done anything against them.  And I know that isn’t true of any of you.  But today, because of the readings we have, I’d like to consider a little different way that we act as though there is no God in another realm.  We all know of our failings morally.  Explicit transgressions come to mind.  But what about our day to day life?

In our Old Testament reading Elijah meets a widow in the town of Zarephath.  There wasn’t any social security back then, so widows and orphans were greatly affected by the loss of income that the man of the house otherwise would have provided for them.  The woman and her son were poor.  On top of that, God had afflicted the land with a terrible, scorching drought.  Shortages of food hit the poor first, because they aren’t able to afford the high prices that the scare commodities are going for.  Elijah asks the widow for some water, which she is happy to supply, but then he also asks for some bread.  That’s a problem for her.  She doesn’t have any to spare.  Her situation is so desperate that she was gathering the fuel necessary to have one final meal with her son.  But Elijah tells her to make some for himself first, and then fix something for herself and for her son.  He promises that God will not allow her flour or oil to run out before the drought has been lifted.

You have to take this woman’s situation very seriously in order to see how difficult it would have been to comply with what Elijah was asking of her.  None of us have been even close to the situation she was in.  Essentially she was being asked to take the food out of her dying son’s mouth to feed this prophet.  How could she know that he was speaking the truth?  And why couldn’t Elijah have produced some flour and oil in advance, instead of eating first and supply later?  Common sense and reason would have told her that this is foolhardy, but she put her trust in the Lord.  She was flesh and blood like any of us, and so she would have had the same thoughts that we have, but perhaps unlike us she believed that the Lord was God, that he exists, and that she would not be disappointed for putting her trust in him.

In our Gospel reading Jesus is preaching the Sermon on the Mount.  He is telling the people that they should not worry about what they will eat or what they will drink or what clothes they might or might not have.  God clothes the grass of the field and feeds the birds of the air.  Will he not much more cloth and feed you, O you of little faith?

Theoretically at least, I think all of you would acknowledge that what you have comes from God.  It’s similar to the way that I think all of you would acknowledge that God exists.  But what is going on in the heart, and what is being played out in your actions?  That’s a different story.  Truly believing that God exists means that you do not need to fret and scheme and covet like the Gentiles do in order to get ahead in life.  You don’t need to just think about your own pocketbook and your own wealth—fighting for every last cent that you can get or that you can keep.  When you believe that God exists, and that he actually does stuff, you can be set free from your foolish belief that your wellbeing is all up to you and your actions, and so you better get as much as you possibly can.

Practically speaking, what does this mean?  To speak generally, believing that God exists and that he does stuff means that you can afford to be generous.  You don’t have to get the lowest price that you can possibly get when you are buying stuff, and you don’t need to get the highest price that you can possibly get when you are selling stuff.  The content of the Law is that we are to love our neighbor.  We can and we should love our neighbor when we are buying and selling.  We should do our best to find a fair price, and if we have to err, then why not err on the side that is to our neighbor’s benefit instead of our own?  Of course it goes without saying, then, that we should not lie or deceive so that we can get more for ourselves.  For example, if your mechanic says that your car is going to blow up within a few thousand miles, then you better not hide this from the one to whom you are selling your lemon.  For most people it is a terrible temptation to keep their mouth shut so that they can get as much as they possibly can.  Fight against this, for it is nothing other than greed.  It isn’t business savviness or smarts.  It’s just good old fashioned greed masquerading as virtue and honor.

But, you might say then, “Won’t I go broke if I live like that?  Won’t I go broke if I am always looking out for my neighbor’s interests more than for my own?”  Well maybe now Jesus’s words might take on a whole new meaning for you: “Do not be anxious about what you will eat or what you will drink or what you will wear.  Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added unto you.”  What good does it do you to say with your mouth that you believe that God has given you all your stuff, but to believe in your heart that he doesn’t do a darned thing and that it’s all up to you to scrimp and steal?  It is not enough just to say in our heads that we believe that God exists.  We have to be prepared to be like that widow of Zarephath, who was generous even though she had so very little because she put her trust in the Lord.  That widow was not a fool, even though many people would think that she was foolish for what she did.  She was wise as she waited on the Lord.

Living in such a way where we wait upon the Lord and put our trust in him does not necessarily mean that we will be filthy stinking rich.  Consider this woman’s life.  She lived paycheck to paycheck, you might say.  She still had to pray daily that God would give her her daily bread, day by day.  But she was richly blessed in ways that are not always so easy to see with the naked eye.  Surely, she was blessed spiritually with healing for her unbelieving heart.  And although she didn’t have the nicest stuff, she always had enough.  God did not let her go hungry.  That is something that we can count on for ourselves as well.

Living generously while also living frugally is the Christian way.  St. Paul says that godliness with contentment is great gain.  And don’t be put off by those who say that this is a foolish way to live—that you have to claw your way to the top of the heap or else you won’t have anything.  They don’t believe that God exists and that he does stuff.  God is able to make it so that the bin does not go empty and the jug does not run dry.  He can stretch your meager paycheck like you wouldn’t believe. 

How so?  There are countless ways, but I will give you a few specifics so that you can see what I’m talking about.  He can make it so that you don’t have to do car repairs or house repairs.  He can make your lawn mower run longer or bring some new ventures for income to your door.  On the other hand, God is also able to empty your pockets very efficiently of all that you have worked so very hard to get.  He can find stuff that you will need to spend your money on until you are more impoverished than you would have been if you lived more generously.

At the end of the psalm with which we began today where King David is speaking about us fools who say in their hearts that there is no God, there is an interesting statement that is applicable to what we have been talking about today.  He says to these fools: “You shame the counsel of the poor because he puts his trust in the Lord.”  The worldly wise, the high and mighty, think that it is sheer stupidity to believe that God will give you what you need to eat and drink and what to wear.  They believe that nobody gives it to you, you have to take it.

And so there will always be this conflict between the unbelieving and the believing.  Unbelievers will think that the actions of the poor Christians are foolish.  The poor Christians, for their part, have learned about their own unbelieving foolishness that makes them no different from the unbelievers, but they have been enriched by God with knowledge of him and his good will towards.  Therefore the Christians will say of those who live as though their greed is what blesses them that they are being foolish.  Each side calls the other foolish.  And you can’t ride the fence.  You must either side with the worldly wise or with the simple believers.

This conflict won’t be sorted out until Judgement Day, when everything will be revealed.  That is when all people will see that our God is wise and generous beyond belief—that he gives daily bread to everyone without our prayers—even to all evil people.  Then the unbelieving will see that they have been tricked by the devil to believe that they would be better blessed by disobeying God’s commands rather than by following them.

See to it, then, that you do not remain a fool who says in his heart that there is no God.  There is a God and he means business.  Knowing him and trusting him is more beneficial and more precious than mountains of silver and gold.