SERMON: Proverbs 8:18-21 (Wisdom and Wealth)

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Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon. We pray that as we declare the word of God, that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and that you would catch a greater vision of who

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Christ is. May you be blessed in the hearing of God's word, and may the Lord be with you.

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In the 17th century, there was a man named Anthony Ashley Cooper.

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He was the first Earl of Shaftesbury, and he stood out not only for his immense fortune, but in the way that he wielded his fortune for Christ.

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While the other nobles of his age were pouring out their wealth in gambling halls and lavish estates and self -indulgent lifestyles,

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Anthony built schools for the poor. He advanced laws and protected children from the cruelty of factory labor.

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He used his influence and his wealth to encourage the downtrodden, and he used it to fund gospel preaching all across England.

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He had money, but his money did not have him. His money never mastered him.

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He saw it as on loan from God, a resource to be consecrated for the building up of Christendom.

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Money, in his view, was for the building up of his home and his children and the kingdom of God, to bless the wider world.

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And what marked him so phenomenally is that he's so rare in church history as a man with great means, but a man who also used those means for the glory of Christ.

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Because all throughout church history, there's been this strange dichotomy when it comes to money, and it goes all the way back to the pages of Scripture.

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If you'll remember, the Essenes, their name is not mentioned in the New Testament, but they are one of the people groups that were vying for ascendancy at the time of Christ.

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You have the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Essenes. Well, the Essenes were the separatist party who basically, like Amish folk, left

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Jerusalem and started living in the caves because the material world was evil and they needed to pursue the spiritual world of the

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Torah. So they lived an ordinary life. They fled to the desert and they embraced poverty as a religious good.

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Then on the other hand, you have the Pharisees, who Jesus called lovers of money, who devoured widows' houses and cloaked their greed in a kind of self -righteous and smug piety.

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And in this, we see the two failed approaches that have repeated over and over throughout church history.

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One is seeking money as if it were a God, and one is seeking poverty as if it were your

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God, and both are wrong. It's happened all throughout church history as well.

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You think about the early monastics in the patristic era, the first 400 years of the church.

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There's a man named St. Anthony who abandoned all of his possessions, fled into the desert, convinced that holiness could not coexist with gold.

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He had an aestheticism that was basically rebranded Gnosticism.

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And what that all means is, Gnosticism was a Greek philosophy that believed that the material world was evil, the spiritual world was good, and that the plan of salvation is for you to escape the material world and live in the immaterial as much as you could.

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So their view of Christ was almost holographic, that he came, yes, but he wasn't really truly material.

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He was pure spiritual. They abandoned all things good with the material world in order to pursue the immaterial blessings.

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That's wrong. God gave us a world. God gave us a world to enjoy, to eat, drink, and be married to the glory of God.

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Then you had in the medieval era, the era that was just after this, the view of money being sort of God or a sign of God's favor.

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You had the popes and you had the bishops who were living in extravagant palaces that rivaled kings, provoking reformers like John Wycliffe to thunder against them for their ecclesiastical greed.

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In the Puritan era, you had men like Richard Baxter who was trying to teach people that money is not to be both despised and idolized.

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It's a tool that can be consecrated to Christ. And yet you had the radical pietist who denounced nearly every material possession as worldliness.

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In our day, we have the exact same extremes. We have prosperity preachers that say that you can get

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Cadillacs from faith. If you just have enough faith, you can have this jet, you can have this thing, sow your seed, give your money.

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It's a pyramid scheme. And then you have modern day aesthetics like the

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Anabaptist or the Amish who escaped the world.

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I'm gonna be honest with you. I was brought up in a kind of pietistic world where money was not really good.

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Serving the Lord was better. Even early in my ministry, I was going to seminary broke and happy about it.

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This must be from the Lord. This must be righteous. This must be good because I've abandoned the worldly things and I've pursued the spiritual things.

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That's what I'm talking about. That's a kind of Gnosticism. And it happens all the time.

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Very rarely do we actually see a balanced view of how to approach money to the glory of God.

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We see it in even our elder generation where so many are blowing their money on vacations and poolside margaritas and smiling as their children's inheritance goes to nothing.

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We see it in men who lack ambition, who don't strive for promotions at work because they're too holy for that.

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They're too heavenly minded to be any earthly good if you've ever heard that phrase. Because they'll say, well, money is the root of all evil.

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No, it's not. The love of money is the root to all kinds of evil.

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Money itself is a neutral tool. For 2000 years, the church has struggled to think biblically about this topic.

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And so we are left today with a great question. Is wealth a curse or is it a blessing?

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Is money inherently evil, intrinsically corrupting or can it be used in holy ways?

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And I think the reason that this dichotomy exists is because we've had such polarity in our thinking.

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It's not money that's either good or evil. It is the heart that is using it.

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It is a tool, just like a hammer can be used for good things and evil things, just like a shotgun can be used for good things or evil things, just like a bottle of fine scotch from the

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Islay region that has the most perfect smoky peat, hypothetically speaking, can be used for good and can be used for ill.

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In the same way, money is a tool that can be used for God or it can be used for the flesh.

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So today I want us to look at these things from Proverbs 8, verses 18 through 21.

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And I want us to see how this gift can be used for God's glory.

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So if you will turn with me there, Proverbs 8, 18 through 21, I will read it to you and then we will look into it together.

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Proverbs 8, we'll begin with verse 18. Riches and honor are with me, enduring wealth and righteousness.

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My fruit is better than gold, even pure gold, and my yield is better than the choice of silver.

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I walk in the way of righteousness in the midst of the path of justice to endow those who love me with wealth that I may fill their treasuries.

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Let us pray. Lord, we thank you for this passage, a passage that is often neglected, a passage that is rarely talked about, a passage in our circles that many, we would see abusing this passage, trying to become wealthy out of a sense of greed and out of a sense of idolatry.

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Entire movement, faith, healing, the prosperity gospel that's been propagated to places like Africa, convincing people that if they're just having a faith, then their livestock won't die or their crops won't wither.

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And yet, Lord, there's also the other side of this, where so many of us have become

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Gnostics, where we look at money as if it's intrinsically evil, and then we must be suspicious of it.

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Lord, I pray that today that we would see money and wealth as a neutral tool that can be used for the glory of God.

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And I pray, Lord, that you would help us to do that. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Amen. When we speak of wealth, many of us have conflated it down into a single thing, which is money, property, assets, stock portfolios.

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But in the Bible, there's actually two kinds of wealth. There's one that's material wealth and one that's spiritual wealth.

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And to many people's surprise, the Bible speaks about them both as if they are gifts from God.

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Now, the first kind of wealth is obvious. It is material wealth. And by that, we mean the tangible resources that bring about commerce and transactions, whether it be in a primitive society in the ancient world with seashells or gold coins, paper bills, numbers on a bank ledger, stocks, bonds, 401ks, or cryptocurrency.

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Property, houses, real estate, provision, clothing, transportation. All of these things are material wealth.

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And all of these things are not spoken about as intrinsically evil in the

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Bible. I know we get nervous at the very mention of material wealth or some of us do as if it's an entirely different picture.

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Material wealth in its right place is a good thing. It's not inherently evil. It is a gift from God that ought to be stewarded and used for the advancement of his kingdom.

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That's why we exist. We exist to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Therefore, every tool in our hands ought to be used for glorifying

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God and enjoying him forever. And there's so many examples of materially blessed people in the

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Bible who use their wealth for the glory of God. Think about Abraham.

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Genesis 13, 12 says, he was very rich in livestock and silver and in gold. Think about Isaac.

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It says in Genesis 26, 12 through 13, he sowed in that land and reaped in the same year 100 fold, which is a really good year.

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The Lord blessed him and the man became rich and continued to grow richer until he became very wealthy.

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You have to remember Hebrew is not as exaggerative as us. So when very is put there, it means stupid wealthy, wicked wealthy for New Englanders.

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You think about David. The Lord brought immense wealth to David so much that he stockpiled precious stones and jewels and wood and gold and all of the things that would be used for the temple, which was a modern or which was a wonder of the ancient world.

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Solomon himself received so much provision from God that it says that when the queen of Sheba came, she marveled at his splendor.

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It says that gold and silver were so abundant that they were like rocks in the street. You think of Lydia in the

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New Testament, a woman of great means, a woman who blessed the church in Acts 16, 14 through 15 with her material wealth.

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She provided lodging. She provided support over and over and over again. The Bible affirms that material wealth can be used as a gift from God to the glory of God for the building up of God's kingdom.

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And we ought not be afraid of it ipso facto. And then there's spiritual wealth.

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The definition of spiritual wealth is fairly easy. It's things that can't be tallied in a bank account, things that can't be weighed on the scales.

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It consists of the riches of our salvation, the graces that Christ has poured into our dead soul that he made alive in Christ.

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It's the eating and the drinking at the table of the Lord, which by the way, is one of the greatest blessings that you and I have ever been given.

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And we get it every week. It's the abundance of the

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Holy Spirit's gifts in your life who's equipped you to serve him and his people. It's the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self -control.

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It's the adorning of a Christian life, Galatians 5, 22 through 23. It's the wisdom that comes down from above,

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James 3, 17. It's the righteousness of Christ that has been imputed to our souls through our justification, imparted to us progressively in our sanctification, securing our adoption, sealing our inheritance, crowning us with everlasting life.

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Our spiritual blessings abound, and we are rich. You think about Old Testament saints,

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John the Baptist, the greatest, Jesus says of them all, and yet he's least in the kingdom of heaven.

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He's in the breadline in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus' point was that the abundant blessings that you have received by the spirit of God are so fantastic that in comparison to John the

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Baptist, the greatest man born of woman, you and I are rich. Paul exclaims this, he said,

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Jesus Christ has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, which means that every.

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Romans, he says, how will he not also with him freely give us all things? I mean, if you have all things, you're kind of wealthy, spiritually speaking.

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This is the kind of wealth that moth and rust can't destroy, that thieves cannot steal, that no one can take from you, because the only man who matters put it in you.

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And even the strong man, Satan himself, cannot unloose what Christ has done.

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To be clothed in Christ's righteousness, to be dwelled with his spirit, to be adopted into his family, those are the truest riches that lead to eternal life.

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They can't be bought with silver and gold. They can't be measured by earthly scales. When Paul compares his former life as a

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Pharisee with the life that he now has in Christ, he says that that was rubbish compared to the surpassing worth of knowing

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Jesus Christ. Philippians 3, seven through eight. Spiritual wealth, unlike material wealth, never fluctuates based off of the stock market prices.

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It never goes down because of a bad year. It is incorruptible, indefiled, reserved for us in heaven, 1

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Peter 1, four. Now, just because one is better, just because one is eternal and one is temporal doesn't mean that the temporal one is bad.

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The Bible doesn't talk about it in that way. The Bible talks about both of them having their place. Both kinds of wealth are a gift from God that are meant to be stewarded.

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And there's a call for us to have wisdom in how we steward them. Let's look at verses 18 through 20 now and see we've kind of done a tour of the

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Bible to show how material and spiritual wealth are blessings from God. Look at what the text says. Riches and honor are with me.

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Enduring wealth and righteousness. Do you see how the text there is pairing material wealth and immaterial wealth together with the word and?

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Riches and honor. Enduring wealth and righteousness. This is what's called a

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Hebrew parallelism where two concepts are connected with the word and, or in Hebrew it'd be the vav, and those two things are being equated.

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This is what's called an equative parallelism. This is not hierarchical where one listed as superior and the other is inferior.

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Both in this poetry that Solomon has given us, both are from God. It is

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God himself who gives riches and honor. It's God himself who gives enduring wealth and righteousness.

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And in that, he gives us blessings that touch both the body and the soul because God made us to be integrated people.

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In the Garden of Eden, body and soul were perfectly united together. It was only after the fall that that division, that bifurcation, that separation of sacred and secular was severed.

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But in Christ, it's coming back together again. And God intends to care for you, both body and soul, both now and for eternity.

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To walk with wisdom, to fear the Lord above all things, is to receive the blessings of God, which not only means righteousness before God, but it also means honor before all men.

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Not only eternal life, but also temporal blessings as well. Now, I wanna be very clear here that this is not a blanket promise that if you're faithful, you will win the lottery.

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This is not that you will get an absurd promotion where you skip six levels and you become the

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CEO. This is not a promise that every believer on earth will be materially wealthy.

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That's not what the point of this is. The point of it is fear God and he will care for you, both body and soul.

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And we know that all too well in our world, don't we? We look at some of the richest people on earth and we see that they are not fearing

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God. And then we look at some of the most righteous and godly people on earth, and we see that in their squalor and in their poverty, maybe they're missionaries, maybe they've hit bad times, they've had hard providences.

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They fear God, but they don't have wealth. So what we're saying here is not an ipso facto.

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What we are saying though, is that everything comes from the hand of God. Both spiritual blessings and material blessings, and they come to us by his providence so that he gives us what he wills, and it's our responsibility to take with what he wills and use it for blessing.

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If he gives you like the parable of the talents, if he gives you a coin, use it for the glory of God.

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If he gives you five, if he gives you 10, whatever he has given you, use it for God's glory. Use it for good.

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Don't be afraid of what you've been given, either spiritually or materially. And in that way, wealth is a kind of x -ray of the soul.

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Wealth is an x -ray that reveals our heart, and it's one of the best x -rays of the heart that we have.

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In the hands of the wicked, wealth is a trap, and it amplifies their wickedness. It's a noose around the neck, but in the hands of the righteous, wealth is a great tool that can be used for much good, the planting of churches, the building up of legacies.

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So we need to understand that just because someone is wealthy doesn't mean they're blessed. And we also need to understand that just because someone is poor doesn't mean they're cursed.

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We need to understand that both righteousness and wealth, both material and spiritual blessings belong to the hand of God, and he can apportion them to whomever and whenever and however he pleases.

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But when he apportions them, when he gives or when he takes away, blessed be the name of the

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Lord. If you're in a season right now where the Lord is blessing you, you better not get a big head because it's from his hand, and he expects you to use it for his glory.

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If you're in a season where God has taken from you, where you feel like you are withering, don't get bitter because the same

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God who loved you enough to save you, loves you enough to sanctify you, and he's doing something in your season right now.

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My point is that God is the one who makes wealthy. God is the one who makes poor. God is the one.

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And like Job, we ought to say, blessed be the name of the Lord. Hannah, in her song, this is

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Samuel's mother, says in 1 Samuel 2, 7, the Lord makes poor and rich. He brings low and he brings high.

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He exalts. Paul's testimony says basically the same thing. In Philippians 4, 12,

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I know how to get along with humble means and I also know how to live in prosperity. And he goes on to say that in all those things, he's learned how to be content in all circumstances, whether with much or whether with little, whether with everything or with nothing.

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So the principle that we need to learn is not to be afraid of wealth, not to look at passages like we're reading and say, oh, that's what the prosperity gospel preachers preach.

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We need to look at these things and say, wealth is from the Lord, whether it being little or whether it be much.

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And he has called us to steward it for his glory in whatever he provides.

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Now, we go on and we say that of these two things that are both from the hand of the Lord, the spiritual blessings in this passage seem to be better because they're more enduring.

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Not better as in the other one, you shouldn't pursue it, you shouldn't have it, but better in one is infinite and one is temporal, one is eternal and one is time -bound.

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Verse 19 proves that point. My fruit is better than gold, even pure gold, and my yield is better than the choice of silver.

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So while God gives both, one is better. The fruit that God gives us is better than gold.

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Doesn't mean gold is evil. Don't look at it in that contrast. One is better and one is good.

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In that sense, it's not about trying to say that one is evil and one is good, it's about ordering them properly, having the right order in our affections.

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Both are gifts, both have eternal worth, both have temporal worth, both are bestowed by the hand of God.

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Now, there is in this passage a wonderful verse that tells us how

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God apportions wealth to his people. It says, he does this, to endow those who love me with wealth.

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Remember, there's two kinds of wealth. To endow those that love me with wealth, that I may fill their treasuries.

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Now, on the surface, it can look like, if I just obey God, I'm gonna get rich. If I just do certain things and he's gonna fill up my bank account, all those zeros are gonna become ones and eights and sevens and nines and everything else.

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That's not what he's saying. He's saying that for those who obey me, there's covenant blessings.

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You have to remember that covenant is a overarching theme of the entire

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Bible. For those who obey God, there are blessings. For those who disobey God, there's curses.

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And now with Christ as the administrator of the new and better covenant, we are still commanded to obey. And the

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Lord does bless us with great wealth because think about it, who here is going to die and go to hell because of your sins?

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If you're in Christ, that is not for you. You are unimaginably wealthy, even if you don't have two pennies to rub together.

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That's why Jeremiah Burroughs could say that it doesn't matter to him if he were afflicted with every boil, every disease, if every woman walking past him shrieked at his hideousness.

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If he was freakishly miserable, he could say to himself, I am rich beyond compare because the

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Lord God has saved me from my sins. What a perspective. It's a perspective

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I think we all ought to adopt because how easily it is for us to chase after wealth as the end and not

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Christ as the end. The wealth is supposed to be used in service to him, not the end for which we pursue it.

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And here it's we see how God ties together both riches and honor, ties together wealth and righteousness.

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He ties together fruit with gold. He ties together yield with silver. He ties together righteousness with justice, treasuries with love.

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And we learn here a spiritual value that material wealth remains a good gift from God so long as it is stewarded rightly by man.

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And let's look at a few examples of this. Abraham, the friend of God was very rich in livestock and silver and gold.

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And in him, all the families of the earth were going to be blessed. That word blessed is going to be wealthy spiritually and sometimes materially.

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Isaac, the Lord blessed him and the man became very rich and continued to grow richer until he became very wealthy. Jacob limped out of Peniel after wrestling with God and he was blessed by God.

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Joseph, given the spirit of wisdom was blessed in Egypt. Israel fed in the wilderness with manna, living in a land flowing with milk and honey, living in homes they did not build, eating from vineyards they did not plant.

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With both material and spiritual blessings poured out upon them. David, crowned with the spirit, elevated to the mighty palace.

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Solomon had wealth of so unimaginable that people from all over the world came to him.

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And yet it was God who poured out wisdom upon him. And it was when Solomon abandoned God at the end of his life that those things became a noose around his neck.

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What I'm trying to say is wealth and blessings are tied together. Wealth and honor, riches and righteousness, they're tied together for a reason because we must handle and steward these things well or they will not be a blessing, they will be a curse.

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You have

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Psalms that promise that the Lord will make us abundant if he is our

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Lord, if he is our shepherd. David saying, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he restores my soul.

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Think about that from a sheep's perspective. A sheep in green pastures is a wealthy sheep.

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Psalm 103, this God forgives all of our inequity, spiritual wealth, crowns you with loving kindness, spiritual wealth, who satisfies your years with good things, material wealth.

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The prophets talk about this under the reign of Jesus. Genesis 49, it says that your vines are gonna be so heavy, the grapes weigh them down, and it's okay if you tie up your donkey to the grapevine.

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You're like, what in the world does that mean? Well, if you've ever tied a donkey to a grapevine, you don't have a grapevine very long because they eat it.

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So what is being promised here is in the Messiah's kingdom, vines will be so abundant that it doesn't matter if you tie up your donkey to a vine because you got so many more.

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Amos 9, 13 through 14, the mountains will drip with sweet wine and all of the hills will flow with it.

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They will plant vineyards and drink their wine, make gardens and eat their fruit. That's a promise in Messiah's kingdom.

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The threshing floors will be full of grain and the vats will overflow with the new wine. And oil, you will have plenty to eat and be satisfied.

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Isaiah says the rains will come and the ground will produce rich fruit. Psalm 72 says there will be an abundance of grain on the earth on the top of the mountains.

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Isaiah 25, six, a feast of age wine and choice pieces with marrow. Jeremiah 31 will be radiant over the grain, the new wine, the oil, and their life will be like a watered garden.

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Zechariah 9, 17, grain will make the young men flourish and new wine the virgins. On and on,

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Psalm 60, verse five and six, the wealth of the nations will come to you. Who is that? That's Jesus. They will bring gold and frankincense.

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Remember that? And will bear good news of the praises of the Lord. Haggai 2, seven through nine, they will come with all the wealth of the nations and I will fill this house with glory.

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Zechariah 14, 14, the wealth of all the surrounding nations will be gathered, gold, silver, and garments in great abundance.

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Micah 4, 4, Isaiah 65, 21, Ezekiel 36, Deuteronomy 28, Zechariah 8, we can go on and on and on.

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That the Lord is promising blessings to those who obey his covenant. And what's so interesting about that is none of us did.

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All of these promises that are given are for those who keep covenant with God. And everyone in this room has not.

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Therefore, all these promises must have an overarching purpose. They must have fulfillment,

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God promised them. God's not a liar, right? If God promises something, it must come true, right?

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So where and how does this come true? It only comes true in Jesus Christ.

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The only one who has kept covenant with God, the only one who stewarded wealth properly.

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And there's so many examples of this in his life and even after he was resurrected. For instance, he multiplies loaves and fishes.

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We don't think about that in the context of wealth, but he fed 5 ,000 people. That's a lot of money to feed 5 ,000 people.

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The disciples were complaining about it. What does Jesus do? He makes it out of nothing. He's like the fed, except holy.

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He even says, I'm the bread of life. Continual bread, continual provision. There is no lack, there is no spare.

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He gives spiritual provision. He tells the woman at the well, I am the living water flowing, which means that he can't run out.

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You think about it like this. If your supply of anything cannot run out is limitless, which means you are wealthy.

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He tells his disciples that his father is gonna provide food and drink and clothing for us if we follow him,

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Matthew 6, 3, which means he's the storehouse, he's the treasury that Proverbs is talking about. He's the one who pours out every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,

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Ephesians 1, 3. There's so many incredible examples in the life of Christ.

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For instance, I'm skipping down because I think we've covered this.

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Think about Jesus's miraculous deeds. He healed the sick. He has unlimited healthcare.

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He raised the dead. Who can do that? He has abundant life to give.

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He fed the multitudes. He has a limitless supply of food. Infinite storehouses of spiritual power that cannot be tapped.

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He lacked no gift. He lacked no grace. No fruit of the spirit he did not have. He was the most spiritually rich man who ever lived because he was always saying only what the father said and the father blessed him.

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I want you to remember that Jesus is not some Galilean beggar who walks around in rags. He carried a money bag.

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That might not mean a lot, but you have to actually have money and a fair amount of it to have a money bag and to have someone who's your treasurer.

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He had Judas who was the one who oversaw the money bag and he was pilfering the money bag which meant that Jesus had stores of wealth.

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Remember at his birth, gold, frankincense and myrrh were given to him. Many scholars even estimate that the value of that gift alone, the gold, the frankincense and the myrrh was hundreds of thousands of dollars in modern day money.

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That was from his birth. He had wealthy benefactors in his ministry like Susanna and Johanna who funded his ministry.

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You think about this, he was a man who was able to preach full time in a time when everybody else was starving.

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He was preaching full time in a time period when taxes, both Roman and Herodian were like 75 % of your income.

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I get angry that I have to pay 20. And so do you because taxation is theft, another sermon.

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But he was able to preach full time in a time period where that was almost unheard of.

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He had enough material wealth to feed all of the people around him, his disciples, they didn't go hungry.

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He had this seamless cloak, which doesn't sound like a big deal to us. But in those days, cloaks and tunics were made almost like patchwork from all of the random scraps that you could get together and sew together.

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He had a tunic that was made of one piece of fabric, which scholars estimate today could be around 20 to $40 ,000.

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That's sort of the Gucci coat he was wearing or whatever. I don't know much about fashion.

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Whatever the expensive stuff is. His friend cracked open a bottle of perfume on his feet that would have been worth 50 to $60 ,000 in today's money.

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He was buried in a rich man's tomb. What I'm trying to show you is that Jesus was not a homeless vagabond.

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Jesus had material wealth. The only way he could have had his ministry is if he had material wealth.

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And he was the only one of us who stewarded it wisely and righteously. He was both an aristocrat of his day, and he was also righteous, which is so rare, as we've said.

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He's the one who had perfect stewardship. He's the one who never abused it. He's the one who totally consecrated it.

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He's the one who never let mammon master him, which means he's the only one who's ever stewarded wealth well, which means that he's the only one who can be our savior.

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Because you and I both have abused our spiritual blessings. We've forsaken them, we've forgotten them, we've ignored them, we've spurned them, and we're also the ones who have neglected our financial and material blessings as well.

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We've sinned in this way, in an every way. So we needed a perfect savior who could do these things perfectly.

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Isn't it unbelievable? I think about this all the time, that in every way

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I sinned, Jesus was righteous. And the Bible reveals it, we're not just making it up.

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In all of these ways, he was perfect. In all of my fear about money, or aversion to money, or stupid decisions that I've ever made with money, or bad investments, or we let the salesman trick us into this, or whatever else, all the ways

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I've not stewarded wealth well, all of the ways I've not provided for my family well, he did.

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Which means he's the only one who can forgive us, and the only one who can transform us, and make us righteous in this area.

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There's so many ways that trusting in the Lord Jesus will make us righteous in this area.

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I mean, you think about this, he owns everything. He owns this building.

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Bob Joyce thinks he owns this building. Bob Joyce does not own this building. That's our landlord.

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Chelmsford is his, Lowell is his. New York and Boston are his,

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Hong Kong and LA are his. The entire world is his. When he rose from the grave, he said, all authority in heaven and earth belong to me.

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So think about that. You serve the king who owns all things. You don't own anything. So therefore, whatever he puts in your hands, he expects you to use it for his glory.

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How often we treat money like, it's mine. No, it's not.

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You have nothing. You are a slave like me. You are to take what he's put in your hands and use it for his glory and for his good because he owns the world, and he expects us.

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The only reason he left us here is to turn this world into a place fit for him.

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You think about how powerful Christ is. He could have snapped his fingers and yanked us out of every, century that we lived in and brought us to heaven without ever having us be born, and yet he left us here.

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He left us here to steward his resources, to build his kingdom for his glory, and we will be held responsible for how we do it.

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So brothers and sisters, embrace the fact that God has blessed you. You're in the richest nation in the world, and there is a great calling on your life to do great good for the kingdom of God while you were here.

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In the raising up of your family and in the raising up of Christendom, let us do it with joy, amen?

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Let's pray. Lord, we thank you that both wealth and honor come from you, both riches and righteousness.

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And Lord, I pray that we would receive whatever it is that you've given us, whether it be small or whether it be large, whether we feel like we are the least of these or whether we feel like we are the first.

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Lord, let us receive them with open hands, knowing that you have entrusted them to us for your service and for your good and for your glory.

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I pray, Lord, that we would not hold on to either wealths with closed, white -knuckled fists.

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But Lord, I pray that everything we've been given, whether it's food or whether it's drink, that we would use it for the glory of God.

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And Lord, I pray. I pray for courage. I pray for enthusiasm.

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I pray for conviction. I look around at the graveyard of Christendom that we live in here in New England, and I look at how buildings are leaving

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Christendom to become hotels and Airbnbs and nightclubs.

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And I look at churches that are still standing that are bowing the knee to every perversion. And I look at us meeting in a way that we're not in a warehouse.

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Lord, I pray. I pray that the people of God in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, I pray that they would catch a vision that all wealth is from you.

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And that, Lord, that we would work to wrestle these buildings out of the hands of pagans and that we would build cathedrals on every hill again and that the gospel would go forth again in this land and that we would not see our wealth as a part of building our little castle, but as a part of building your eternal kingdom again.

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God, I pray that in this place that has had such great preachers as Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, John Wesley, men who heralded the gospel,

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Lord, I pray it would happen again. And I pray that we would catch a vision for how our material and our immaterial wealth will be a part of building up that kingdom.