Money and Possessions: from Greed to a Biblical Motivation for Reward
September 19, 2006
Time’s cover story for the week of September 18 – Does God Want You To Be Rich? – explores the hold that the so-called “prosperity gospel” has on a significant fraction of the Church. When prosperity preachers say that God wants His followers to be rich in the things of this world, it riles me. When their destructive message is amplified through mainstream media reports, it angers me.
My sinful nature would love for the prosperity gospel to be true. In fact, if I were to design a religion, it no doubt would include a god who wants me to be rich right here, right now. As recently as two years ago, my adoration of money may have rivaled the most decadent among us. As an adolescent, Alex P. Keaton was among my role models. Later, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, starring Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen, consistently rated as one of my favorite movies. The major appeal: Gordon Gekko (played by Douglas).
As slick and twisted as Gekko was, I admired what I perceived as a willingness to discuss the pursuit of self-interest in language stripped bare of political correctness. Recall his climactic speech at the Teldar Paper shareholders’ meeting:
[G]reed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
“Greed is good,” I agreed. Admittedly, greed is an “excessive desire” by definition, but I doubted whether “excessive” really meant anything in this context. By what standard could that possibly be measured? (Can you hear the influence of my post-modern University of Michigan education?) Hence, in my world, an excessive desire was nothing more than a hearty desire, and there couldn’t be anything wrong with a hearty desire for life, money, love or knowledge.
Well, it has been about two years now since I turned to the Lord, and began seeking in earnest to know Christ and the power of his resurrection. Among the first truths He impressed upon me: a hearty desire for the things of this world is fatally misdirected. Because I’ve written before about this hard lesson, I won’t do so again here.
What I would like to do is recommend a resource for those looking for a weapon to battle a strong desire to acquire or hold onto the rewards of this world. Most of the Lord’s work of redeeming my heart from worship of money and possessions has been accomplished through prayer, meditation and devotions. But most important to my intellectual growth in this area has been Randy Alcorn’s book Money, Possessions and Eternity (rev. 2003).
Alcorn’s Scripturally-focused approach, in particular his discussion of the doctrine of eternal rewards, has blessed me with a framework for processing my diminishing but still present desires to be rewarded for a job well done. This biblical doctrine recognizes that God uses the promise of eternal rewards to help motivate us to obedience in this world. In other words, he appeals to our eternal self-interest.
At many points in the Bible, the prospect of eternal rewards is recognized as a “proper motivation for the Christian’s obedience” (Alcorn at 130). Moses suffered short-term “disgrace for the sake of Christ” and the loss of “the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward” (Hebrews 11:26).
The apostle Paul ran the race of life “to get a crown that will last forever” (1 Corinthians 9:25). As Alcorn reminds us, “Paul was unashamedly motivated by the prospect of eternal reward, which he affirmed freely and frequently (2 Corinthians 4:16-18; 5:9-10; 2 Timothy 4:7-8). He encouraged all believers to be motivated by rewards (Galatians 6:9-10; 1 Timothy 6:17-19; 2 Timothy 2:5, 12).”
Christ, himself, “endured the cross” “for the joy set before him” (Hebrews 12:2). And He encouraged us to obedience in light of reward to come, saying, “when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous” (Luke 14:13-14). He instructed us to “love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High” (Luke 6:35). How great will the reward be? In another context, Jesus suggests a return of 10,000%: “everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life” (Matthew 19:29). Finally, Christ taught not that desire for reward is wrong, but that desire for material reward here and now is misdirected:
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. (Matthew 6:19-20)
To say that eternal reward is a proper motivation for Christian obedience, of course, is not to say that it is or ought to be the sole or even primary motivation.
Recognizing the propriety of a desire for eternal reward has helped me deal with the pressures of our materialistic culture, and with my own desires to keep up with – or to have more than – the Joneses. For instance, not long ago I would find feelings of envy creeping into my heart as I visited or heard about the big or new house of one of my peers. When I hear the thought “I want that, too,” I try to remind myself that (1) the relentless forces of entropy and decay already have begun to destroy their beautiful house, and (2) God wants to build for me an indestructible, eternal home in heaven. As those thoughts have become a habit of the mind, the desire for a great mansion in this life intrudes with decreasing frequency. And when it does intrude, I find it increasingly easier to release it.We should be motivated by gratitude to serve God . . . . We should be motivated by our ambition "to please him" . . . . [We] obey God out of our love for him as Father and Redeemer . . . out of fear of him as Creator and Judge . . . and out of our hope in him as Rewarder of those who serve him . . . . (Alcorn at 131)
Randy Alcorn paints a particularly vivid picture about the eternal home we might expect, depending on the extent of our earthly obedience:
Jesus stated that he is preparing for us eternal dwelling places on his master’s estate (John 14:2-3). . . . 1 Corinthians 3:10-15 suggests that in this life we are providing the building materials for our Lord to us[e] in this construction project, of which he himself is the foundation. If this is true, then the size and quality of our eternal dwelling is influenced by how we live our lives now. [Thus] all believers are engaged in a sort of eternal building project, the results of which will vary widely. We might imagine that some of us are sending ahead sufficient materials for pup tents, some for studio apartments, some for trailer homes, some for ranch houses, and others for great mansions.Do you want your eternal home to be a “great mansion” or a “pup tent?”
Comments
I should mention that Alcorn has another (shorter) book devoted solely to this issue, called THE LAW OF REWARDS: GIVING WHAT YOU CAN'T KEEP TO GAIN WHAT YOU CAN'T LOSE.
Posted by: Ramsey Wilson | September 19, 2006 12:32 PM