“Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things;
and give me life in your ways.” (Psalm 119:37)
Roughly once a month I enter our household income and expenses into Microsoft Money 2006. Yes, the orphan software child of Microsoft that it abandoned in 2011. Regardless of the neglect, the package has remained loyal and functional.
This week, as I was balancing our Wells Fargo checking account, and updating our retirement savings, Psalm 119:37 flashed through my head.
How rude. How inappropriate.
While I’m looking at a personal financial report, the Holy Spirit of God has the audacity to interrupt my calculation and planning with the word “worthless”.
But like a burr that gets caught in my hiking socks, the thought and conviction hung on.
By international standards, we have abundance. In domestic terms, I would guess fairly average. But the point isn’t about the amount of accumulation, but the value I place on it.
The Psalmist, without knowing what Fidelity is holding in our account, describes this as “without value”. “Worthless”.
At times these worthless items occupy my thinking. “How much is enough?” “What did the market do today?” “Which politician will have the most positive impact on my retirement accounts in the coming years?”
So my eyes turn. My attention shifts. My pulse accelerates.
At times, both consumption and conservation can be an idol.
On Tuesday, at a HOPE International fund raising event, I was told that 700 million residents on our planet live on roughly $2 a day. Yes, another burr in my sock.
And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. (Luke 12:18, ESV)
Bigger barns are never the solution. Never.
Assets provide opportunity to participate tangibly in the advancement of the Kingdom of God. To leverage my least valuable asset into the most valuable outcome… transformation.
The tighter I clench my fist, the harder my heart gets, and the more my stomach churns. An open heart opens my fist, and an open fist feeds my soul.
Stewardship matters. Wisdom and prudence are to be commended. But not for the sake of stockpiling or barn-filling.
Resources are a tool… to breakup crusty ground, to reclaim what has been abandoned or lost. To bless someone without resources. Without fanfare. Without self-promotion.
Resources only become worthless, when they become the goal. When amassing more is the objective.
Perhaps Susanna Wesley said it best over 300 years ago… “Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, takes off your relish for spiritual things, whatever increases the authority of the body over the mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may seem in itself.”
“That thing is sin to you…”
Avoiding worthless for the sake of our King.
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