A certain spiritual master from the East became so pleased with his disciple’s progress that he left him on his own. The man lived simply in a mud hut. He begged for his food. Each morning after his meditations and prayers, the disciple washed his loincloth and hung it out to dry.

 

One day the man came back only to discover that his loincloth had been torn apart and eaten by rats. He begged the villagers for another, and they gave it to him. But the rats ate that one, too. So the man got himself a cat. That took care of the rats, but now when he begged for his food, he had to beg for milk for his cat as well.

 

This won’t do, he thought. I’ll get a cow. So he got a cow and found that now he had to beg for feed for the cow. So he decided to till and plant the ground around his hut.

 

Soon, the man realized he was turning into a farmer and had no time for his spiritual devotions, so he hired servants to tend to the farm. Overseeing the laborers became such a time-consuming chore, though, that the man got married in order to have a wife to help him.

 

After a while, the disciple became the richest man in the village. His teacher was traveling that way one day and was shocked to see that where there had once been a simple mud hut, there was now a palace surrounded by a vast estate with many servants.

 

What is the meaning of this? the master asked the disciple. You won’t believe this, replied the man, but there was no other way I could keep my loincloth.[i]

 

The lure of wealth creates all sorts of justifications in us, doesn’t it? In their eagerness to become rich, Paul says in 1Timothy, some have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. Instead, Paul says, we should strive for gain—but gain in godliness with contentment, because we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it.

 

Now this whole passage of Scripture makes me a little uncomfortable because Paul is actually talking to young Timothy, his protégé in the ministry. He is warning a pastor not to become greedy. He wants to make sure that this young minister learns to be content with a mud hut and doesn’t become consumed by his love for a newer and nicer house. (Do you see why I am uncomfortable?) Paul has a way of meddling with all of us, don’t you know?! And we all need his meddling, because we all are susceptible to falling in love with money and the things money can get us and falling away from our first love, which is our love for God and the things of God. Pastors are not immune to this temptation—and not just megachurch pastors or TV evangelists. The amount of money we make is not the issue. Poorer preachers as well as richer can fall prey to this seduction.

 

But Paul’s warning is not limited to Pastor Timothy then or to Pastor George now. By the time we reach verse 17, Paul makes sure he makes you uncomfortable, too—he stretches his counsel to all Christians, and he speaks especially to the rich about what they must do with their wealth. Do good, Paul says. Use your wealth to do good for others, so that you are not consumed by your money and can know the life that really is life. St. Bernard of Clairvaux understood the futility of any other course: Theirs is an endless road, he said, and a hopeless maze, who seek for goods before they seek for God.[ii]

 

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus illustrates the seriousness of the matter. Jesus does not name the rich man in the parable, although he was probably well known by everyone in his lifetime. Jesus tells the story from the perspective of eternity. From that view of things, we see that the name the man thought he was making means nothing to God. The beggar, Lazarus, on the other hand, is named. No one may have known his name in his lifetime, but God knows him intimately. The rich man needed nothing from God, he must have thought, and so he didn’t give thought to what God might have needed from him. Lazarus had nothing and no one to depend upon in this life, so he could seek after God before goods. Jesus is warning us of the eternal peril of seeking goods before we seek God. He makes it vivid and clear that if we want to do well in the next life, we had better learn to do good in this one. He even calls the doing of good works in this life a kind of investment in our future. They are to do good, he says, to be rich in good works, generous, ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future.

 

Cecil Sherman is an admired mentor who is now retired from pastoring churches like Broadway Baptist in Fort Worth and First Baptist in Asheville, North Carolina. Other preachers often complain about having to preach to people about money. Cecil said he never minded that at all: I take it as my sacred duty to deliver people from that which if held too tightly will send them straight to hell. Well…?

 

Of course you might be sitting here asking yourself if that means you can buy your way into heaven by your good works of giving. No, absolutely not, but you might be able to keep yourself out of heaven by saving money for yourself that is meant to be shared in order to do good for others. Jesus saves. But we live too often as if money saves.

 

So what is the antidote for this? Putting Jesus first by using our riches to do good with. Now, this can take more forms than you think. When we talk about riches, we usually talk about money. That is one form of wealth, and we might as well start there, since our habit is to do everything else first and talk about what we do with our money last. But that won’t do.

 

If you are not committed to the principle of tithing, now is the time to start. Some of you are so deeply in debt that you figure you can’t tithe yet because your creditors are hounding you. Well, well and good. Pay off your debt quickly so you can become a tither sooner. Make it a goal to pay off your debt now and not add any debt at all until you establish yourself as a tither.

 

But start giving something at the same time. If you want to run a marathon someday, you might think you have to lose a lot of weight you are carrying first. But if you will begin walking before you run, at the same time that you are dieting, you will let both things work together for the best result.

 

And for those of you unsure of what a tithe is … let me help. The word tithe means tenth. The Bible says you should make the giving of a tenth of your income the baseline of your stewardship. For some of you, you have to climb up from the basement to get to the baseline. Fine. Whatever it takes.

 

The tithe is not simply God asking you for something for the sake of your spiritual loyalty. God has always been passionately concerned with the poor. When farmers went to harvest their fields, God ordered them to leave a tenth of the field unharvested so the poor could come and glean the rest. Giving ten percent of your gross income puts you in a position to avoid the rich man’s fate, not because of what you give, but because you come into relationship with the heart of God and with Lazarus at your gate.

 

Some of you can and should be doing much more than giving a tithe. Warren Buffett’s example is easy to dismiss because of his enormous wealth. But this humble and remarkable man has heeded Paul’s counsel against becoming haughty with his riches. The chairman of Berkshire Hathaway last year announced that he was giving $30 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gateses have set aside more than $35 billion to deal with problems of global poverty, disease and ignorance. Extraordinary. They will take the same resolve and ingenuity that built Microsoft into an economic powerhouse and try to deal with every Lazarus they can find at every gate in the world.

 

Buffett said something very interesting when he announced his decision: My gift is nothing, he said. I have everything I need with less than one percent of my wealth. I was born in the right country at the right time, and my work is disproportionately rewarded compared to that of teachers and soldiers. I’m just giving back surplus claims that have no value to me but can do a lot for others. The people I really admire are the small donors who give up a movie or a restaurant meal to help needier people.[iii]

 

So my question to you is this: Are you one of those people Warren Buffett admires? We can all do something; most of us can do something much more than what we are doing now.

 

You are richer than you know. No matter how much money you have, you are still probably richer than ninety percent of the people in the world. But in his new boo,k simply titled, Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World, former president Bill Clinton lists, alongside giving money, examples of giving time, giving things, giving skills, and giving gifts of reconciliation and new beginnings. There is virtually no limit to the possibilities of what good you can do with the riches you have.

 

Don Daniel e-mailed me this week to ask if I knew of a Wilshire soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan that he might donate a fighting knife to. Don has collected knives for years, and he has been realizing that if he can save a life by giving something he possesses, then it shouldn’t belong to him any longer. We are making that happen. But the point should be the same for all of us: if we have something that that we possess that others need for their very survival, we should ask ourselves whether it should really belong to us.

 

Carolyn Strickland is coordinating a new ministry in our community in conjunction with Buckner Family Services, called Kids Hope USA-Wilshire. Ten Wilshire people are giving their time and knowledge to mentor an elementary school child one hour per week. Each mentor has a co-mentor as back-up who prays for the meeting. The mentor works with one child—and one child only—all semester. The teacher gives the mentor information about help needed in math or reading or behavior. The one question the kids always ask is, Are you here to see only me? They often don’t have that kind of special attention from other people in their lives. And the answer is yes. My rich wife will be working with Madison. Madison is her Lazarus. She will know her name, and she will care for her needs. Kim could be doing other things, God and George know. But she is doing what God and George both know is right.

 

I could go on and on with these examples. You don’t have to leave the church to do good works for the poor at your gate. You can serve in the preschool with children who qualify as being less fortunate than you in growing up, or teach Sunday school to those that are poorer than you in spiritual knowledge, or become a Stephen Minister to care for those in crisis times, or, or, or. We can help you find Lazarus at your gate. And in doing so, we may not help each other get into heaven or keep each other out of hell, but we might just begin to taste what Paul called the life that really is life. Got a taste for that?

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