Wednesday, August 26, 2009
How Much Do You Need? The Danger of Coveting, Part 56 of 60
TEXT: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s” (Exodus 20:17).
“Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows” (I Timothy 6:9-10).
IDEA: An obsession with acquiring wealth has great dangers.
PURPOSE: To help listeners realize that a desire for riches can make them spiritually poor.
Imagine that you’re a fly and you landed on some flypaper.
When the fly lands on the flypaper, what do you think is going through its head?
Can you imagine the fly saying, “My flypaper!”
Does it make much difference if the flypaper says, “My fly”?
I. Is it possible for people to own houses and automobiles and wear the latest clothes and not be hurt by it?
When do the automobile and house and clothes own us?
John Chrysostom said, “Riches are not forbidden, but the price of them is.” What do you think he meant?
Which is more dangerous: the love of money that is prompted by a materialistic society, or our rationalization for our joining the chase?
II. Paul sets out the dangers of a love of money (covetousness) in both general and specific terms in 1 Timothy 6:9-10:
"Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows."
The love of money is a tool of the Evil One to lure us away from God.
Paul says it is a temptation and behind the temptation there lies a tempter.
You have a trap or a snare: whenever you have a trap, that means there is a hunter or a trapper behind it.
Satan is capable of using our hope for wealth to blur moral distinctions in Christians.
The love of money is foolish and harmful.
Foolish: why do you think he calls it foolish?
Harmful: these cravings are not merely for money, but for all the things you want when you have access to wealth.
Money often leads you into circles where the rules are different, where the values are distorted, and the peer pressure is enormous.
What for a Christian might have been unthinkable from the outside becomes quite natural from the inside.
These desires plunge or drown us and lead to complete destruction.
What is so insidious is that there are no warning signs along the paths to riches that tell you that there is destruction ahead. The fly is not warned by the flypaper, but is nonetheless destroyed.
