Good Morning Everyone,
Our theme for this month: “Obeying God when obeying isn’t easy”
Our Bible verse for today: “Freely you have received, freely give.” Matthew 10:8 NIV
Our thought for today: “We must resist the temptation to cling to stuff.”
Many years ago my wife and I adopted a general philosophy regarding the acquiring and giving away of stuff. It goes like this: “If God has blessed us to the point that He has allowed us to get a new item (whatever the item is), if we can, we will attempt to bless someone else who is in need by giving them the old item.”
Over the years that philosophy has led us to give away (instead of selling), a dining room set, a bedroom set, two sofas, several recliners, two refrigerators, a washing machine, a dryer, and two cars, that I can remember.
Now, I would like to claim that we did that because we have such big generous hearts, but the exact opposite is true. We came to the conclusion that God wanted us to do that precisely because we were not really that generous. Over the years, like many people, we had become very possessive of our stuff. We had accumulated lots and lots of stuff, we were always longing for new stuff, and when we did get the new stuff, we would then try to sell the old stuff for as much money as we could get so we could then get even more new stuff!
Yes it was true, we had come to the point that we no longer owned our possessions, our possessions owned us.
So to remedy that, not only has God moved us to possess less, but He also requires us to give things away that we could otherwise sell. And it has not been easy. I like my stuff just as much as the next guy does. And when I don’t need my stuff anymore, I like to get money for it. So making do with less, and giving things away, has always been a struggle for me. But it has gotten easier over the years and I’ve actually come to enjoy it.
Maybe possessiveness isn’t a problem for you. Maybe you have learned to hold everything lightly. Maybe you recognize that everything you have is a gift from God and it’s easy for you to share with others. But if so, you’re the exception, because in our consumer-oriented society which is so fixated on conspicuous consumption, we’re conditioned to get all we can and to keep all we can.
The lesson Jesus wants us to learn is that God has blessed us, so now we need to bless others. It’s not an easy lesson to learn and it’s certainly not an easy practice to live by, but it is an essential part of obeying God. “Freely you have received, freely give.”
God Bless,
Pastor Jim
Oak Hill Baptist Church 