A few days ago I found a $5 bill in my pocket. Five dollars can’t get you much these days but nonetheless I was delighted to find such a small, unexpected treasure. Immediately I thought of the many different ways that I could use those five dollars that day. Therein lies the problem. We grow up learning, thinking, and being trained into the belief that “money is for me”, and so we need to work hard to get our hands on as much as we can. This is the pressure that we are faced with from our parents, friends, culture and society in general. The problem is that the pursuit of money can cause us to rearrange our priorities, ignore God, compromise our beliefs, and engage in a lot of destructive actions. In short, it causes us to lose our senses. 

We have been tricked into thinking that money is the most important thing in life. With money we can buy whatever our heart desires to bring us happiness, we can live a comfortable life without any worries, and we generally believe that it will eliminate a whole host of life’s problems. The Bible doesn’t teach anything remotely close to that. But still, we pursue money to fulfill all of our desires. When we do that, we make ourselves more important than God; we worship the creature rather than the Creator. What this world values so highly, God looks at quite differently. We look at money as perhaps the most valuable thing in our life, but really it’s not much different from a Disney Dollar. With a Disney Dollar, you can use it to get whatever you want when you’re at Disneyland; a churro, a meal, a Mickey Mouse hat. All of these things are sure to bring you some sort of happiness. But what happens when you’re no longer there? That Disney Dollar has become worthless. It can’t be used outside of the Magic Kingdom.

In the same way, there will come a day when we are no longer on this earth. There will come a time when the Father will call us home, and all the material resources we’ve amassed will become useless. So what good is it then to accumulate money for ourselves? Jesus makes it clear in the parable in Luke 16 that money is for meeting the needs of others. The money that we have is not really ours. It has been given to us by God and it’s up to us to be good stewards of that gift. I challenge all the Catapult students to think about this and bring in your donations this coming Sunday as we talked about this past week. We’ll be making a special donation to Habitat for Humanity’s efforts in Chile to live out this truth that money truly is for meeting the needs of others. 

Praise.

-Danny