(Note: While this article was written with elders’ wives and other Christian women in mind, we hope all of our readers will enjoy it and share it with others who might benefit from it.)
“You can’t take it with you—but you can send it on ahead.” That’s the theme of Randy Alcorn’s book The Treasure Principle and the crux of Jesus’ teaching on money in the Sermon on the Mount, where he said:
“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” (Matt. 6:19-24)
Jesus doesn’t say money is trivial; he actually tells us we should store it up. But he says we have two options for where to store it: on earth, where it will vanish when this life is over, or in the life to come, where we can enjoy it for eternity. We can store up heavenly treasure for ourselves by using our earthly treasure to meet the physical and spiritual needs of others—that’s an investment plan that will never fail.
Alcorn, whose many books and articles about money and giving have made him the preeminent evangelical voice on the topic in our generation, challenges us to imagine ourselves as Union soldiers living in the American South near the end of the Civil War. Our pockets are stuffed with Confederate currency, which will soon be utterly worthless. The only smart thing to do, knowing the South is about to lose the war, is to keep just enough Confederate currency to meet our immediate needs before we go home—and exchange all the rest for U.S. currency.
As Christians, he says, we have “the ultimate insider trading tip: Earth’s currency will become worthless when Christ returns—or when you die, whichever comes first . . . Jesus functions here as the foremost market timer. He tells us to once and for all switch investment vehicles. He instructs us to transfer our funds from earth . . . to heaven . . . There’s nothing wrong with Confederate money, as long as you understand its limits. Realizing its value is temporary should radically affect your investment strategy. To accumulate vast earthly treasures you can’t possibly hold on to for long is equivalent to stockpiling Confederate money even though you know it’s about to become worthless. According to Jesus, storing up earthly treasures isn’t simply wrong. It’s just plain stupid.”
Chip Bell says on Bible.org, “Instead of accumulating more and more here on earth, we can forward assets to our future address.” How do we do that? Bell says we answer that question by identifying the four things that will last forever: people, godly character, God’s kingdom, and love. The time and money we spend on evangelizing and discipling others, growing spiritually, supporting the local church, and expressing generosity and kindness to others—those are deposits we make in our “heavenly bank accounts.”
The Good Life Starts with a Good Eye
Wedged between Jesus’ comments about money is a curious statement about having a good eye. What’s that about?
Just as an American English speaker might be puzzled to hear someone described as having a short fuse, losing her marbles, or putting her foot in her mouth, we scratch our heads when we see verses about the eye in the middle of a passage about money. But in the Jewish culture, a “good eye” (ayin tovah) is an idiom for generosity, and a “bad eye” (ayin ra’ah) belongs to someone who is selfish and stingy. Proverbs 22:9 describes the generous person as one with “a good eye” or “a bountiful eye.”
When it comes to money, we need clear vision and proper perspective. Someone with a bad eye is nearsighted—she can’t see past her earthly life into the future. She is blind to the fact that everything she has is the Lord’s, and since her eyes are closed to others’ needs, her fist is closed too. She drifts blindly into enslavement to her money and possessions. Her world revolves around them. “How great is that darkness!” Jesus says of this person. She simply doesn’t get it.
But someone with a good eye sees reality with accuracy and clarity. She has the depth perception to see that her earthly life is temporary and the world to come is real and permanent. When she looks at her earthly possessions, she knows that they ultimately belong to the Lord. Her eyes are open to the needs of others, and she responds with generosity.
Why Giving Is So Good
Generosity blesses the giver as much as the recipient, replacing the gravitational pull of possessions with a sense of freedom and buoyancy.
Alcorn says giving is “a matter of basic physics. The greater the mass, the greater the hold that mass exerts. The more things we own—the greater their total mass—the more they grip us, setting us in orbit around them. Finally, like a black hole, they suck us in. Giving changes all that. It breaks us out of orbit around our possessions. We escape their gravity, entering a new orbit around our treasures in heaven.”
If you have ever spilled a drink on your freshly installed carpet, scratched your shiny new car, felt the pressure to work harder for a heftier mortgage, or stood in the middle of your new, bigger-and-better house realizing you now “need” lots of new furniture (and a lot more time to clean!), you know exactly what he means. Nice things are a blessing, but it’s wise to recognize their true cost.
Eddie Ogan tells a story that embodies the truth that “’[i]t is more blessed to give than to receive’” (Acts 20:35). To paraphrase her account, when she was a little girl in the spring of 1946, her pastor announced an Easter collection for a poor family in their church. Eddie and her sisters, along with their widowed mom, scrimped and saved fastidiously for the collection. They committed to eating only potatoes for the month and cut the electric bill by keeping the radio off and spending more time in the dark. The kids did yard work, babysat, and made potholders they sold for a dollar each.
By Easter eve they had earned $70 and were almost too excited to sleep. On Easter morning they darted to church in the rain (one sister with wet feet, since the cardboard that was filling the holes in her shoes had disintegrated) and were so proud to put their hard-earned money—three twenty-dollar bills and a ten—into the offering basket to help the poor family.
After lunch that afternoon, they saw the pastor’s car pulling up to their house, and Eddie’s mother answered the door. He handed her an envelope containing three twenty-dollar bills, a ten, and seventeen ones. Their hearts sank as they went from feeling like millionaires to realizing they were the poor family.
The next Sunday, a visiting missionary spoke at their church. At the end of his presentation, he announced that a church in Africa needed a roof, and $100 would cover it. “Can’t we all sacrifice to help these poor people?” he asked. Eddie and her family smiled at each other as their mom pulled the envelope from the previous week out of her purse and handed it to her daughters to put into the offering.
When the pastor announced that the church’s offering totaled a little over $100, the missionary excitedly said, “You must have some rich people in this church.” Eddie’s family had given $87 of that $100. They were the rich family. “From that day on,” Eddie recalls, “I’ve never been poor again.”
What Is God Doing in Us?
Sid Litke writes on Bible.org, “Is God perhaps working in our hearts in some way—maybe though some financial struggle—to turn and focus our heart’s goals on eternity? . . . God wants our whole life, not just our money, but God uses our money—particularly our giving—as a key indicator and even a method by which to transform our heart.”
As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, thus storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is truly life. (1 Tim. 6:17-19)
Photo by Andre Taissin on Unsplash