In 1 Timothy the apostle Paul is addressing rich people. That’s us by the way! By world standards we are the rich being addressed in the Bible! You see, if you own a car you are among the 3% of the people in the world that do. Many of us have two or more! If you earn $37,000 a year, you are in the top 4% of wage earners alive today. If you make $45,000 a year or more, you are in the top 1% of people who are earning money today. When I was studying demographic information in preparation to start a new church, I learned that the average person in our area makes a lot more than that! So we are in the top 1% of wage earners alive today! So we are the rich people Paul is addressing. And here’s Paul’s advice in 1 Timothy 6:18 to us rich people, “Tell them [rich people] to use their money to do good. They should be rich in good works and generous to those in need, always being ready to share with others.” Having money has the potential to be a bad thing. If we have the money to buy lots of stuff, materialism can hold us firm in its grip if we’re not careful. But Paul here shares with us the antidote to materialism so that we can stay free from it’s grip. He says the antidote is to be “…generous to those in need, always being ready to share with others.” That’s how you get free and stay free from materialism. By being generous.
The laws of physics tell us the greater the mass, the greater the hold that mass exerts. This explains why the largest planets are capable of holding so many satellites and moons in orbit. Similarly, the more things we own – the greater their total mass – the more they grip us, hold us, and set us in orbit around them. Is there anything wrong with owning possessions? No! It just becomes wrong when they own you. The apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 6:12, “I have the right to do anything…but not everything is beneficial. I have the right to do anything, but I will not be mastered by anything.”
We accumulate more and more because we mistakenly believe that the more we get the happier we’ll be but the truth is: The more you get the more you want. By drinking deep of material possessions you don’t quench your thirst for more, you intensify it. Solomon put it this way in Ecclesiastes 5:10 says, “Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income.” The more you get, the more you want. And it doesn’t satisfy. So why not try something new? Why not try giving?
When you give:
- It breaks the chains of materialism.
- It makes you happy. As Jesus put it in Acts 20:35, “It’s more blessed to give than to receive.”
- It not only breaks the chains of materialism and makes you happy, it also helps you to create financial margin. Giving money away is the number one way to create financial margin. Here’s how. Your lack of margin isn’t really a money issue. It’s a heart issue. Because your heart is materialistic, greedy and selfish – you spend and spend and spend to try and satisfy your insatiable appetite for stuff. And in doing so you use up any financial margin you had – and when this heart issue is really bad it results in negative financial margin (this is what we know as debt). It’s a heart issue, not an issue of how much money you make. Now here’s how giving money away actually helps you to create more financial margin. When you give money away it breaks the power of money in your life. That is, when you give money away God changes your heart. When you give…the grip that materialism, greed and selfishness has on you begins to loosen – a little bit at a time. And when you aren’t so materialistic you don’t spend as much on stuff you don’t need. When you aren’t greedy, you don’t have to buy every single thing you lay your eyes on. When you aren’t selfish you don’t need to consume all the money you have to indulge yourself. And in this way you create more margin by giving your money away.
So we see that giving truly is the antidote to materialism!