Last week after worship someone came up to me, and they will remain nameless, and asked if I was now done preaching on money. I told them that we had one more week left, and they were grateful that that was it, although they would have been just as happy if we were done last week, and perhaps that’s you as well. If it is, know that you just have to make it through today, and then we will make our way onto other things. But those things might not necessarily be more important things, because money is a spiritual issue. We don’t normally think of it that way, but the Protestant reformer Martin Luther said that there were three steps to conversion. First was the conversion of the heart, second was the conversion of the mind and finally was the conversion of the wallet. But, he said, they didn’t always happen at the same time, and he argued that the wallet was the last to come around. Now, as James Harnish says, “salvation is about a lot more than money, but it is never about anything less than money, particularly in a culture that is compulsively driven by the power of money.” That is, ideas of salvation end up being partly about money because money plays such an important role in our culture and in our lives.
This is nothing new, Jesus was dealing with the same issue which is why he talks about money and possessions so much, and he tells us directly that we cannot have two masters, that we cannot serve both God and money, or God and possessions. That we have to choose our allegiance. Now he doesn’t say that money in and of itself is bad, but what we decide to do with it, how we are going to treat it and relate to it that makes all the difference. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism emphasized exactly the same things when he talked about money, and in establishing what have become Wesley’s rules on money which are to first make as much as we can, with some very clear stipulations about what that means, the second was to save all that we can, and the third, and I know this is the message you have all been waiting for, and you’re sitting on the edges of you seats now in anticipation, give all you can.
