The enjoyment of true riches

I Timothy 6:17-19 Command those who are rich in this present world not to be
arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their
hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.
Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and
willing to share. In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm
foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is
truly life.
There were a number of rich people in this Ephesian congregation which was
being pastored by Timothy. Enough for the apostle to advise Timothy to tell
wealthy believers how they should manage their affairs. It is possible to be a
rich Christian. It is possible to be a poor Christian. Both have their temptations,
and perhaps the temptations of riches are more dangerous. The Puritan Richard
Rogers woke up one night just after midnight, and he was worried about
something that he owned, and he couldnt sleep thinking about the possibility
of losing it. Then he became convicted that some of the gifts of God to him had
actually become too sweet. A mans library can become too sweet; anything
new can become too sweet. When we tighten our belts we are more at ease,
but the God who has made some people rich can give them grace to accept
and use their riches.
It is significant that Paul does not say, Command those who are rich in this
present world to give away all they have to the poor people in the
congregation. There is not a hint of that. The Lord told one rich young ruler to
sell all his possessions, and give the proceedings away, and then follow him.
When Peter heard that he blurted out, We have left everything to follow you!
Was it a moment of awareness for Peter, that that had happened to them? Was
it a boast? But does Jesus expect each Christian to give up everything to
become real disciples? The Lord challenged that rich young man to do it, but he
did not demand it of Joseph of Aramethea, or Jairus, or Mary and Martha. And
when wealthy Zacchaeus promised to give half of his possessions to the poor
the Lord did not say, and the other half too. All of us are to renounce riches
as our god and lord, and lay up treasures in heaven, but there is no vow of
poverty demanded as a condition of becoming a Christian. We are not to
admire Buddhist monks sitting by their begging bowls waiting for people to
give them food for the day. We are not to dream that if only we were 100%
religious people we too would be living like that. That is not so. A centurion was
not told by Jesus to cease being an officer. The converted soldiers who came to
John to ask him how they should live new lives were told such things as, Be
content with your wages. So let us begin with this observation:1. It Is Possible To Be a Rich Christian.
I would base that on three assertions:i] The Christian is under a mandate to replenish and subdue and rule over the
earth (Genesis 1:28).
This is not a sacred world, nor a mystic world, nor a magic world. It is an earth
to be cultivated, and improved. Its resources are to be harnessed for our use.
Its fossil fuels are to be extracted. Its mineral reserves are to be mined. Its wind
and wave and water power is to be channelled for our comfort. Man has been

made to have dominion in this world, and directing and managing the
resources of the world is the vocation of every one of us. The first man was put
in a garden and told to till it. He was not to sit on his porch and send his wife
out to work the fields. Idleness is an alien root which has entered our hearts
after the fall, and it is to be mortified. Gods original intention for mankind was
not poverty but prosperity. There is nothing grubby in a Christian being
involved in business, or of doing well at it.
Of course, this is Gods world and we are temporary trustees. We must give
account to God for how we have used what he has given us. We must make
sure that our spiritual energies are not impaired by what we do for a living. We
are not to deface and pollute and destroy the natural world, but all of us are
called to replenish and subdue the creation. That is the way to prosperity. It is
no secret.
My mothers father was very typical of his age. He was a Baptist, Marxist
entrepreneur. He saved his money and gave loans to fellow railwaymen. He
bought three little houses, and on a Wednesday afternoon once a month I
would go as a six year-old boy with my mother to collect the 20 pence weekly
rental from those old women who lived in the houses. One was called Mrs
Banks, and she had chickens in her kitchen, and in those days as an only child I
wished we too could have had hens in our home. Grandpa Francis was playing
with Marxist ideas, as many did in Wales in the 1920s, but in his heart he was
working away in Gods creation, and he had invested in three little houses
which he renovated, one to be left to each of his three children. That was how
he prospered. That leads me on to my second point.
ii] The Christian has been given the right to own property.
God alone has total and unconditional ownership of property, but man has the
present and historical right to property. You remember in the land of Israel the
Lord shared out the land amongst the families. The land was not communally
owned; the vineyards and the olive groves and the barley fields were privately
owned. The people were held responsible to God for what they did to their land.
That responsibility freed man. I think we all function best when we are given as
much responsibility as we can bear. A man without responsibility is a man to be
pitied. A man with nothing at his disposal cant act freely. He has to touch his
forelock and doff his cap to everyone over him for permission to take a single
step. And those commissars can prevent a man who has nothing from
flourishing. Without property there is no free personal life. Without property
there is little power to your actions. A person should be able to say my room
and my things and my clothes or he may as well be in prison. What do you
own in prison? Even your clothes are prison clothes.
I will give you a text for the right to private property. It is the Eighth
Commandment; Thou shalt not steal. White colonisers moving into another
continent may not help themselves to the best land from the people of that
nation. Caesar cannot send in his army and remove a mans business from him.
Ahab could not steal Naboths vineyard from him if he did not wish to sell it or
exchange it. There are private property rights that God has guaranteed in the
Eighth Commandment. We utterly reject the Marxist theory that men are
created equal, and that private property is theft and that this injustice can only
be removed by state ownership. You see the anarchy and riots on the streets of

London a month ago from those who believe that. Property rights give to men,
and to women especially, freedom, and it is unacceptable for Caesar to say,
You must go and live in this place, and do this job, and this will be the wage
which you will get for it.
Over a hundred years ago Charles Hodge wrote these words in his monumental
Systematic Theology, The foundation of the right to property is the will of God
This doctrine of the divine right of property is the only security for the
individual or for society. If it be made to rest on any other foundation it is
insecure and unstable. It is only by making property sacred, guarded by the
fiery sword of divine justice that it can be safe from the dangers to which it is
everywhere and always exposed. So Christians can be rich because they have
been given by God the right to private ownership.
iii] The most basic God-created unit in the world is the family.
Our children dont belong to Caesar. Caesar has no children. They do not
belong to themselves. They do not belong to the church. They do not belong to
the family, as if parents had the right to expose an unwanted baby girl.
Children belong to God and have been given in trust to parents. They answer to
God for how they educate the children he has given them, which children are
made in his image. What principles do they give their children, and how do
they encourage them to thrift and responsibility and work? Do they raise them
in the nurture and admonition of the Lord? Are they taught that the fear of the
Lord is the beginning of wisdom? Do they support them in valuing learning and
toil? Parents have the task of looking after the family and the welfare of its
members. It is such things as values, and industry, and common sense, and
wisdom, and Biblical morality and, above all, the blessing of God that leads to
true prosperity. We are told that when Potiphar put Joseph in charge of his
household and of all that he owned, the LORD blessed the household of the
Egyptian because of Joseph. The blessing of the LORD was on everything
Potiphar had, both in the house and in the field (Gen. 39:5). My father-in-law
would say to his daughters about the children God gave them money in the
bank. That is, in them you will find true and lasting wealth.
So those three truths are the foundation of rich Christians. Firstly, the Christian
must go for it in replenishing and subduing the earth; secondly, he has the
right to own land, a home and possessions; thirdly, it is he who has the
stewardship of his family. Now those convictions are the basis of wealth
creation. There are few Christians who hold to those principles who have not
prospered under God. In fact I cannot think of any. There is no need to send
money to fake evangelists in order to prosper.
You may have received an actual letter like the following. Let me read it to you.
You may be familiar with this actual letter, or this kind of error: Theres no
better way to insure your own financial security than to plant some seedmoney in Gods work. His law of sowing and reaping guarantees you a harvest
of much more than you can sow Have you limited God to your present
income, business, house or car? Theres no limit to Gods plenty! Write on
the enclosed slip what you need from God the salvation of a loved one,
healing, a raise in pay, newer car or home, sale or purchase of property,
guidance in business or investment , whatever you need Enclose your slip
with your seed-money Expect Gods material blessings to return.

There is a name for men who send out letters like that, and the name is crook.
Our Father has promised to supply all needs of his children richly, not via any
sinner, and not with them purloining 20%. If you responsibly replenish and
subdue the earth to the Lord, and maintain your home and property as to the
Lord, and are a good steward of your family you will be a prosperous person.
So Timothy had these rich folk in his congregation, and they are present in
most churches. There is an economic and racial and psychological and age
range of people in every true congregation of Jesus Christ. What was he to
command the wealthy? Notice that command is a strong word, not
recommend or suggest or even teach rather the word is translated by Jay
Adams, Authoritatively instruct. You will see in our text that Paul gives
Timothy two warnings about the dangers of riches, and then two duties wealthy
Christians must fulfil. And lest any of you should think that you are not wealthy
and that this sermon has no relevance to you I will say two more things, one
day you will be more wealthy than you are today if Gods blessing rests upon
you, and also this, that if I should take you to many places in Asia and Africa
then you would discover how rich everyone here is.
2. There are Two Dangers Rich Christians Should Avoid.
i] Pride. Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant
(v.17). I am sure we have met arrogant people who are poor in this present
world. Pompous little men, strident about their rights, who havent got two
pennies to rub together, but they are quick to put anyone down. They are the
bane of young school-teachers at parents evenings. Surely pride is not the
exclusive mark of a rich man.
Perhaps it is the mark of the nouveau riche that they have become arrogant
men. The most perfect example of this is found today in the second largest
building in the world (the largest is the Pentagon in Washington), which is found
in Bucharest, the capital of Romania. It is the legacy of the arrogance of the
late Nicolae Ceausescu, the countrys former dictator. He decided to build a
marble palace of 3,200 rooms and today the impoverished people of Romania
do not know what to do with it or how to pay for it. It would cost too much to
demolish it, and so it is still being built though the dictator was shot on
Christmas Day 1989. The Romanian government is imposing price rises and
austerity programmes on the people while this monstrosity is being finished.
When the building was started 24,000 workers toiled in three shifts, 24 hours a
day for five years. How many died in those labour gangs forced to work there
we do not know. This one building has cost so far three billion dollars. He
intended it to accommodate the countrys entire communist apparatus. Fifteen
different districts were levelled to the ground to make room for it. Over 700
architects were employed, led by a 26-year-old female Ceausescu relative.
More than 700 trainloads of marble were hauled there from Transylvania. Entire
forests of oak, elm, and sweet cherry were stripped. There are millions of
metres of carpet, and 2,800 chandeliers, one of which weighs four and a half
tons crafted to look like a space rocket. The floors had to match the ceilings.
The mosaics had to match the floor plans. The windows in many of the
cavernous reception halls are 17 metres high with miles of curtains sewn with
gold and silver threads. These room are so vast they could swallow up
Wembley Stadium. There was also an Olympic-size stadium, vast underground

car-parks, nuclear bunkers and one tunnel is a train link to the city airport. You
can walk for miles in this one building without meeting anyone. There was a
balcony erected from which Ceausescu was going to make speeches to his
adoring people. But they shot him before that. The only person to have spoken
from the balcony is the singer Michael Jackson, who raised his gloved hand and
shouted, I love you Budapest. It is in Bucharest.
That building is a monument to the arrogance of the rich, to the folly of man. It
is a white elephant and a nightmare. It is a symbol of those who have come to
believe in their own fantasies. You meet such men in the book of Daniel and
this 20th century has witnessed many of them, generally socialist dictators, in
Africa, China and eastern Europe. They have ruthlessly taken power, are the
recipients of vast wealth and become overwhelmingly arrogant.
Wealth and pride have a tendency to walk together, but in the church the
wealthy are not to show a trace of arrogance. They are to sing, My richest gain
I count but loss and pour contempt on all my pride. Our own experience of
wealthy people may be very different. We may have met a millionaire and
expressed our admiration of his character. He seemed just like us. When he
was with us there was no flamboyance at all. But how is he with his
employees? In his business, or his office, or his factory? How is he with his
rivals, or in his home? Where does he worship? Isnt the disappointing feature
of so many wealthy believers in show business, or sport, or in the media, or
politics that they have ceased to go to church? They have found some excuse
that they get approached by people, but that intrusion can be dealt with by
the congregation leadership. These wealthy men think they are exempt from
the great exhortation, Let us not give up meeting together (Heb. 10:25). They
claim to be Christians under the obligation of loving their fellow Christians, but
they are not members in a local church. They, of all people, need to keep the
Lords Day and meet, not with the shallow people from the world of show
business and sport and politics, but the Lords own people, so very different
from themselves the people they will be spending eternity with. That is
something one must say about President Clinton, that I see pictures of him
going to church every Sunday, whereas Ronald Reagan, a more conservative
man and a professing Christian, was one of those men who protested that it
was impossible for him to worship God on the Lords Day. He might as well
have governed in Moscow.
Wealth can corrupt. The American Puritan, Richard Mather, in his farewell
sermon to his congregation, made this observation, Experience shows that it
is an easy thing in the midst of worldly business to lose the life and power of
religion, that nothing of it should be left but only the external form, as it were
the carcass or shell, worldliness having eaten out the kernel, and having
consumed the very soul and life of godliness. Cotton Mather, his grandson,
seeing the decline in religion since his grandfathers time, said Religion begat
prosperity, and the daughter devoured the mother. How many preachers have
been devoured by wealth?
What is arrogance? It is glorying in man instead of in God. You even meet it in
the Christian church in our country, in the preachers extravagant house, the
expensive clothes, the big car, the telling gestures pulling down their white
shirt-cuffs, the velvet collared coat, the silver-handled walking stick. You see it

in the lionised preacher who gets his secretary to finally reply with a one line
note of refusal to an old acquaintance who has written him a long encouraging
letter which includes a request asking would he give a word at a certain
function. You see it when a man is not interested in listening, but only in
talking, when he has lost the gift of encouraging his struggling brothers. You
see it when a preacher refuses to enter his meeting to speak until everyone is
seated, and then insists that everyone must be seated until he leaves. We
speak of what we do know. Command those who are rich in this present world
not to be arrogant. Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.
Think of all he was and all he had. The archangel worshipped him. God said,
This is my beloved Son. Yet he humbled himself even to the death of the
cross.
ii] Materialism. Command those who are rich in this present world not to put
their hope in wealth (v.17). There was once a farmer, the Lord Jesus said,
whose enterprises were so successful that his barns couldnt hold all his
harvest. Ill tear down these old buildings and build more barns, and bigger
buildings, he said. Expansion! That was the keyword for the future. So he lay
back in bed and thought to himself, You have plenty of good things laid up for
many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry (Luke 12:19). But that very
night as he slept God spoke to him and said, You fool. Why did God say that?
Wasnt he a great farmer? Yes. Wasnt he hard-working? True. Wasnt he
forward-planning? No. He only thought of the next few years. His horizons were
so limited. And who knows what the next few years are going to bring? Who
would have dreamed that the Princess of Wales was suddenly going to die as
she did? No almanac announced it. No horoscope said that this was what lay
ahead.
The rich farmer was a fool because death was never part of his plans. He lived
for what was perishing. He lived for the very dust that would be taken from him
at death. You see what Paul says in our text? Command those who are rich in
the present world not to put their trust in wealth which is so uncertain. The
Lord reminds us that moth and rust and thieves can all take from us what we
had hoped in. And God said to this farmer, This very night your life will be
demanded from you. All he had grumbled about were tax demands, and time
demands, and the demands of beggars, and the demands of his workmen for
higher pay, but he never thought of a demand you cant brush aside, when God
speaks and says, Away to judgement. That farmer was like a figure I recently
saw on a book-jacket, climbing up a ladder towards the future: every step he
took, the rung broke behind him. There was no way down.
There is a great verse in Ecclesiastes 5:10 with such a simple axiom, Whoever
loves money never has money enough. Isnt it true that the more men acquire
the more men desire? Isnt that materialism? I was speaking to the Indian
Christian who is working with Keith Underhill in Kenya teaching the Bible. He
was raised in a wealthy home. His father is a millionaire, but this son knew no
contentment and peace as God began to work in his life. It was when he
discovered a Bible and read the letter of Paul to the Romans that those opening
chapters convicted him of his own sin and need. They pointed him to the
finished work of Christ. And there he found a resting place. His father has cut
him out of his will for becoming a Christian, but he has given up merely what
he could never keep, and he has gained what he will never lose. But he still

feels the seductive power of materialism. He only has to work for a day at one
of his relatives businesses to feel the old excitement and fascination with
money stirring up and gripping him.
Money is an acid test of a persons character. How a Christian uses his money
is a barometer of his sanctification. How a man gets his money, and how a man
spends his money, and how a man shares his money tells you all the important
things about that man. It is good to have money, and the things that money
can buy, but it is vital that we check our lives by Christ, and make sure that we
have not lost the things that money cannot buy. It can buy vacations, and
servants, and any kind of luxury, so we never minimise its power, but it cannot
buy salvation, and we are unsaved men, nor a good conscience, and we are
guilty men before God. So Paul tells Timothy to command those who are rich
in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth.
2. There Are Two Duties Rich Men Should Address.
i] Put Your Hope in God. (v.17).
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. This God is a personal
God. He loves. He is not silent. He has spoken in past times through his
prophets, but he has come especially close to us through his Son Jesus Christ.
He has shown us quite comprehensively what he himself is like. He has put his
finger on the source of our trouble. It is our sin, and our love of sinning. He has
outstretched his hand against the wood of a cross to be crucified as a sacrifice
for our sin. He died in our place. On the third day he rose from the dead and he
lives today to be our Saviour. He tells us we must come to him and entrust
ourselves, every bit of us, into his loving care, and he will receive us and give
to us rest. He will become our Pastor, and our Friend, and our Saviour, and
most of all our God.
Hope in him! Never cease hoping in him. In other words, tell the rich not to
hope in their money. Put your hope in God. Dont hope in man. A hundred years
ago it was the dawn of the 20th century and there were great hopes of what
man was about to achieve. A hundred years ago from this pulpit and from
every pulpit in this town the appallingly pessimistic doctrine of the depravity of
man taught in this Bible was rarely mentioned. There was hope in education,
and hope in politics, and hope in trade, and hope in science, and hope in man.
And then in the year 1914 Britain drifted into a Great War and every day, for
four long years, 400 British soldiers were killed. For four endless years, on
every single day of those years, 400 young boys from Britain were killed, and
you see the war memorials in every village and the lists of Sunday School
scholars killed in almost every church. And hope in man turned into cynicism
and despair.
Hope in God, because the Son of God has come, and the blind see, and the
lame walk, and the leper is cleansed, and the dead live, and the poor hear the
Sermon on the Mount. Hope in the God who became incarnate in Jesus Christ.
Hope in the God whose Son was raised from the grave on the third day. You
have some money in a Building Society, and you hope they are going to pay
you interest? You have set aside each week money for a pension and you hope
they are going to pay you. You are going abroad for a year and you are letting
your home to people whom you hope will look after your house while you are

away. You tell something very sensitive to a good friend and you hope that they
are going to keep that confidential. We live by such hopes, because they are
grounded in our knowledge of people, and companies, and banks. We have
references and testimonials. We have a reason to hope in them. Without such
knowledge there is no hope.
Dont say that you hope things are going to work out when you die. Do you
know the Son of God who came ruined sinners to reclaim? Do you know that he
said, Him that cometh to me I will in wise cast out? Have you come to him?
Then hope in him, that he will never cast you out, that he will be your
Sovereign Protector for ever, that walls of salvation will surround you, that
when you walk through the valley of the shadow of death you will not be alone.
Hope in him who will work all things together for your good, from whose love
nothing will ever separate you, who will supply all your need so richly.
This is the God we are to hope in, who richly provides us with everything for
our enjoyment (v.17). What a wonderful phrase! It describes for us a God who
gives his children joy, who provides the most satisfying pleasures for us, not to
be analysed, not to be evaluated, but the purpose of these gifts is that they
might be enjoyed. Why do you do such a thing? a Christian may be asked.
Because I enjoy it, comes the answer. What do you most enjoy in this world?
My mother and father, someone says. God provided them for you. My
husband, or my wife, you say. God provided them for you. Our children, you
say. Children are a heritage from the Lord. The world we live in. God designed
and made it. My health. Your breath is in his hands: you live and move and
have your being in him. Every talent, and every achievement, and every
wonderful experience are richly provided by God. The insulin that keeps you
alive is Gods gift. The telephone and e-mail that keep you in touch with your
distant family are Gods gifts. He provides us with everything for our
enjoyment, the apostle writes. Arent you a debtor to God?
Someone says, My faith. Thats a gift of God. And your repentance too. That
my sins are forgiven, and that I am a son of God, and that I am going to a place
he has prepared for me. Those are Gods gifts. All good gifts around us are
sent from heaven above. Hope in this God. Two men are walking into town. It is
a wet Saturday night in Aberystwyth. The first has no coat, but his jacket collar
is turned up. He doesnt seem to care that he is being soaked through. It
matters little where he goes. He will find a shop doorway, or a railway carriage.
He could go here or he could go there. It is of no importance. He is drifting
because he is homeless. That is the way most people are going through life,
without any ground for hope. What about you? Have you got hope? Nietzsche
wrote a poem with the line in it, Woe to the man who has no home.
See, there is a second man, and the darkness is equally around him, and he is
just as wet, but there is a lift to his step and a light in his eye and a sense of
purpose about his bearing. He whistles as he walks. Why? He has hope. He can
see the lights of home ahead, and he knows the one he loves will be waiting
there for him. He will find warmth and love, and the darkness of the way will be
laughed at. That is the way, men and women, people who hope in Jesus Christ
survive the darkness of their journey home. They have hope in this kind and
loving heavenly Father who gives us all things richly to enjoy. Hope in him!

Somebody protests, That is all too comfy and too heavenly minded. But Paul
has something else to tell us:ii] Do Good to Man (v.18).
Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and
willing to share (v.18). Be good, your parents smilingly said to you as you
waved good-bye. But the New Testament says, Do good. What does that
mean? Three things:
a) be rich in good deeds. I remember Professor John Murray preaching on the
verse in Ephesians 2:10 which describes the Christian as Gods workmanship,
created in Christ Jesus unto good works. We are saved unto good works, he
said, not by good works. Whats the difference between two little prepositions,
unto good works and by good works? It is all the difference between
heaven and hell. We are saved by the good works of Jesus Christ. Thats grace.
We are saved for a life of good works. Thats gratitude.
Whenever you examine a person greatly used of God you will find there not
merely an orator and an organiser or that they were a people of prayer but that
they were rich in good works. Think of Amy Carmichael, converted at 16 in a
CSSM Mission in Yorkshire 1883 in but soon back in her home land of Ireland.
She began working with the Belfast City Mission on Saturday nights helping the
mill girls. It was not long before she was in India working with children and
caring for hundreds of them. She died in January 1951 rich in good deeds.
Or think of that volume of letters which are a sample of Spurgeons good
deeds. His son said, Dad often said, I am only a poor clerk, driving the pen
hour after hour; here is another whole morning gone and nothing done but
letter! letters! letters! He never handed the work of writing letters to a
secretary. He wrote them all by hand in his favourite violet ink. He wrote to his
family and to children in his Sunday School and in his orphanage and to people
all over the world. He never parades how busy he is. His letters have a restful
spirit as though suggesting he certainly has time for this correspondent
whether they might have been the Prime Minister or his 5 year-old sister,
Caroline Louisa Spurgeon. Hear the opening sentences of one written to her:
Miss Caroline Louisa Spurgeon, Your name is so long that it will almost reach
across the paper. We have one gentleman in our school whose name is Edward
Ralph William Baxter Tweed; the boys tease him about his long name; but he is
a very good boy, and that makes his name a good one. Everybodys name is
pretty, if they are good people.
The Duke of Tuscany has just had a little son; the little fellow was taken to the
Catholic Cathedral, had some water put on his face, and then they named him
you must get Eliza to read it Giovanni Nepomerceno Maria Annunziati
Giuseppe Giovannbattista Ferdinando Baldassere Luigi eonzaga Pietro
Alessandro Zanobi Antonino. A pretty name to go to bed and get up with; it will
be a long time before he will be able to say it all the way through and so on.
A simply delightful letter, never to be discarded. It tells us that Spurgeon was
rich in good deeds.
Some of you will have heard of Fred Wright who was killed by a tribe of Indians
in Brazil in 1935. He was one of eleven children and he excelled them all at
sport. He loved rugby, but hed hurry home after a game, clean up, eat and

then there were some older women and he would scrub their floors every week.
His brother Joe, who also become a missionary, said about him, He wasnt a
pious puke. He was rich in good deeds.
Or think of Dr Helen Roseveare who at 28 went to the Belgian Congo with WEC
in 1953. Soon there was the Simba uprising where she was attacked and raped
and held prisoner for five months. But then went back to the Congo where she
worked for twenty years. She was asked how she viewed her years in the
Congo. Those are great questions. Stop for a moment. Someone says to you,
And how do you view your years as a Christian, considering all the sufferings
you have gone through? How Helen Roseveare responded was, I know, how
most of you would respond, I suddenly knew with every fibre of my being that
these twenty years had been worthwhile, very worthwhile, utterly worthwhile,
with no room for regrets or recriminations. She was rich in good deeds.
These are true riches which are to characterise every Christian, because we
serve one who went about doing good.
b) Be generous. (v.18). We are to be generous with our time, with our talents,
with our home, with our possessions. And we are to be generous with our
money. Timothy, tell rich Christians to be generous. What a sweet refreshing
grace generosity is. Youll never find a preacher down-playing generosity
because every preacher is the beneficiary of so much generosity.
Here is the true story of a one pound coin. In the pocket of the one who earned
it that coin was just another piece of money. In the offering box, in the
missionary envelope, it became a consecrated coin. Invested in a translation of
booklet of Sukesh Pabari into Swahili that pound coin became a message of
love and hope. To the soul of that Luo man it brought salvation. In the hands,
and through the life and preaching of this Christian in western Kenya that
pound coin brought grace and peace to his own people in many villages. So
through generous giving in one congregation a man printed the gospel in
Swahili, a Luo preached the message of grace to many villages and brought
eternal life to people the man in Aberystwyth never actually met. In fact he
never left Wales. Through prayerful generosity his money became sacred and
spiritual.
A letter arrived from Baruch Maoz in Israel this week telling us of the building of
their new church desperately needed because of the hundreds of people
attending his services. He informs us that this year he has received an
anonymous gift of $800,000 from one man. What generosity from a rich man! I
would long for us to become a congregation of generous Christians, not just
known as being orthodox and evangelical, but so generous to the Lords
servants. Couldnt many of us be much more generous than we are? Havent
we been saved by the extraordinary generosity of God? For God so loved the
world that he gave his only-begotten Son. Let me give you a verse about
generosity. Proverbs 11:25, A generous man will prosper; he who refreshes
others will himself be refreshed.
c) Be willing to share (v.18) That is the third positive commandment Timothy is
to give to the rich people of the Ephesian congregation. A friend taught his
children about money with a five-in-one-money-box. The first box was his
earnings and gifts box where his pocket money and birthday money was kept.

Then he had four other compartments. The second was called Gods box and
there he was encouraged to put his tithe for God. The third box was his
savings. You remember how God chose Joseph to advise the kind of Egypt to
make sure the country saved in seven years of plenty. Prepare for the future,
for the proverbial rainy day. The book of Proverbs tells us about that even the
little ant prepares for a time when no food is available. The fourth box is the
spending box and thats where we put money for the new computer or the new
kitchen. And the fifth box is the others box and that is the generosity box and
that is where we learn from the beginning that it is more blessed to give than
to receive.
Be willing to share, Timothy told the congregation in Ephesus. There are
those great words of the Lord Jesus, Freely you have received; freely give.
God said, I will share my heaven with sinner. They shall sit in the throne with
me. I will never be separated from them.
3. The Consequences for the Rich are Great.
In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the
coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life (v.19).
There are rich people who set up great foundations named after them the
Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie foundation. They have used their
treasures to set up foundations. These foundations exist and do much good
after the life of the millionaire is over. Every Christian can do the same. You do
good, like Amy Carmichael, you are rich in good deeds like Helen Roseveare,
you are generous like the man who has sent anonymously $800,000 to a
congregation in Israel, you are willing to share with others and in doing that
you have set up a great foundation. When you stand before the Lord he will say
you did all this to the least of these my brethren and so you did them to me.
Welcome to the coming age. You have a foundation to stand on. It is a
foundation of gold and silver and precious stones. All you have done with what
you had. Your hope in God and loving care for your fellow men enables you to
get a grip of real living.
Here is a mother who denies herself for the sake of her sons. She serves them
from one week to the next, working and caring for them, but they just drink
and smoke and gambol away all theyve got. The question is, Whos got a grip
on life that is really life? Life that is truly life is service. Look at those three
boys at their mothers funeral. They are inconsolable. She gave us everything.
She loved us with an unqualified love, and now she is gone, and we have this
load of guilt to carry round with us for the rest of our lives. They have lost out
on life itself life that is truly life it is more than physical and biological life.
It is life from heaven, the life of God that fills men and women rich and poor. If
youve got it then it will show itself in doing good to others, being generous,
willing to share. That life lays up treasure in heaven and we have a grip on it
now life that is truly life.
4 June 2000 GEOFF THOMAS