1 Timothy 6: 17-21
October 18, 2009

Exordium: Ephesus, where Timothy served the church, was a wealthy city. It was a center for commerce and education, much like our own Annapolis. There could be found in its streets and gardens, rich people and about one of three people who lived there were slaves purchased and kept in servitude by their owners.  Both of these groups, rich and slave poor, were also to be found in the Church. Paul commands Timothy to charge the people with the Christian approach to their abundance and their need.


Explication: Paul can do the same for us.  The last word in this letter is “grace be with you” (plural, meaning “you all”). More than Timothy are being addressed here. You, here in the Annapolis church, the saints in this place, are also spoken to by the Holy Spirit.

In these three verses Paul gives a whole theology of wealth and poverty, a guidebook for believers as to how to use their money or their lack of it. He points the people, through Timothy, to the way of looking at their possessions (or lack of them) that helps them in their everyday life. It will do the same for us.

What is Paul saying to us here?

    • HE LAYS OUT A CHRISTIAN ATTIUDE TOWARD WEALTH

He is saying wealth comes from God. He is the Author of all that we have and are. He has furnished the world as a spacious and well-equipped home for us. Everything we could ever want is here for us.

In a fallen world, with sin and selfishness rampant, we don’t all get an equal share of what God has placed here for us. Still He watches over each one of us, His people, and supplies us with His riches in Christ Jesus.

His purpose is not only to provide us with what we need but to go beyond that to our comfort and our blessing. He wants us to enjoy the world He has made and all the ways He has enriched our life through it. He is the Great Host who invites us into His banqueting table and says, “The banner over us is love”.

He is not an ascetic but has great pleasure in His works and wants us to share it. He is not austere but a glad and good God, a loving heavenly Father, who delights to see his children laugh and sing and enjoy each other and Himself, not in luxury or in indulgence but with the moderation that characterizes His own being.

Since He is the Giver and Enabler of our enjoyment, He doesn’t want us to be high-minded or proud of what we have, as if we have earned it all.  He says, “The silver is mine, the gold is mine.”

That is what the 12 year-old Lowell Barry heard one day in the country church.  At the end of the sermon the pastor called for the people to commit themselves to be tithers by signing a card. Lowell signed one too.  Can you imagine the deacons sorting out those cards? “Look at the oldest Barry kid. He doesn’t have any money. Shall we count his card?”

But Barry went on to Stanford University to study chemistry and later began his own fertilizer business from his home and his truck until the “Best Fertilizer Company” became the largest in the West.

And the tithes grew along with him until he was giving 35% of his income to the Lord’s work.  One day he gave an idea to Billy Graham and the money with which to accomplish it. “Let’s begin schools of evangelism along with each crusade.” I well remember when I was a student in one of these. When that program concluded over 75 thousand pastors and Christian workers had received free training with room and board at the expense of Lowell Barry. It all began with a twelve-year-old boy realizing that everything he had came from God.

The tithe is a way of acknowledging that fact. It is a humbling activity. It is hard to say “I am a self made man”; or “I picked myself up by my bootstraps” when you weekly remind yourself in the offering that it all comes from God and not yourself.

Don’t trust in uncertain riches, warns Paul. He is calling the believer away from trusting in the power of the dollar to the power of the living God because uncertainty is the very essence of riches.

Money can’t be counted on to guarantee anything.

  • It can’t help in calamity
  • It can’t meet the desires of the heart
  • In a moment it may be gone.
  • We must part with it at the last.

But we can always depend on God.

  • He will always be with us
  • He can fully supply all we need if we are in His will
  • We can never lose Him; He will be ours forever.

He is alive and money is dead. It has no power. Its only power is the power we mistakenly attribute to it. God wants us to transfer that power to Him. We do that by keeping our eye upon the Giver, not the gift. Trust the Giver, not the gift.

Then, you can say with the Apostle, “I know how to be abased and how to abound. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” This is the secret of Christian contentment.

    • OUR ATTIDUE MUST TURN INTO ACTION

The Christian theology of money impacts how we live every day. What God has done is to entrust His creation into our hands.  It remains His property, but we are stewards, managers of it, to use in accordance with His will and purpose.

His will is that is should meet human need – lift the level of life – draw many to faith in Him and love of others. With what He has given we are to do good to others, to be rich no longer in money but in good works. There is an alchemy here in which our love and faith translates cold cash into warm hearts and enlightened minds and strong marriages and trained ministers and missionaries, teachers and doctors, and lawyers, homemakers, sales people, and carpenters.

The greatest joy one can get out of money is to see what it can do in the lives of others.

Think with me of Bruce Wasserstein, who died last week at the age of 61. He passed away suddenly according to the Wall Street Journal. Money in itself must have become important to him, eclipsing the more important things in his life.   He was in the upper 150 of the nation’s wealthiest people, leaving an immense fortune of 2.2 billion dollars.

But in the news report of his death, there is no mention of philanthropic work expressed in building a church or synagogue or a school. He left six children and was into his fourth marriage. Known as the “dealmaker on Wall Street”, he did not appear to have made any deal with God finding the peace and blessing and generosity that God gives.  (For another view, see the movie “The Ultimate Gift”)

Rich in this world, but not rich toward God, not rich in good works, and leaves behind an estate which will probably become the subject of pain, lawsuits, and family troubles for a long time.  “What fools these mortals be!”

Compare this to one who is “ready to give”. That is, the money is as it were in his hand and the hand is open, waiting for the right opportunity.  Looking for places and people to invest in, to build up – to relieve poverty, ignorance and disease, irreligion and violence.

That’s what happened to Jim Rouse when he heard a sermon in which the pastor, Gordon Cosby, called someone in the congregation to go forth and build a city that would be ideal for raising boys and girls. He did it.  He was watching for something that he could do for His Master. Columbia Maryland is a monument to the spirit of giving.

That was Key Powell who said to me early one morning, “I am a happy man. I have given away 350 thousand dollars and I haven’t even had my breakfast yet.”

In this, Christians are imitating God.  “He so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.” The Lord Jesus gave up His life’s blood for us and the great apostle who gave up family life, comfort, and his own life for the well-being of the Church of God.

Paul calls us to be willing to share. Here the idea is to partner with others so that they may succeed. To invest in another’s venture, not to profit but to encourage, so that together you can do something great. The old version has the word “communicate” with others. The original means “to be sociable with your money”, that is, share it.

Think about Jim Schnabel of Baltimore who takes the profits from his worldwide company and supports persecuted Christians around the world. The highest luxury is to relieve the needs of others.

Or Dennis Bakke of Northern Virginia whose fortune for building power plants established the Mustard Seed Foundation which assists small businesses around the world. When Christians want to get started in an enterprise and need capital to do it, Dennis’s generosity is there for them.

Yes, charity begins at home, but it doesn’t stop there. In the kingdom of heaven it goes wherever human need exists. The theology of money is having the courage and grace not to love our money or hoard it, but to take it, small or large and take action with it, definite careful, constant sharing of it.

It is to prove untrue the age-old hunch that money can bring happiness and the best thing is to get it, keep it, as much as you can. We live out the truth that that is all wrong. It does not accord with the will of God.

    1. THERE IS ALSO AN ASPIRATION – A HOPE – BUILT INTO THE THEOLOGY OF WEALTH

That is, we are, as Christians, citizens of two worlds – this world and the world to come. Our money transcends that divide. It is a bridge from one world to the next. But unless money is used as God intends, it stops here. It cannot cross the great, fixed gulf.

But given to God it can be rolled over to Heaven. In Heaven it provides a basis, a foundation for reward. We read in Acts 10 Peter saying to Cornelius, “Your alms are remembered in the sight of God.”  It is not that his giving brought salvation to his soul. He still had to repent and believe; yet that formed a basis for the gospel being brought to him.

God is not unrighteous to forget our labors for him, either. He counts the good we have done with our money as done for Him. Surely we cannot buy our salvation, but with it done in the right way and with great love, our gifts give God a basis for commending us.

Is that not the meaning of Luke 16: 9-11 “And I say to you, make friends for yourselves by unrighteous mammon, that when you fail, they may receive you into an everlasting home. He who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much; and he who is unjust in what is least is unjust also in much. Therefore you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches?” In some mysterious way our reward seems to be related to our attitude toward money and how we used it for others and for God’s glory.

In Revelation 14:13 the dead in Christ are congratulated for their good fortune to die in His arms and in faith. And we read, “Their works do follow them.”  They do not go before them to purchase admission or next to them as a basis for boasting, but behind them where they cannot even see them. But God does and He says, “Well done good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of the Lord”.

We read “that they may hold on life eternal.  The original would be better translated, “that you lay hold on the life that is life indeed.” You can say, “This is real living” when you send your riches on ahead, using the gifts of this world to furnish the world to come. You will build a bridge between earth and heaven by your gifts to others, small and large stepping-stones to glory.

Your faith will resemble the water cycle. First there come showers down on the earth and then the water rises to heaven again. God gifts the world and you return the gifts to him through your love for others. This is the great cycle of the Kingdom of earth and heaven.

Conclusion: What a theology this is!  The attitude, followed by the action, lifting an aspiration up to heaven. I expect great things from you as you live out the Christian theology of Wealth and Poverty.

Glen C. Knecht