Evangelicalism in Crisis Part 3: Those Who Want To Be Rich

Greed is bad.

The Bible says that a million times. The 10th commandment has within it a condemnation of greed when it says “You shall not covet.”

Jesus 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” (Matthew 5:19-21).

The apostle Paul wrote,

"[I]f we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs" (1 Timothy 6:8-10).

Greed is so bad that it will keep you from Jesus Christ. And that is bad because you cannot be saved apart from him. The Bible says, in Acts 4:12, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to humanity whereby we must be saved.”

Greed will keep you from coming to Christ in the first place, or it will turn you away from Christ at the very moment you are about to give your life to him, or it will cause you to wander away from Christ having once professed faith in him, or it will blind you to the horrible truth that you’re just a damned fool.

Here are four Scripture passages that speak to those four conditions that I just mentioned.

(1) Greed will keep you from Christ. The Bible says in Luke 16:14 that the Pharisees loved money. When Jesus said that you cannot serve both God and money, the Pharisees scoffed at him. They were never favorably inclined toward Jesus. They did not like him from the get-go. No man who loves money is favorably inclined toward Jesus. Such a man may have a soft spot in his heart for religion, and he may even love a Jesus of his own imagining. But he cannot love the Jesus who actually exists and who is faithfully presented on the pages of Holy Scripture. Pharisees love money. Pharisees hate Jesus.

(2) Greed will turn you away from Christ at the very moment you are about to give your life to him. That is what happened to the rich young man whose story is told in Matthew 19, Mark 10, and Luke 18. That man was no Pharisee. He did not hate Jesus or scoff at him. In fact, he trusted Jesus to tell him how to inherit eternal life. For some reason Jesus raised the bar very high for him. In his conversation with the man Jesus said, “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” (Mark 10:21).

The man did not do that because he was rich and he wanted to keep his things. The Bible says he walked away sad. He was ready to become a Christian, and probably would have done so, but greed got in his way.

Before I go on to number 3, I think I should speak to the matter of whether all of us should sell everything we have and give to the poor. My short answer is “No.” I agree with countless Bible teachers who have pointed out that Jesus only said this to one man. Jesus met lots of other rich people and did not make the same demand of them. Even Zacchaeus only pledged to give half of his stuff to the poor, and Jesus did not say, “Where’s the other half?” (Luke 19:8-10).

I think it is best to note that in this case, Jesus was laying his finger directly upon that man’s besetting sin. That man’s sin was greed, and it had to go. We may see rough parallels in Jesus’ conversations with Nicodemus in John 3 and the woman at the well in John 4. The sin of the woman at the well was not greed. It was promiscuity. Jesus said to her (and only to her), “Go call your husband.” That dagger of a sentence exposed her loose lifestyle. But a chapter earlier Jesus had not said to Nicodemus, “Go call your wife.” If Jesus had said that, I suppose Nicodemus would have shrugged his shoulders and said, “Ok, I’ll go call my wife.” That was not an area of embarrassment for him. He would not have needed to respond with an evasive deception like “I don’t have a wife.” It seems that Nicodemus’s besetting sin was neither greed nor promiscuity but rather the greatest, most fundamental sin of all: pride. So Jesus said to him, the great teacher of Israel (I paraphrase), “You have to start all over again like a newborn baby. You can’t even see the kingdom of God until you do.”

Jesus had the annoying habit of calling people to repentance in the area where they most needed it and where they were perhaps least willing to give it.

(3) Greed will cause you to wander from Christ even though you once professed faith in him. The apostle Paul said that himself in the passage I quoted earlier from 1 Timothy 6:10 where he says, “Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” Jesus had earlier warned that the lure of riches would eventually draw some followers away from him. In the parable of the seed and the sower, the weeds that choke out a promising plant are identified as “the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things” (Mark 4:19). Someone who probably fit in that category was Demas. I don’t think we can be 100 percent sure, because we don’t have all the details, but 2 Timothy 4:10 suggests this kind of falling away when it says, “Demas, because he loved this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica.” It sounds like Demas preferred riches to the rigors of serving Christ.

(4) Greed can blind you to the horrible truth that you’re just a damned fool. In Luke 12, Jesus tells the story of a man who has done very well for himself financially. He has done so well that it looks like he can take an early retirement and spend the rest of his days just enjoying life. He makes plans to build bigger storage facilities for all his stuff, and then says to himself, “You have plenty laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink, and be merry.”

For many people, that sounds like the American dream. Work only as long as you need to and then spend the rest of your days enjoying your stuff. But Jesus concludes that story by saying, “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’” And then Jesus says, “This is how it will be for everyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.” (Luke 12:16-21)

That story hits too close to home for me. Earlier this week I was talking to my wife about the prospect of retirement. I am 58, and anticipating the day - perhaps 8 and a half years from now - when I can retire from my labor job in a chemical plant. And I think it is no sin to yearn for rest. But it is a sin to be self-indulgent - to think only in terms of one’s things and how one might best enjoy them at leisure, and to give no thought to how our resources might best be used for the glory of God and the benefit of people. The truth is, I may not have 8 and half years. Or I may have a lot more than that. But on whatever day God says to me, “Paul, this night your life will be demanded from you,” I don’t want him to preface that announcement with the words, “You fool.”

In order not to be fools, we must not be greedy. We must give with wise generosity, for the Bible says, “God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7). We must not be self-indulgent, because Jesus sternly warned people not to store up things for themselves. And we must not even want to be rich, because the apostle Paul said those who want to be rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. And Jesus said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle then for a rich person to get into the kingdom of God (Matthew 19:24). No devout soul who takes those words seriously would ever want to be rich. What sane individual would want to make it harder to get into heaven? What rational person would want to fall into temptation and a trap that could drown him in destruction and perdition?

Now, what I have just shared with you is, in my mind, a very straightforward, pedestrian, old-hat Christian presentation on the subject of greed and its danger to the soul. I do not think that I have tried to provoke you with any extreme language or hyperbole. My goal here has been to set forth very simply, in measured tones, what the Bible says about greed.

And this leads me to a disturbing question to contemplate. For those of you who have some familiarity with mainstream evangelical preaching today – how often have you heard a condemnation of greed or a warning about greed along the lines of what I have just shared?

I have not heard it at all in recent years. Zero. And for what it’s worth, I do listen to sermons quite a bit. That’s what I do. Nearly every day I listen to at least parts of several contemporary evangelical sermons. There are gazillions of them online, and they’re also on Christian radio, and I listen to those when I’m driving. In today’s evangelical world, exhortations about and warnings against greed are nonexistent.

While condemnations of greed are absent, exhortations to give are plentiful. (Those two are not the same, of course.) I hear exhortations to give every day. In fact, there are preachers on evangelical Christian radio who, at end of every sermon, give a little presentation where they ask for money. Some don’t even wait for the end of the sermon. Some of them now have a commercial break in the middle of the sermon where they promote their ministry, hawk sales of their book, and ask you to give generously. Or, they offer you something free to get you on their mailing list. Such mailing lists, you should know, are lucrative cash cows for those who know how to exploit them.

I have a word of counsel for my fellow evangelicals. Don’t give money to millionaires. That’s stupid. And when I say that, I don’t even have in mind those obvious, outrageous frauds who masquerade as Christians. You know the type: Joel Osteen, T. D. Jakes, Joyce Meyer, Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, Steven Furtick of Elevation Church, Brian Houston of Hillsong. Those people live cartoonishly lavish lifestyles, and their intoxication with greed is open, unapologized for, and actively promoted. Brian Houston, to pick one example, actually wrote a book with the title You Need More Money. On YouTube you can find a clip of him saying, “There is no one person in this building who doesn’t need more money. And if you say, ‘Well I don’t need more money,’ then I would say, ‘You have a very poor outlook on life.’” That is straight from the mouth of antichrist.

Frauds like the Hillsong founder Brian Houston - who clearly believed that St. Paul had a poor outlook on life for being content and not wanting more money - are beyond the fringe of the category of evangelical that I have in mind this morning. Greedy villains like Brian Houston and Joel Osteen will not be invited any time soon to speak at Moody’s Founders’ Week, or address the student body at Wheaton College, or serve as chancellor of Dallas Theological Seminary, or join Keith and Kristyn Getty on the stage of a “Sing!” concert. Anyone who has a minimal familiarity with the Bible and a minimal familiarity with the teachings and lifestyles of Osteen, Joyce Meyer, Brian Houston, etc., will see very quickly that those people have nothing to do with Jesus Christ.

Again, my concern strikes much closer to home. Because I am speaking as an evangelical Christian to other evangelical Christians.

So here is an example of the kind of thing that concerns me. In 2010, I heard, a few months apart, a couple sermons by two well-known mainstream evangelical preachers. These were not TV charlatans but serious, influential expositors of the Word. Both sermons disturbed me, and I wrote essays at the time that referenced them. One preacher gave as a sermon illustration an incident where he said he really wanted to see a Monday night football game in person at Lambeau Field. Tickets were impossible to get at face value, so he instructed his son to go online and bid whatever exorbitant sum was necessary to get 12 tickets. He paid the ungodly price to get those tickets, and then a wealthy parishioner gave him 6 more, and the preacher concluded those were the tickets God wanted him to have. What you have there are thousands upon thousands of dollars, all derived ultimately from the sacrificial tithes of God’s people, to see a stupid football game. Of course there were a lot more shenanigans where that came from. Some years earlier that pastor had bought a house for 2 million dollars. He also had a serious gambling problem and he was known for giving away Harley Davidson motorcycles and automobiles to buddies like Ed Stetzer.

The other sermon I heard that year was by a younger preacher who boasted of having 40 pairs of shoes, and said his wife had more than that. He spoke contemptuously of modestly-priced wine and said he would only drink the premium stuff. Again, there was more, but I’ll stop there. You get the idea. He said these things without any remorse, repentance or shame - just as matters of fact.

The first preacher was the since-utterly-disgraced James MacDonald and the second preacher was the since-utterly-disgraced Mark Driscoll. Eleven years later we all know how evil these men are now that their jaw-dropping depravity in multiple areas has been unveiled for the world to see. All their former elders have at long last found the courage to denounce them. And that’s good. But my question is, “How did these men of such transparent, demonic greed flourish for so long in a community of people that supposedly value the Bible, and read it, and love the Lord Jesus Christ?” That is incomprehensible to me. How did MacDonald keep his radio show on WMBI? How did he get invited to speak to Bible students at Moody and to seminary students at Trinity? How did that fiend Mark Driscoll manage to plant his name, face and influence on every nook and cranny of the evangelical world? Part of the answer is that evangelicals of influence stopped caring about, identifying, denouncing, and repenting of greed. Gargantuan self-gorging greed is just out there all the time in plain sight, and we as a community have winked at it and let it slouch on by.

And we’re still doing that. It is part of the ongoing crisis in evangelicalism today. For example: David Jeremiah is still on evangelical Christian radio. Some years ago his chief financial officer, George Hale, resigned in protest and disgust over the unethical, deceptive practices Jeremiah was using to artificially inflate numbers on his book sales. Jeremiah doesn’t even write his own books – he employs ghostwriters. But with his celebrated name on the covers of these books, he was able to get a 3 million dollar check from Faith Words, a Nashville-based publisher, and soon after that, in January of 2010, he bought a 2 million dollar condominium in a resort community on Coronado Island.

Of course that’s wrong, of course that is indicative of blatant, self-indulgent, godless greed. But how can the megachurch evangelical preachers of our day condemn such a vice when so many of them are awash in it themselves?

Thank God there are exceptions to the rule of greed that has so poisoned our evangelical culture. I’ll mention two that I know about, though I’m sure there are others.

John Piper could be very rich and live very lavishly if he wanted to. He need only say the word. The royalties on his books would have him set for life. But for years Piper has kept his relatively modest house in a troubled neighborhood in Minneapolis where the syringes of drug addicts litter his doorstep. It is as though there is a golden apple before his eyes, and yet for the love of Christ and fear of God he refuses to lay hold of it. He values as something far greater his treasure in heaven, and refuses to forfeit that for the sake of earthly comfort. When his elders wanted to raise his salary beyond what he knew he needed, he refused. They tried to pressure him with the argument that it would throw off the salary structure of the whole staff, because of course they would have to be paid less than the senior pastor, and that wouldn’t be enough for them. Piper was mystified by that argument and said, “Where is it written that the senior pastor has to be the highest paid? Why should that be case? Just pay them what you need to pay them. If it’s more than what I get, who cares?”

I’m so thankful to God that there are some people who get it.

Someone of a previous generation who got it was C. S. Lewis. The converted atheist and greatest mind of his generation actually had trouble comprehending some things that other people seem to manage without difficulty. Algebra was beyond him. He was never able to learn how to drive a car. And he had no knack for understanding money management. In fact, his first publisher ripped him off royally and Lewis had no clue. Lewis didn’t really understand money, he just knew that as a Christian he had to be generous with the money that came his way.

I have to stick in a parenthetical note here. When I said that he was the greatest mind of his generation, it will seem that I immediately contradicted myself by referring to areas where he was, shall we say, special. Lest that remain as the dominant impression, please let me encourage you to read just the first six chapters of his book Miracles. Serious engagement with that book alone will have you staring open-jawed at the page and wondering why you never realized till that moment that you were an utter simpleton.

But I digress. When the money came rolling in from Lewis’s bestselling books, he just gave it away to widows and orphans and other needy people. He actually gave way too much of it, because he didn’t know he still had to pay taxes on it as income. Once he got back on track financially from having given his way into tax debt, he established a charitable fund with the help of a lawyer friend, Owen Barfield, and for the remainder of his days he never saw most of the royalties from his books because two-thirds of it went directly to charity.

And no, he did not buy a two million dollar condo in a resort community. In fact, the house he lived in near Oxford didn’t even have central heat. It was cold in the winter. He felt he had to warn an incoming American guest, Walter Hooper, that the accommodations he could offer would probably be a lot less comfortable than what an American would be used to.

Among the many gems that Lewis left behind is this statement concerning how much we, as Christians, should give. It is so encouraging to know that he not only wrote this, but he lived by it. He wrote:

“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc, is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.”

Amen. Let us pray.

Our Father in heaven, give us this day our daily bread. Wait a minute. Scratch that, God. You already gave me my daily bread. And tomorrow’s bread too, and the day after that. They’re in my refrigerator and freezer and cupboards at home. So let me start again. Thank you God for the overabounding material blessings that I, a rich spoiled brat, take for granted as an entitlement and mostly don’t even notice. Deliver me from the greed that rules my culture and renders me senseless to the ways in which, perhaps, my own heart has been taken captive to it. Thank you for the example of saints like Paul who conquered greed and enjoyed contentment in the confines of a prison cell. Teach me to live with that generosity of spirit so that when the moment comes for you to say that my life is demanded of me, you will not call me the fool that I am by nature, but the child and servant that I have become by grace. In Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.