Material wealth is a blessing.

This morning I awoke in a warm house. Had a hot breakfast. Sorted through

a wardrobe of clothes that wereonce upon a timein style. I jumped in a

pick-up truck that I really like and drove to an office filled with shelves

of books and a relatively expensive laptop computer.

I consider all of these blessings

from God.

Wealth is a blessing. But it's

a dangerous blessing.

Last evening I sat down to

a pile of bills at the kitchen table. My two-year-old son Peyton, holding

a plastic baseball bat and ball, tugged on my arm.

"Not now Peyton, I've

got to pay the mortgage."

How easy it becomes to enjoy

a house but neglect the family inside it.

Clothes, cars, laptops, vacationsthose

things God intends us to enjoy somehow, perhaps without our even noticing,

transition from blessings to distractions, from enjoyment to entrapment.

Jesus said it's easier for

a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter

His Kingdom. Does that mean it's impossible? No, with God all things are

possible. Yet there's something about money and possessions that make

us particularly vulnerable to certain spiritual diseasespride, selfishness,

coveting, and greed.

How can we enjoy God's material

blessings without falling into Satan's traps? The answer may surprise

you. It involves a new pair of glasses.

You see, we've got a vision

problem. Material possessions have blurred our perspectives and skewed

our priorities. We've come to equate our worth with our wealth. We think

life is money, and money is life.

Try this lens instead, one

provided by Jesus: Your life does not consist in the abundance of your

possessions (Luke 12:15). There's more to you than the balance of

your checking account. There's more to life than the size of your 401K.

Your worth isn't measured in the square footage of your house or in the

horsepower of your sedan.

You have infinite worth just

because you're you. God created you, gave His Son to save you, and desires

an eternal relationship with you.

Material wealth? It's a blessing.

If you've got it, enjoy it. Use it in a wise, godly manner. But be careful.

When viewed through the wrong lens, it's a dangerous blessing.

The story's told of a man who

opened a newspaper and discovered it was dated six months into the future.

It contained stories of events that would take place six months later.

The sports page listed scores of games that hadn't yet been played. The

financial page revealed the future rise and fall of various stocks and

bonds.

This could make him a wealthy

man. A few large bets on underdog teams would make him rich. Investments

in the right stocks would fatten his portfolio. A smile crossed his lips.

He kept leafing through the

newspaper until he came across the obituaries. There he found a picture

of himself.

Who cares about wealth when

you know you're going to die?

Then again, we do know that,

don't we? We are mortal. Life is brief. And when life ends all the material

wealth we've accumulated will be meaningless. We'll learn then, if we

haven't learned before: Life does not consist in the abundance of our

possessions.

Daniel Overdorf is the Sr.

Minister of Fayetteville Christian Church, located at New Hope and Hickory

Roads in Fayetteville. He may be heard each Sunday at 10:30 a.m. as a

part of the church's weekly worship. Daniel may be contacted at the church

office770-461-8763, or at [email protected]

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