There’s a great cure for poverty, it’s called get a job, work hard. God never set himself up as the cure for laziness, or the cure for stupid. There is no supernatural, super-spiritual thing that over comes a lack of hard work or laziness.
We've got to be wise, which means staying out of debt, not putting money in things going down in value, not trusting the government to do it for us, live on a budget, take charge of your finances, show self-control!
To know God, is to take care of the poor and the afflicted. Tsedaqah (Hebrew) is introduced, equating Righteousness with Generosity/Charity
Anytime that you bring up the topic of money, you open up all kinds of things - people get really irritated; and they instantly go: is this law, or grace? The short answer to that is: it’s all Grace.
If I can make a point: other than food and money, people don’t have a problem with the Old Testament at all.
If I were to say: the topic for the seminar today is “don’t be sexually intimate with your mother”, that’s in Leviticus 12, it’s a command: don’t be sexually intimate with your mother. But that verse is nowhere in the New Testament; and I guarantee you no one would say: wait a minute, you’re putting us under law!
Even though its nowhere in the New Testament, if I were to say: the topic of today’s lesson is “Don’t burn your children in Fire”, I guarantee you no one would say: wait a minute, you’re putting us under law!
Let me just handle the law and grace thing… Even in the oldest, of the oldest, of the Old Testament, your forgiveness was never found in keeping the commands; your forgiveness was found in putting your faith in God’s faithfulness.
They put their faith in a lamb, and they were forgiven. How are we forgiven: we put our faith in a lamb! Same - old & new – no difference, forgiveness came by faith, through grace.
The commands were never intended to forgive sins; but to show forgiven people how to live. This is not about law at all, this is about how God intended for us to live the best sort of life.
We have to ask ourselves some core belief questions, and that is this: if I’m willing to trust God with my eternal soul; what is it about money that I don’t trust him with? We trust him with something as big as eternity, but when it comes to money there’s something in us that wants to hoard.
God actually instituted a ‘divine order’, of handling money; a ‘divine order of giving’; or ‘divine order of living’.
He actually instituted a divine order of handling money, and he intended it to create the most blessed group of people in the history of the world.
Did it work, yes? You have a group of people, which make up less than 1% of the world’s population; yet they have 30% of the world’s wealth. They’re on to something!
We’re going to have five main points today. Let me just give them to you all at once: #1) Work; #2) Wisdom; #3) Honor; #4) Knowing God; #5) Tzedakah.
Financially, first we have to institute a couple of things; #1 Work.
God never designated himself as the cure for laziness. As a matter of fact, in the Torah, there is a certain disdain that god has for laziness. He actually deplores it. So God never set himself up as the cure for laziness.
There’s a great cure for poverty, it’s called: “get a job; work hard”. There is no supernatural, super-spiritual thing that over comes a lack of hard work or laziness.
We’ve all been taught to tithe? We’ve been taught that: if you tithe, it opens the windows of heaven – is that true? Sure, but is tithing the cure for laziness – no!
People say: “I’ve tithed, but God isn’t blessing me?” Yes, but you’re sleeping until eleven! You’re not doing anything to gain a skill that’s marketable!
There are things that you have to do in the natural that you can’t overlook; you have to work hard! In the age of the Jewish world, they worked six 12-hour days; and they still sort of carry that today. They worked six twelve’s; we work five eights - and we’re worn out.
They worked 6*12=72; we work 5*8=40; so take god out of it, and you already have 32 man-hours a week, of production, more than what we do. There’s a side to favor that’s spiritual; but there’s a side of favor that’s very natural. Have you ever noticed that very-prepared people are ‘luckier’ than unprepared people? So is it really luck? No, it’s preparation. So #1, work hard! Work Hard.
#2, Live in Wisdom. Let me say this: God is not the cure-all for laziness; nor is He the cure-all for stupidity.
God is not the cure for stupid. A stupid and selfish act on your part does not constitute an emergency on God’s part. If you do something stupid, or if you do something selfish, it does not constitute an emergency on Gods part.