The 21st Century Christian and Money

And we're back! Again sorry about the long hiatus in postings. But as I said in the previous post, I hope to get back to a more regular schedule of postings, starting this week.

For this post I want to open it up to any further discussion or thoughts on the topic of last Sunday's sermon. Last Sunday we began a series called "The 21st Century Christian: Living out the Gospel Story within Today's Culture." The basic gist of the series is to try and develop a gospel-centered biblical theology on a couple of different subjects. This past Sunday's subject was money (see http://www.rooseveltchurch.org/resources/sermon-archives/ for the audio). We looked over a whole bunch of passages and based on those passages I elaborated on the following 4 biblical truths and 3 biblical practices based on those truths.

4 biblical truths:

1. Money must not be your God

2. Having money is not necessarily evil

3. God is deeply concerned with how you get your money

(i.e. Do you work justly to gain money for what you need or are you working unjustly to gain money? Do you work hard or are you lazy and expect things to always be given to you?)

4. God is deeply concerned with how you use your money

(i.e. Are you generous or are you a hoarder?)

3 biblical practices:

1. Generously use money to do good, especially for the least in our world and especially for those within the church

2. Be content

3. Trust God

We also spent some time quoting a number of sad statistics (all from a recent book entitled "Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don't Give Away More Money") about how little American Christians actually give away of their money (basically 1-2% of their income). We then considered the astounding amount of ministry that could be accomplished if we became modestly generous with our money (giving a minimum of 10% of after tax income; the additional money that would generated would be $133.4 billion dollars).

So, what are your questions and thoughts on this subject? Here are a few questions to get things started (mostly provoked from Mike Bullmore's own application questions based on his sermon on this topic from 1 Corinthians 16):

1. How much should Christians be talking about the subject of money to one another? Should we be more open about how we spend our money and how much we give away to one another? Should this be part of being accountable to one another?

2. Is your giving a consistently planned priority? Why should it be important to have giving be a consistently planned priority?

3. How does the gospel release us and encourage us to be generous givers? How has the gospel done this in your life?