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Welcome to Faith of Our Fathers. Today we feature John stott. Born in 1921, he was well known throughout the world for his writings and godly influence in the global church. He founded Langham Partnership in response to the growing needs he heard from churches and pastors in the majority world. Stott passed away July 27th in 2011. Today, John Stott presents a study beyond the Misquotation Money is the Root of All Evil.
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There is little doubt that the Bible is the most misquoted book in the world. There are many biblical phrases that have been absorbed into the English language. The Oxford Dictionary of quotations gives about 1500 of them, and there they remain, half remembered, half forgotten, and for that reason, often distorted. They belong to the category that is called quote misquote. And we are, as regular members of All Souls will know in the middle of a series of sermons on some of these popular misquotations. The misquotation tonight is that money is the root of all evil. It would be very interesting if I had the opportunity to set you an examination in what respect you would regard that as a misquotation and whether you know your Bible well enough to know what a serious misquotation it is. There are at least three mistakes in it because money is not the root of all evil. The Bible doesn't say that. So why don't we look at the text from which the misquotation comes? It comes in the first letter of Paul to Timothy, which Nick Belcher read to us just now, First Timothy, chapter six and verse ten. For the love of money is the root of all evils. Well, the main misquotation is now apparent that what the Bible says is a root of evil is not money itself, but the love of money. And of course there is a fundamental difference between the two, between possessing certain things, money and what money can buy on the one hand, and being covetous on the other, which is what the love of money means. That's a major distortion, but I'm afraid that there are two others, even in the Revised Standard Version text, because all evil cannot possibly be traced back to the love of money as the only source of evil. None of us could possibly defend that. And it's not what the Greek text says. In the Greek text, the word root lacks the definite article. It does not say the love of money is the root, but a root. Further, evil in the Greek text is plural and not singular, so that the new International version has it right in saying the love of money is a root of all Kinds of evil, all kinds of evil can be traced back to the love of money as one of the many roots. Well, now at least we got the quotation right. It hasn't helped us to make very much progress. We still are deeply concerned on this whole question of money and what a Christian attitude to money should be. It is indeed an urgent issue in our own day because we know very well that there is a growing economic inequality between the nations of the so called north and south, that is, of the first and Third Worlds or of the developed and developing worlds. We probably know that a quarter of the population of the world, or nearly a quarter 1000 million people, are destitute. That means that they lack the basic necessities for survival. And we perhaps also know the other statistic that the number of people who die is starvation every day is on average reliably computed to be 10,000. It will be very difficult for any sensitive Christian, any Christian with a sensitive social conscience to live with those statistics with any degree of equilibrium. So in the light of so much hunger, poverty, destitution, starvation in the world, we come back to our question. What should be a Christian's attitude to money and material possessions? And in particular, what did the Apostle teach in this passage from which the quotation and misquotation are taken? Well, let me seek to draw your attention to the fact that the AAPOstle Paul issues two warnings about money and two exhortations about money. And if we want, as I hope all of us do, want, to develop a balanced biblical understanding and not go off, as so often we tend to do, to extremes on the one hand or the other. If we want to develop a balanced biblical understanding, we must remember these two warnings and these two exhortations at the same time. Of course, we need to listen carefully to what Paul writes. It's all too easy for us to twist Scripture into giving a Christian endorsement of our own prejudices, into saying what in fact it doesn't say, so that we become unable to hear what it does say. So as I go on, I hope that you will lift your heart to heaven in prayer. You will pray not only that I may be balanced in what I say, but that all of us may be open to whatever God has to say to us on this disturbing subject through His Word. Firstly, then, the apostles two warnings. A is a warning against covetousness, which is the same thing as the love of money or a craving for money. Covetousness is probably the commonest and most insidious sin of the affluent nations of the 20th century. Have you ever thought how often our evaluations of one another and of different situations are monetary evaluations? A principal evaluation of a job or profession is how much pay is involved in it. We even sometimes assess human beings by saying, how much is he worth? How much is she worth? Isn't that a terrible expression? As if our worth, our human worth as personalities made in the image of God, can ever be assessed in terms purely of the capital or the income that we have. So we must not make money the criterion of personal worth. I don't know anybody who has put it with greater and more characteristic verve than Malcolm Muggeridge. You may have come across this quotation. He is describing the affluence of our world to which you and I so easily become accustomed. Wealth increasing forevermore and its beneficiaries rich in higher purchase, stupefied with the telly and with sex, comprehensively educated. Told by Professor Hoyle how the world began and by Bertrand Russell how it will end. Venturing forth on the broad highways, three lanes aside, blood spattering the tarmac as an extra thrill. Heaven lying about them in the supermarket, the rainbow ending in the nearest bingo hall. Leisure burgeoning out in multitudinous shining aerials rising like dreaming spires into the sky. Many mansions, mansions of light and chromium climbing ever upwards. This kingdom, he says, surely can only be for posterity. An unending source of wry derision, always assuming that there is to be any posterity. The backdrop, after all, is the mushroom cloud. As the Gadarene herd frisk and frolic, they draw ever nearer to the cliff's precipitous edge. That is the prophetic voice of Malcolm Muggeridge, and it comes home to us uncomfortably as we listen to it. But let us turn from Malcolm Muggeridge to the inspired text. I hope you still have it open before you. And I want to read to you now, if I may, chapter six of 1 Timothy, verses nine and ten. Those who desire to be rich, that is, the covetous, those who are craving money. How does Paul describe them? Well, those who desire to be rich fall climbing, as it were, towards money and its atonement. They fall. What kind of a fall is it into which they fall? Well, they fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of. Money is a root of all kinds of evil. It's through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced their hurts with many pangs. I want to go through that with you again. I think it's important that we notice precisely what the apostle says. First, they fall into temptation. In other words, they land themselves into the very situation into which they pray in the Lord's Prayer every day. God will not lead them, so they lead themselves into it. Then second, they fall into a snare, that is, they become trapped in materialism from which they cannot escape. Then they fall into senseless and hurtful desires, because money is a drug and covetousness is a drug addiction, which is foolish on the one hand, senseless, and on the other harmful to the person concerned. Then they fall into ruin and destruction, seeking gain. This is the irony of it. Seeking gain they encounter loss, loss of self respect, loss of integrity, loss even of themselves in a lost eternity. And then verse 10. Through this craving, some have wandered into error and they pierce themselves with many pangs. Covetousness does not bring satisfaction, it brings sorrow. The money is like sea water. The more you drink, the thirstier you become. So the love of money is a temptation, it is a trap, it is a drug. It leads to error and to sorrow and to ultimate ruin. No wonder Paul goes On in verse 11, man of God shun all this. Run away from the love of money or covetousness. And Jesus himself said, beware of covetousness, because a human being's life does not consist in the abundance of what they possess. Indeed, Paul says in another passage that covetousness is idolatry. Well, English literature knows no more covetous character than Charles Dickens Creation in A Christmas Carol. Ebenezer Scrooge. Do you remember how, near the beginning of the book, Dickens describes Scrooge as a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching covetous old sinner, who moreover, was hard and sharp as a flint from which no steel had ever struck out. Generous fire, secret and self contained and solitary as an oyster. And then Dickens went on. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek stiffened his gait, made his eyes red and his thin lips blue, and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. Ebenezer Scrooge, the covetous old sinner. I hope there's nobody here like that. I hope we take seriously the warnings of Jesus. Beware of covetousness. So there is Paul's first warning. It is a warning against covetousness. But then, b, there is another warning, and that is against asceticism. And in case we're not sure what that means, I'll come to explain it in a moment. But the point is that in the Ephesian Church, and maybe the other surrounding churches, over which Paul had given Timothy a superintending position, there were some Christians so disgusted with covetousness and materialism that they had gone to the opposite extreme of asceticism. Materialism is a covetous preoccupation with material things as if they were the supreme good. Asceticism is an austere renunciation of material things as if they were evil in themselves. So materialism and asceticism are opposites. They are the opposite ends of the spectrum, and Paul urges us to avoid them both. Now, of course, there are good reasons for rejecting materialism, partly as we've already seen, because covetousness is such a dangerous idolatry, and partly because it's horribly insensitive to lead this kind of life in the light of the poverty and the destitution of millions of people. As Sir Francis Bacon once read, money is like muck, not good unless spread. But you see, we should not turn away from materialism because we think the material world and material things are evil in themselves. There is nothing wrong with possessions in themselves, or with the material order which God has made. On the contrary, let me remind you, God has made the material order. He's told us to subdue it so that we should extract from it its wealth, its animal, vegetable, and mineral wealth for the common good of humankind. God has given us as human beings the creative capacity to make, shape, craft, fashion things for our use, and God has given us all things. He says so at the end of verse 17, richly to enjoy. If the Christian is not to be a materialist, he is not to be an ascetic either. God has given us the good things of creation in order that we might enjoy them. Now, Paul writes that in this letter, if you don't mind glancing back at the fourth chapter and let me read you verses four and five. Everything created by God is good, And nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving. But then it has a double consecration. It is consecrated by the word of God who created it, and has said so in scripture and by prayer. That is our thankful reception of it. Now, I think it is important for me to emphasize this tonight so that we don't overreact to materialism and go out of the frying pan into the fire. And asceticism. There is a great deal of Christian asceticism about that is incompatible with the biblical revelation. And not least in the evangelical community. We don't thank God enough for the good things of creation, often because we're preoccupied with the good things of redemption. Most of us evangelicals have a better doctrine of redemption than we have of creation. And we thank God for the gifts of grace more than we do for the gifts of nature. What do I mean? Well, how much do we thank God for the great joys of family and of friends and of the wider social community which he has created and which he intends us to enjoy? We should give thanks for marriage and sex and children, the daily work of. Do you give thanks to God for your daily work to which most of us go back tomorrow morning, as a means to fulfill ourselves, to serve the community and to glorify God? Work is something that God has given to us to enjoy. Do we thank him for peace, freedom, justice and good government, for food, drawn drink, clothing, shelter, for music, literature, painting, drama, sport, for birds and beasts and butterflies, for seas and mountains and forests and flowers? Now, to reject these material things of the material creation, Paul calls in chapter four, apostasy. It is an insult to the Creator. It is rejecting the good gifts of the good Creator. I like what G.K. chesterton once wrote. He said, you say grace before meals, all right, but I say grace before the play and the opera, and grace before the concert and the pantomime. And grace before I open a book. Grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing. And grace before I dip my pen in the ink. There are many things, the good gifts of the Creator, for which we should thank Him. Let me venture to give you a little lesson in a new science that I am developing called one theology, the theology of birds. I wonder if you know why pigeons are the most pagan of all birds. You know, don't you, that there are 26 orders of bird in the class bird. And of these 26 orders, 25 of them drink by gravity. So after every sip of water, they lift their head upwards and it trickles down by gravity. Consequently, they have a lovely proverb in Ghana. The Africans are great lovers of proverbs, especially the Ghanaians. And they say even the chicken, when it drinks, lifts its head to heaven to thank God for the water. Not only the chickens, 25 out of the 26 orders of bird drink by gravity. But there's only one order that doesn't, and that's the pigeons. Pigeons drink by suction and not by gravity. So when they drink, they keep their heads down in the puddle and they never lift their heads to God to thank him for the water. Now you and I need to thank God more than we customarily do for the good gifts of creation. Thereupon, two warnings. Materialism on the one extreme, asceticism. @ the other extreme, preoccupation with material things and the austere renunciation of material things. Both extremes are wrong and unbiblical. So now we come secondly, from the two warnings to the two exhortations. A is Paul's exhortation to simplicity, simplicity of lifestyle. One of the worst of many false gospels which are being preached in the church today is the so called prosperity Gospel. As if God promised his people if they were to be obedient, health and wealth, etc. They are making a number of serious mistakes. We should have no hesitation in in rejecting the prosperity Gospel as a false gospel. Firstly, they are still living in the Old Testament. They are not New Testament Christians. You see, in the Old Testament, God did promise national prosperity to Israel. But all the promises of prosperity are in the Old Testament. And these prosperity gospel preachers have never noticed that the promises are not repeated in the New Testament. They are Old Testament people. Secondly, they live in affluent countries. They have never traveled to the bariadas of Latin America or the favelas of Brazil. I venture to say that no Christian who has ever visited Calcutta could continue to preach the prosperity Gospel. It would be obscene to do so. And thirdly, they have overlooked the fact that the New Testament Gospel is more a gospel of adversity than of prosperity. They have forgotten that Jesus is described as the suffering servant of the Lord and that the authentic hallmark of the followers of Jesus is not success, but suffering, service. And fourthly, they've never taken in our text which sets before us as the economic ideal not prosperity, but simplicity. So let's look at the text. Verse 11. Sorry, it isn't verse 11. Why did I say verse 11 when I didn't mean it? What I meant was verse seven. We brought nothing into this world. And the nothing is strongly emphasized in the Greek text. J.B. phillips brings it out by saying, absolutely nothing. We brought absolutely nothing into the world, and we can take absolutely nothing out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, then with these simplicities of life we shall be content. But those who desire to be rich. And he contrasts covetousness with contentment. Now that verse seven is an echo, I think of Job, chapter one, verse 21, where Job naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I shall return thither. We are born naked and penniless. And we shall die and be taken out of this world naked and penniless, too. I wonder if you've ever thought that life on earth is a pilgrimage between two moments of nakedness. And as we travel from one nakedness, a naked birth, to a naked death, we ought to learn to travel light. Possessions, which are good in themselves. God gives us things richly to enjoy. The possessions of the traveling luggage of life. They are not the possession of eternity. So if we have the necessities, Paul says, let's be content. Now, what can be regarded as necessities for life or for quality of life vary, of course, in different cultures. And we have to admit that even in areas of great poverty, most people, however poor they are, have a little bit more than just food and clothing. The Greek word for clothing probably includes shelter. But many of even the very poor have maybe a tent or a shack to dwell in as well. They have probably a simple table, maybe a bed or some bed clothing, probably a chair or two, maybe some cooking utensils, maybe a cow or a goat. So the simplicities of life go a little bit beyond just food and clothing. Now, in our own culture, I don't myself think that we can regard more possessions than that as going beyond necessities into luxuries. Many of us would want to defend our possession of a car, probably a fridge, maybe a radio, maybe some books. I certainly have many books and something for our recreation. In my case, a pair of binoculars and a bird book or two. And a camera. Now, I know we have to be very careful not to avoid the disturbing challenges of Scripture by cunning rationalizations. But at the same time, we have to admit that in different cultures the distinction between necessity and luxury will be drawn at a different point. Let me quote from the evangelical commitment to simple lifestyle, which was the report at the conclusion of an international consultation on simple lifestyle that was held in 1980. Here is the we accept the distinction between necessities and luxuries, between creative hobbies and empty status symbols, between modesty and vanity, between occasional celebrations and normal routine, and between the service of God and slavery to fashion. Those are good distinctions, I think. So how are we going to distinguish between necessity and luxury? Not by making rules and regulations for one another, but by deciding that we are going to make a conscientious decision about each purchase that we're going to make. The question to ask before we make a purchase is not do I want it? But do I need it? And to tell whether I need it, whether I'm going to use it not only for myself, but to share it with others. And the other question to ask is not can I afford it? But can I justify it as belonging to the category of necessities rather than of luxuries? So do let us remember that Paul is not advocating poverty over against possessions. He's advocating simplicity over against extravagance and contentment over against covetousness. So that is the exhortation to simplicity before. I conclude in a moment. B. The second exhortation to generosity, verse 17. As for the rich in this world, he's not now addressing those who want to be rich, but those who are rich. What does he say to the rich in this world? Well, it's interesting. He doesn't tell them immediately to divest themselves of their riches. He tells them not to be haughty, not to be proud of their riches, not to be snobs, and moreover, not to put their trust in riches. And then he goes on to exhort them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous. Friends, there are so many good causes and Christian causes in the world today that languish for lack of financial support. And there are millions of people eking out a miserable existence who could be rescued from that by thoughtful development programs to which we should be contributing. Besides, our God is a generous God. In giving his Son. God gave himself. He is a gracious God, and grace means generosity. So if our God is generous, God's people must be generous too. Well, let me conclude. We reject the misquotation. Money is not itself the root of all evils, but the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. We want then to heed Paul's warnings, his warnings against the extremes of materialism, the preoccupation with material goods as if they were the supreme good of life, and on the other hand, asceticism, which is an austere enunciation of material things as if they were evil in themselves. Those two extremes we firmly reject. But then we need to heed Paul's exhortations. I hope that many of us will seek to develop a simple or simpler lifestyle, a simple lifestyle that avoids extravagance and makes conscientious decisions as to whether this purchase can be justified in the light of the poverty of so many people in the world today. And then we need not only to develop simplicity but generosity, like God sharing with other people the good things that he has given to us. And Jesus our Lord, you may remember, exhibited both simplicity and generosity to perfection. Let us follow him. Let us pray again we spend a moment in silence. These are challenging thoughts. We need perhaps particularly to respond to the apostles call to simplicity on the one hand and generosity on the other. Let us pray for grace to be not forgetful hearers of God's word but obedient doers. Let us pray in silence. Lord Jesus, we thank you for the simplicity and generosity of your own life. We thank you that you gave yourself in utmost trouble generosity for us and for our salvation and you call us to follow in your footsteps. We pray that we may be delivered from covetousness and that we may cultivate contentment and simplicity in its place. Make us generous like yourself, giving gladly for you love a cheerful giver and you have said it is more blessed to give than to receive. We ask that you will make us obedient in this area of our lives for the glory of your great name.
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Amen. You've been listening to John Stott. Listen to Faith of Our Fathers each Saturday and Sunday to hear more great 20th century preachers.