Tripp Redeeming Money

How God Reveals and Reorients Our Hearts
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4335-5676-0
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten

Money. The thought of it can be overwhelming, and the pursuit of it can be addicting. Our society constantly promises us that money will provide what we want-success, comfort, peace, and happiness-leading our fickle hearts to trust money for things it was never intended to give us. Even if we think we know what the Bible says about money, there seems to be a gap between our theology and our everyday money struggles. In this practical and hopeful book, best-selling author Paul David Tripp shows us how to view and interact with money in a God-honoring way. Through chapters that expose the depths of our heart struggles and our need for grace, this book offers a roadmap to find peace, generosity, and joy in the world that God created.

Paul David Tripp (DMin, Westminster Theological Seminary) is a pastor, an award-winning author, and an international conference speaker. He has written numerous books, including Lead; Parenting; and the bestselling devotional New Morning Mercies. His not-for-profit ministry exists to connect the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life. Tripp lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Luella, and they have four grown children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tripp, Paul David

Leseproben

1

Putting on the Right Glasses

We sat next to each other on a bus from Chinatown in New York to Chinatown in Philadelphia. I’d had a long and tiring ministry weekend, and I didn’t feel like talking to anybody, but we were cramped together on the very last seat on the bus, so I said hello and asked him what was taking him to Philly. He told me he lived in Philly and asked me what I had been doing in New York. After telling him that I had been participating in a Christian conference, he immediately informed me that he was an atheist and just didn’t see the point of organized religion. Thus began a two-hour-long conversation.

As I listened to him, three things got my attention. First was the surety with which he spoke. At twenty-eight years old, he was convinced that he had it all figured out. He had not been a philosophy major, and he had only casual knowledge of the religions of the world and almost no knowledge of what Christianity was about, but he was sure. He was a theologian, but he had no idea that he was. He didn’t have a neutral view of the nature of life. Rather, he carried in his mind an organized system of thought about life, death, identity, meaning, and purpose—what was, what is, and what will come. He would have called himself “irreligious,” but he was just as theologically inclined as I was.

I was then struck by the vast assumptions he made about all that is. He was not nervous that he might be proved wrong. He didn’t seek to validate his assumptions. He assumed the logic of his atheism, that it was logically and scientifically provable, and he felt sorry for those of us who hang on to our invalid religious mysticism. He had no sourcebook like the Bible to validate his viewpoints, but he was at rest with profoundly important assumptions about the nature of life and reality.

Finally, as I listened to my new friend, it hit me that every morning he put on a set of glasses through which he saw everything in life. I don’t mean physical glasses—he seemed to see quite well without assistance. I mean that he looked at everything in life through his set of interpretive glasses. Everything we talked about and everything he encountered or thought about was seen and understood through the lens of his atheism. His identity, sexuality, money, relationships, morality, view of history, politics, and everything else in which he participated or thought about was connected to his view of life. He was thoughtful and smart, he was serious about life, but sadly he was wearing the wrong set of glasses. What he thought he saw and understood clearly, he saw with dramatic distortion. What seemed obvious to him wouldn’t have seemed obvious if he had taken off his glasses. And if he were wearing another set of philosophical/theological glasses, he would understand everything in a different way.

I have written about this before and will probably write about it again: no one is neutral in the way he or she thinks about life. No one is truly open-minded. Everyone carries with them a worldview that shapes their understanding of everything. Everyone is a philosopher; everyone is a theologian. All are meaning makers. We never leave our lives alone. We constantly dig through the pile of our experiences, seeking to make sense of what has happened and is happening to us. We form positions on everything, and those positions shape the decisions we make, the actions we take, and the words we say.

This is why it is both impossible and dangerous to start a book about money by talking about money. You just can’t understand anything in isolation. Everything in our lives is connected to everything else, and everything is shaped by what we understand to be true. Handling money right—being in control of it, not being controlled by it, and not asking it to do for you what it was never intended to do—requires examining the worldview that should shape how we think about money and everything else in our lives. My goal in this book is to root everything I write about money in a distinctly biblical worldview. Even more specifically, I want to help you look at money and money problems through the lens of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. I am deeply persuaded that we will never make proper sense of the world of money, which influences us, perhaps more deeply than we realize, unless we first put on our gospel glasses. If you and I don’t let the gospel of Jesus Christ correct our assumptions about life, we won’t be able to evaluate and gain ground in the way we understand and relate to money and make practical money decisions.

The Four Foundations of a Gospel Worldview

1. At the center of the universe is a God of incalculable glory.

The existence that dominates the universe is not ours, but God’s. It is this perspective that must shape—or for some of us, reshape—the way we think about money. Life is not first about our wants, desires, dreams, purposes, expectations, or plans. Life is about God’s will, God’s purpose, God’s pleasure, and God’s glory. We must not, and cannot, look at money separately from the ultimate reality of life, the existence of God. We were created by God according to his wise design and for his wise purpose. Our lives don’t belong to us to use as we please. Because we were created by God, we belong to God, and because our money belongs to God, we don’t have the right to use and invest it however we please.

Our money problems begin with viewing money in isolation from this profound core truth and from living with a sense of ownership that is never true of a creature. You see, you don’t start understanding and addressing money problems with education and budget. There are many important things to understand about money, and a personal budget can be practically helpful, but it cannot be our starting point. That would be like teaching a little boy to throw a football but not helping him to understand the basic purpose, rules, and fundamentals of the game. You could have all kinds of money information and still be tragically mastered by it. You could have a clear sense of how to budget your funds and still not be thinking about and using money in the way God intended.

John loved himself and had a wonderful plan for his life. He was raised in a rather poor family and he had determined early that he would not live that way as an adult. From a distance, John looked like a very successful man. He had just about every comfort money could buy, and he had experienced everything money could purchase. He had lots of money in the bank, a huge retirement put away, and no bills to haunt him. He was the great money success, except that he wasn’t. You see, the most serious money problem anyone could have is not debt; it is worship. John’s world of money had John in the center of it. It was about his will, his plans, his rules, his success, and his comfort. John’s view of money was completely divorced from the single most significant reality in human life, the existence and glory of God. Although John didn’t understand it, he loved money because it bought his ticket to the one thing he craved, self-glory. He lived for his own pleasure, he lived for his own comfort, he lived to be in control—and money bought it all. If love of money is a root of all kinds of evil (1 Tim. 6:10), John’s good life was not so good after all. You just can’t leave out the most important thing in life and be okay when it comes to money, no matter that all your bills are paid.

Addressing the issue of money and understanding money problems don’t begin with money and budget information; they begin with surrender. You and I will never use money the way it was meant to be used, and we will never break disastrous money habits if we are not living in light of the fact that life is not about us. The world wasn’t first created to be a vehicle for realizing our personal definition of happiness. Money wasn’t created for the sole purpose of bringing into our lives all the things we crave. If we don’t start with surrender, even if we’re not in debt, we will use money in a way that God never intended. In this way maybe many of us have more money problems than we realize. We think we’re okay because we are able to pay the price of our pleasures, but we’re not okay, because what shapes our money matters is a spirit of ownership rather than a spirit of surrender. The first step in money sanity is surrendering to the glory of one greater than you.

2. We live in a world terribly broken by sin.

We will fail to properly understand money and the money problems that ensnare us if we ignore or minimize the fact that we live in a world so broken by sin that it does not function in any dimension in the way that God originally intended. In this broken world, money is not just used; it is misused. Money temptations greet us every day. Money lies are told to us every day. Money is presented to us as the savior that it can never be. Every day millions of us are seduced into asking money to do for us what only God can do.

But the brokenness is not just external; it is internal. Sin is first a matter of the heart. It changes the way we think and what we desire. It alters what we desire and what we worship. Sin causes us to be more controlled by what we want than by what God has commanded. And, sadly, sin turns all of us into idol worshipers, who put things in the creation in the place only the Creator should inhabit in our...