How to be Poor

Proverbs 13 and 14 describe how people bring themselves into poverty.

- They are lazy

- They won’t listen to advice

- They won’t live according to God’s teachings (wicked

)

- Certain types of wives are foolish and destructive

- Some people spend more time talking than working.

It would seem natural then to have an attitude like…

- They made their own mess and now they have to find their own way out

- They have reaped what they have sown

- I’m going to let them “bottom out”

- They wouldn’t listen to me and I’ve done all I’m going to do for them

However, Proverbs states that to despise the poor is sinful behavior and it dishonors God. He says we are to be “gracious” to the poor. That being gracious brings honor to God.

God doesn’t want us to behave like humans. He wants us to behave like him, to be little gods. No one ever said it would be easy.

No Joke

There’s an old joke about a farmer who was going broke farming so he quit and started selling hammers. He would buy hammers for $3 apiece and sell them for $2 each. He was happy and doing a pretty good business but a friend advised him that for every hammer he sold he was losing $1. His reply? “it’s more profitable than farming”.

That joke is similar to what people sometimes do with their lives. Activities like drunkenness, sexual immorality, unfaithfulness to a spouse, etc. can cause folks to view their lives as being spiritually bankrupt. So they decide to go to church or pray or read the Bible every once in a while without actually correcting the behaviors that got them into such a big mess to begin with.

Going to church, praying and reading the Bible are good things to do but until we take some corrective action in our lives and commit ourselves fully to Jesus Christ and his teachings, we are still “going broke”… Like buying hammers for $3 and selling them for $2. Don’t make a joke out of your lives.

Spiritual Arrogance

Luke 18:9-14 records two prayers; a self-righteous prayer and a self-critical prayer. The two men were praying in the same place and at the same time. The one thanked God that he was not evil like other people and recounted to God the good things that he had done in his life. The other asked God for mercy for his short comings. Here’s the thing… we have all done some good in our lives and it would be easy to make a list of those things and carefully recite them to God. Almost as if God didn’t know those things already and needed to be reminded. The best approach is to have a short term memory of the good things we have done and to have a heightened sensitivity about our short comings and our need to be more Christ-like. Let’s face it, if we were in a contest with Jesus Christ and trying to best him with our good works we would come in second… every time. Realizing that let’s be truthful and self-critical in our prayers. The self-critical man went home “justified before God”.