I Know I'm a Slave, But...

Last night, I was talking with friends about our New Year's resolutions. The first three of us who shared mentioned desires to grow in our relationships with God and listed of ways we hoped to accomplish this. The last person to share, also a Christian, led her explanation by saying, "Well, my first resolution doesn't have to do with God." She then explained to us that her goal over the next two years is to build up enough wealth that she will be on the path to financial security for life. Basically, she plans to invest the next two years of her life getting money.

The other three of us in the conversation quickly began telling her that she was making money an idol--that it would never satisfy her, that it would demand more from her than she ever expected, that true security in lfe doesn't come from money, etc. I shared with her a quote from Timothy Keller, who said, "If you live for money, you are a slave." As we said each of these things to our friend, she agreed that they were true. She even went so far as to affirm the statement that she is a slave to money. The other three of us jumped in, saying she doesn't have to live as a slave--the gospel will set her free from her slavery. And then she dropped the big one on us. She told us, "I know I'm a slave, but just let me be a slave for another 2 years and then I'll be ok."

Needless to say, I was shocked. Why would anyone who knows they're a slave to a cruel master such as money and who has the opportunity to be free choose willingly to continue living as a slave? But as I have thought more about it, I have realized that this is an attitude I take toward sin in my own life much more often than I would like to admit. I know that the gospel frees me from the need to find my value in what other people think of me, and I know trying to please all the people around me makes me a slave to their opinions, but I say I'll start living in that truth only as soon as this person approves of me. I enter into a slippery slope, from which the only escape is the gospel--the one thing I am willfully ignoring at that point in time. In the words of Tim Keller, my idol "begins redefining all of reality in terms of itself."

Just as my friend needs the gospel to set her free from her slavery to money, I need the gospel to set me free from all of my idolatrous behaviors. As we go into the new year, may God give me the grace to rest in the gospel and find my identity in Him alone.

Do You Really Believe It?

One of my friends works on the trading floor of a major bank. He knows a lot about investments. He spends his days studying the markets so he can make the best moves that will be the most profitable for his company. He also uses this knowledge to increase his personal wealth. Recently, he was telling me about an investment he made in a company in Africa that has more than doubled in a little over a year. As he described the factors that went into his decision to invest in this company, he made it clear that investing in this company was an easy choice. They serve a large market of people, sell an item that is always in high demand, and the government kept their IPO intentionally low to encourage people to invest in them. My friend described the situation as them “basically giving away free money.”

Now, let’s pretend. Go back a year and a half, before my friend made this investment. He comes to me, tells me about the investment, and I say, “That’s nice. I hope you make lots of money on this one.” Although my response carries the appearance of believing his story, in reality it proves that I don’t truly believe his description of the situation. If I truly believed that what he said about the investment was true, I wouldn’t simply congratulate him on a good find; I’d ask him how I could get in on this investment as well. If I truly believed that my friend’s description was accurate and someone was handing out “free money,” I would do everything reasonably within my power to get my hands on that money.

Far too often, the response of Christianity at large to the existence of hell is like my hypothetical response in this story—we acknowledge belief in it with our mouths, but lead lives that prove we don’t believe it’s real.

I am currently reading George Marsden’s biography of Jonathan Edwards. In the biography, Marsden makes the observation that in Edwards’ opinion, most Christians only believe in hell as an inherited belief. Basically, they’ll say it’s real because it’s in the Bible and their parents or spiritual mentors taught them it’s real, but on a functional level they live on a day-to-day basis as if it wasn’t real. Marsden says that the reason Edwards preached so many sermons that were brutally descriptive of hell is that he wanted his people to constantly remember the reality of hell both so they personally could trust in Christ and be saved from it and so they would live in such a way around their non-Christian friends and relatives that they would point them to Christ as well. This style of teaching has given Edwards a lot of negative press in many circles, but his brutally descriptive teaching was not inspired by a joy in describing the horrors of eternal punishment; it was inspired by a love that desired to keep as many people as possible from having to live that fate. He not only believed that hell was real, but wanted to live his life in such a way that he demonstrated the urgency inspired by the fact that hell is real.

Do your actions back what you say you believe?