I Know I am… Rich

I have a very curious question. I usually ask this question to people who come to me telling me that they are unhappy with their lives and want my advice. Today, I want to pose the question to all of you and I want you to share with each other the answer to this question. Every single person, when asked will tell you what’s in their heart. The question is: What is the first thing you would buy if you would never run out of money? Some people would tell you that they would buy a car, or a boat, or a house. In fact, some people may even tell you that they would buy a contract free smart phone. If somebody had asked me what I would buy if I would never run out of money, I would tell them that my first purchase would be a mid to large sized multi-national conglomerate. You can ask your Bible study groups why I said that, but those of you who may question my sanity need to understand my rationale: the only way to move the world is through the machine known as global capitalism and I would use it to do my will on the world. I know it’s super sinister. Rich isn’t even a good word the way we use it. Just think about it. Did any of you say that you would use your money to help somebody who you weren’t related to with those first dollars? To most people, rich just means having every single thing they want right when they want it. I often think that if God would just give me some money to do that, I would do so many awesome things for Him. In fact, I think a lot of us wish God would give us some money from His unlimited bank to us so that we can do the first thing we dreamed of doing if money never ran out. But God’s idea of rich is WAY better than ours. If we can trust that God has a better kind of rich than what we can imagine, we will be able to trust Him to give us everything we need (including things we don’t even know we want). Let’s read Matthew 17:24-27. ²⁴ After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma temple tax came to Peter and asked, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the temple tax?” ²⁵ “Yes, he does,” he replied. When Peter came into the house, Jesus was the first to speak. “What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own children or from others?” ²⁶ “From others,” Peter answered. “Then the children are exempt,” Jesus said to him. ²⁷ “But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.” I want you to underline verse 27 in your Bibles and in your notes: Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours. This is the key to the whole story. I want everybody to walk away today with four lessons from this story. But before we get to that, let me make this story make sense to all of you. Keep this in mind, so you know what’s going on.  Back in the first century, if you wanted to go to church and you were at least twenty years old, you needed to pay a tax. The tax was about 8 grams of silver and by most people’s standards was pretty expensive—it was like paying for 12 loaves of bread. This came from Exodus 30 and it was originally instituted so that the Israelites would have money to take care of the temple—it’s like a mandatory offering. The first thing you need to know about this story is that it is probably the most understated miracle in the Bible. It’s so understated that if you read it too quickly, you miss the miracle. Did you miss it yourself? The miracle itself is the fishful of money. Peter went fishing and caught a fish. Going fishing and catching a fish is a miracle on its own, if you’ve ever gone fishing, you’d know this. But more than this, going fishing and finding a fish that has money in its mouth? That’s a real miracle. It’s a miracle because Jesus told Peter exactly how to do it, and then it happened, when Peter followed those directions. My first point, write this down: Miracles come from obedience in faith. These guys were homeless; they left their jobs to follow Jesus. None of them had paid their taxes. Jesus didn’t even pay his taxes yet. There was a need that they had and the need came from not being rich. If miracles come from obedience in faith, then my second point is this: because it’s so obvious that there needed to be a place for us to be obedient—that only came from an act of being rich. To be rich, we have to surrender our rights.  Look at the story, Jesus says that children don’t need to pay the tax. Jesus, being the son of God, Christians, being children of God, doesn’t have the same obligations to this tax. But Jesus surrendered his rights, and that surrendering resulted in a need being created. This is a sign, of being rich—doing what you don’t have to, for the sake of equality. God puts certain needs into our lives so we’ll find Him as we try to fill our needs. We need certain things to survive and other things to really thrive. Will God meet those needs too? Of course does. We just underlined verse 27! God can and will give us what we need when we trust Him, and then some. Write that down. If God can pay taxes from the mouth a fish, don’t you think he can take care of your needs? (next slide)In the passage, Jesus teaches us that God is our Father. One time, He told His followers about a good dad. If a girl asked her dad for something to eat, would a good dad give her a piece of bread? Or would he give her a stone? A good dad wants great things for his child so of course he would give her the bread. (Hold up a candy bar.) But here’s what you may really want to know. What if the girl asked for something to eat now? Would the good dad give her bread or a candy bar? Now it depends. Maybe before breakfast, it wouldn’t be good for her to have the candy bar. But sometimes, just like your parents might do, she would get candy for a treat. What do the stone, bread, and candy bar have to do with being rich? If we really trust God to be a good dad—the best Father ever really—then we’ll know that He give us everything we need, and He’ll treat us sometimes too with amazing blessing in our life—better than a candy bar, and even better than money. That’s the kind of good God He is. And that’s the kind of rich we are. Here’s the fourth point: To be rich, God is everything we need. Let’s go to our memory verse for today which comes from Philippians 4:19. And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus. You and me are the type of rich that don’t need anything except for the love and power of God. If you live that way, then I guarantee you that you will never not have enough again. You will always have enough. You will never, ever be somebody who is not rich. You should know you are rich and you should pray that way and live that way today.