Source: https://www.youtube.com/live/YnHeigbMgCo?feature=share
Don't Be Enslaved To Possessions
Well praise Jesus today.
Everyone. I wanted to speak about something the Holy Spirit has been showing me the last few months, and it's about a few different things,
but really for me, it's about accepting the things with joy that the Lord has
put in my life without looking over those. You see, for me, I have a big
family, so it can be easy to think I should find a different house to live in.
I should get a bigger house, because it would allow me to expand my family
more. But thinking like that, if it's not the Lord's will for us, you end up
looking down on the things and the blessings the Lord has already given to you.
And one trap that can easily come
on us as Christians is the pride of life, thinking that because we can move, or
at least we think we can, then we can make our own life better, or just chasing
after things, a better property, a better house, all those sorts of things. And
the Lord Jesus knows what we need, and He knows what we just want. And for me,
honestly, some of this was trying to look for a different place to live, and a
little bit of it, I realized, was pride for me. Because instead of trying to
work through some situations, I just thought money could solve that. And the
Lord rebuked me for that. To give in a kind of like a simple example of this
...(hold on, just a second here…)
So, to give an example of that,
when you have say, four children, and they only have one bike, everyone shares
that bike, and everyone has to learn how to share. But if everyone has their
own bike, no one has to learn how to share that one bike. They don't have to
learn to share a bike, because everyone has a bike. Similar if all your
children share a room, then they learn how to get along. They have a close bond
together. But if you have a huge house and everyone has their own room,
everyone has their own TV, everyone has their own life, you never have to
actually interact with one another. And a lot of that camaraderie and that
development of being together is lost. And a lot of wealthy people, they lose
all of that what the Lord has given them to work through. They lose all of
that, because moneys basically been the solution. And I don't want that to ever
be me. I want to grow the way the Lord Jesus wants me to. And I'd also want to
encourage you and others to live the life that Jesus wants you to live. No
matter whatever your means are, the Lord will provide for that.
So, I wanted to read what Jesus
said specifically about this, and then also share with you a certain dream that
I had this morning as I was waking up. So, this is found from Luke 12. “13Then
one from the crowd said to Him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the
inheritance with me.” 14But He said to him, “Man, who made Me a judge or an
arbitrator over you?” 15And He said to them, “Take heed and beware of
covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he
possesses.”
Now, that is a big statement,
because for a lot of us, we think that it does consist of the amount of things
that we possess. Life would be happier if I had a bigger living space, or life
would be happier if I just had this. But the truth is, happiness enjoy in Jesus
Christ does not ever come from the amount of stuff you have. It comes from
being content in Jesus and doing His will.
16Then He spoke a parable to
them, saying: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully. 17And he
thought within himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no room to store
my crops?’
In other words, he's getting too
big for his property, too big for his business.
18So he said, ‘I will do this: I
will pull down my barns and build greater, and there I will store all my crops
and my goods. 19And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up
for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, and be merry.” ’ 20But God said to
him, ‘Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those
things be which you have provided?’ 21“So is he who lays up treasure for
himself, and is not rich toward God.”
So we want to be really careful
about coveting things, about putting or our mindset on things of the world. And
that is way too easy to rise up in us to where we think we need something that
is actually not what the Lord thinks that we need at all. So, guys, it's a
blessing to be in the will of the Lord, to be receiving what the Lord wants for
us, but not to be wanting more. Because when we do receive the things that
Jesus does have for us, we are rich. We’re rich to the things of Jesus Christ.
The world may see us as nothing but we’re rich to the things of God. But as
soon as we start chasing after the world, and how much we can make ourselves
look good on the outside, or having more possessions, we become poor. Because
as anyone knows that has bought a vehicle or a property or has possessions,
they know that those possessions start to own them. If you buy a big boat,
maybe it's $50000, and now you're paying, like a $600 a month payment on your
boat. And so, your possessions start to own you, instead of you owning your
possessions.
I want to share with you this
dream that the Lord gave me before I woke up this morning. In my dream, I saw a
certain man who worked maintenance at an apartment complex. It was somewhere in
the city. I imagined it to be somewhere like New York, where there were a lot
of people, there were high rises, a lot of the people were ethnic people. And I
don't know if this probably doesn't matter at all, but the maintenance man that
I saw to this hotel, he was African-American, and, he was an older guy, maybe
60 older than me. So anyways, I was looking at this apartment complex where
this guy worked, and I was asking him how he enjoyed his job. He said he
enjoyed working there very, very much. And he was showing me around the
apartment complex, and how people could custom make their complex. So instead of
it just being a really generic apartment, you could outfit it with a garden on
the outside, or you could change your carpet color to whatever you wanted. You
could tailor it to make it who you are. And this maintenance man, because he
worked at the hotel, was allowed to do a lot of handyman work. And he had
redesigned the inside of his apartment complex to look really, to look nice. He
had kind of cased some pieces of wood that were originally not very nice-looking
pillars inside of his apartment, and he had made nice designs on them. And, so
as things started to progress with my conversation with him, I started to
wonder how glorious it actually was, because this guy believed that this was
just wonderful, that he could be the maintenance man and live at this apartment
complex. And I wonder to myself, how much does it cost? How much does it cost
to live here? And the man told me it was like a little over $3000 a month. And
I thought, man, that seems kind of excessive. But maybe people in New York,
maybe they make a lot more than over here, or something. And so, I asked them,
well, how much are you making? How much do you make as a maintenance person for
this apartment? How much do you make? And he told me it was like $3700. So I thought,
that's crazy. So $3000 of your income is going directly towards your little
apartment. And then, the rest $700 is all your month expenses, which for some
people may not even be enough to hardly buy groceries for the month. So, I just
wondered to myself, how can someone live in such poverty, with having so much
money and having such a big, nice apartment complex? And in reality, I realized
in my dream, it was like vanity. Because he didn't have to live at this sort of
apartment. He lived there because it looked very nice on the outside, and to
him, it was a decent paying job. And even though, like more than three quarters
of his money went directly to his apartment, he felt that was the right way to
live. But what I realized is the apartment is not serving him in his needs. He
is living for the vanity of the appearance of how much money he has, his
possessions own him. And I started realizing it's much better if you lived like
how he would perceive a poor person would in the country, if you lived as someone
who didn't have to upkeep that image, because if you weren't having to upkeep
that image of looking so good on the outside, and if you are making that same
amount of money, say $3000 or $4000 a month, but you are only having to pay $500
or a thousand dollars for rent, you would suddenly have all of this money that
you could use on all these other things that were, the vanity of your
apartment. So, I kind of thought, in my dream, well, to each their own.
But the Lord showed me that, a
lot of people are living in vanity, and they're spending and buying things out
of excess or they're getting themselves in debt, and all of their possessions
are owning them. And they're becoming very poor spiritually and even poor
physically in this world. But the appearance on the outside of them is to the
rest of the world, it looks like they're doing very good, but they're doing
much worse than someone who is in their opinion a poor country bumpkin. It'd be
much better to live in a shack and be able to use the bit of money you have to help
your neighbor or to give to the people Jesus is
calling you, rather than trying to make yourself look like this image of a rich
man with being in a massive amount of debt. And so, you have all these people
today, guys, who are going to college, they have a ton of college debt. They
buy a house, they owe a million dollars in debt to their house, and then they
don't have any money to, they have no wiggle room to do anything for the Lord
and His kingdom.
And I realized, I don't want that
to be me. The Lord has blessed me, and, He has pulled me out of that sort of
lifestyle, just being a slave to the world. And as for me in my family, I don't
want to go back to that. I don't want to indebt myself. I don't want to buy
getting into debt. And so, everything as my personal conviction, if I'm going
to buy a new vehicle or anything, I want to pay cash for it. And if I don't
have the cash for it, I'm going to figure out how to ride my bike, or figure
out how to live within my means, so I'm not strapping myself to the world,
which then leads to more and more worldliness. So, I don't want to be like the
guy who just says, “I'm going to build bigger barns. The Lord has blessed me.
I'll move my grain to a bigger barn. I'll rip down my old one. I'll sit back,
I'll watch TV. I'll live my life for myself and eat and drink.” Rather, I want
to be in humble submission to the Lord, and all my resources and everything I
have be for the Lord to use it for His purpose.
So guys, I hope this encourages
someone to get their life right with Jesus, to not be like the rich man who
thinks he has everything, but the Lord could demand his life that night. I hope
you're not strapping yourself down to the world to where you can't serve God,
because your possessions own you. I hope that you have freedom in Jesus to
serve Him and to do His will without worldliness. So, “Lord Jesus, we do pray
for humility. We pray for your righteousness to be in us, and we pray to use
all of our talents and skills and abilities and everything that you've given us
to bring glory to your kingdom, that we can be an encouragement to one another,
to the body of Christ, and that we wouldn't be selfish, and that we wouldn't be
slaves of worldliness, but that we could be slaves of righteousness to obey you
and to live for you. Lord, with all of our heart, that we would well please you
and be children in your kingdom, in the kingdom of God. In your name we pray,
Lord Jesus, amen. ”
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