We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded by your direct support for ReKnew and our vision. Please consider supporting this project.

5402444194_75b286bde4_z

How Much Is Enough?

Richard Beck over at Experimental Theology wrote a reflection on insights he gained from the book How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky. He points out how the advent of money changed the way we view our needs and made it easier to hoard without noticing it. It’s a challenging conversation to begin having when the culture around us is bombarding us with messages that manufacture desire. What do we really need? And, more importantly, how can we use our material blessings in ways that glorify God and bring his kingdom to earth?

From the article:

With the rise of money we’ve lost the ability to ask “What do I really need?” That’s a good old-fashioned use-value question that we should spend more time contemplating. Unfortunately, our questions tend to be exchange-value questions, questions like “How much can I buy?”

And with those sorts of questions leading us forward the words of Paul seem particularly prophetic and apt:

1 Timothy 6.10
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

Image by Kevin Dooley. Sourced via Flickr.

Category:
Tags: ,

Related Reading

Memorial Day

For Memorial Day, we thought we would repost Greg’s thoughts from 2007. In this post, Greg expresses his conflicted feelings over this holiday and gives a brief defense of Christian pacifism.  *** Hope you all had a happy Memorial Day. (Isn’t that something of a misnomer — a happy time remembering people killed in war?) Memorial Day…

William Wilberforce and the Possibility of “Christian” Politics

William Wilberforce was a passionate Christian who entered politics for the sole purpose of ending the slave trade.  For more than thirty years he passionately  and courageous labored to get Parliament to outlaw the practice. His life’s dream was fulfilled a month before he died in 1833. It’s no surprise, therefore, that Wilberforce is frequently…

Following Jesus as You

Rachel Held Evans posted an insightful blog today (it was actually a repost from 2011) engaging the problem of discouragement as we encounter various ideals of what it means to be a Christian versus the reality and limitations of our particular lives. I think we all struggle with this at one time or another. Rather…

Reflecting on the Lord’s Prayer

Jesus begins the instruction on prayer (Matthew 6:9-13) by telling his disciples to pray for the Father’s name to be “hallowed,” for his kingdom to come, and for his will to be established on earth as it is in heaven. He is, in effect, telling them to pray for the fulfillment of everything his ministry,…

How To Fix The Church: The Kingdom of God (Part 4)

God has leveraged everything on the Church loving like Jesus loved, as outlined in our previous posts in this series. “By this the world will know you are my disciples,” Jesus said, “by your love” (Jn 13:35). By God’s own design, Christ-like love is supposed to be the proof that Jesus is real. In John…

Consumer Wars: Sermon Clip

To go along with our other post today, here’s a clip from Greg’s sermon last week. If you don’t have any financial margin in your life, this might have something to do with it. You can find the entire sermon here.