Beggars and Choosers

I'm quite a bit behind in posting my articles for the Daily Sentinel. This article first appeared back on the last Friday of October. It was a lot more timely near Halloween than Thanksgiving and Christmas. But oh well, enjoy anyway.....


Last night was “Trick-or-Treat” Night here and in other communities in the County. Hundreds of children took to the streets dressed up in costumes and went from door-to-door expecting to receive candy. “Trick or Treat!” they shouted. Adults smiled, admired their costumes and threw a couple of fun-sized chocolate bars or sugary sweets into their bags. Then the kids raced off to the next house to repeat the ritual. Again and again. Until they come home at the end of the evening with bags almost as heavy as they are!

What fun! Begging for candy – and getting it!! During their quest, kids don’t care what kind of candy they receive. The fun is in the pursuit of a full bag – it’s only later that they become choosy at what they actually eat. (Actually, it may be the parents who are choosy as to what they actually eat!)

My wife and I would always go through the candy after our kids came home from trick-or-treat night. Part of the sorting, obviously, was to make sure the candy was safe to eat. I haven’t heard as much lately, but when I was growing up, there were all kinds of stories of unsafe and dangerous items being planted in the candy to hurt or poisoned unsuspecting children. Rumors of razor blades embedded in apples and popcorn balls meant the end of homemade or healthy treats. Now we’re left with prepackaged candy, none of which is really good for us.

But beyond making sure the candy is safe, we also separate out the chocolate from the sugary stuff. You see, I am very choosy when it comes to the candy that I consume! What I want is chocolate with nuts, such as Snickers, Mr. Goodbar, or Reece’s. My kids on the other hand, like Smarties, Tootsie Pops, and SourTarts, as well as chocolate. But they don’t like nuts!

I think all this begging and choosing about candy is similar to what we do when it comes to Jesus Christ. We come to Jesus as beggars. We have nothing of value to give him. Even if I have all the wealth of the world, I cannot buy a relationship with Christ. God doesn’t care about what I have, God cares about who I am. So the only way to have a relationship is to come as a beggar, begging for forgiveness and a fresh start in life.

And just as on trick-or-treat nights are bags are filled with candy, so are our lives filled with Jesus Christ when we come to him. Often in the euphoria of that new relationship, we don’t care what Jesus is doing in us. We’re just excited that now we have found something of true value. But then something strange happens. We start to become choosy about what Jesus wants to do with us. Some things about us, we are ready for him to change; but other places are definitely off-limits!

When pastors start to touch on those off limit places, they get accused of “meddlin’,” and people don’t like it. Sometimes pastors are meddling in things, but more often than not they are simply preaching the uncomfortable truth that we cannot choose to ignore without eternal consequences. We cannot say, “I’ll take Jesus – hold the nuts!” We either get all of Jesus, or none of Jesus.

In Luke chapter 9, Jesus said to a man, “follow me.” But the man replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” Jesus said to him, “let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.” Jesus replied, “no one who puts his hand to the plow looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

Jesus was not trying to be unreasonable with these men, but he was insisting that they follow him without reservation. He makes the same demands upon us today. We can beg for forgiveness and ask for salvation, but we cannot be choosy as to how God responds. You can trust that when you say “trick-or-treat” to Jesus, there will be no tricks – just treats!

What's Your Net Worth?

Not too long ago, I attended a special seminar on retirement planning. One of the exercises was to calculate my net worth. In simple terms, I added up the dollar value of everything I own, and then subtracted the amount of money I owe. The result wasn’t pretty. In fact, it was downright negative. I mean, literally in the negative! I owed more to others than what I owned. That meant even if I sold everything I had, it wouldn’t be enough to pay my debts.

Perhaps you’re in a similar situation. Recent statistics put family credit card debt averages at $8000. Even more disturbing, 36% of those who owed $10,000 or more on their credit cards earned less than $50,000 per year. That kind of debt is nearly impossible to pay off – which is why bankruptcy filings continue to rise.

Those of us who work for a living aren’t doing a very good job of saving for the days when we are no longer working. More than half of all employees in the US have less than $25,000 in total savings and investments. Count me in that half.

All this money stuff gives me a headache. When I look at where I am financially compared to where society tells me I ought to be, I get depressed. I’m simply not worth very much in the world’s eyes. Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley don’t come knocking on my door. Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Michael Dell don’t return my phone calls.

Every day we are bombarded with dual messages: you’re not good enough; but buy this or that and you’ll be better. Drug companies tell us we need their pills. Car companies tell us we need their cars. Beer and soda companies tell us we need to drink their products. Even churches have gotten into the advertising action. Come to OUR church and you’ll feel LOTS better!

The simple truth is that all the advertising messages we receive fall short of the truth – even the church ones. That’s because we cannot become good enough no matter what we do, or what we buy, or where we go to church. I’ve heard some people say that the denomination one attends is determined by economics. Poorer people tend to be Pentecostal or Church of God. Middle class people tend to be Baptist or Methodist. Richer people tend to be Lutheran, Presbyterian or Episcopalian. As if God designed churches based on net incomes. YUCK!

My net worth may not be much in the world’s eyes, and my church may not be one where lots of rich people attend, but I know that in God’s eyes – we are worth so much!! And so are you!! God doesn’t look at our checkbooks before deciding whether or not to care about us. God doesn’t care whether our cash value is negative or positive. Whether we’re in debt to our eyeballs or overflowing with cash, God sees us as who God made us to be. And God also sees how short we fall from what we were made to be.

The real net worth that God cares about is how much progress we’ve made through Him to become what we were made to be. Each day is a new deposit from God to you – to be invested in become more forgiving, more discerning, more generous. The bottom line in God’s eyes: how much are you becoming like Jesus Christ?

Jesus tells a parable to Peter in Matthew 18:21-35 about the servant who owed the king a tremendous, un-payable debt. The servant begged the king for more time to pay. The king, knowing full well the servant could never pay the debt, nevertheless cancelled the debt and sent the servant away as a free man. The servant, however, went and grabbed a fellow servant by the throat and demanded instant payment on a paltry debt. The second servant didn’t have the money to pay back the debt and so begged for more time to pay (just what the first servant had done with the king). But the first servant wasn’t as forgiving as the king – he sent his fellow servant to debtor’s prison.

Even though the first servant had an instant financial windfall from the king’s forgiveness, he had no net value in the king’s eyes. When the king heard about how the servant had treated his fellow servant, the debt was reinstated and the servant was sent away for forever – to pay a debt he could never repay.

Your net worth and mine should be based on God’s economy: how much can you forgive and give away? Not how much can you gain. We all fall short, but God forgives and restores us when we come to Him. I pray that you become wealthy by God’s standards!!