A Fresh Start For Your Finances // Spring Cleaning Your Life, Part 2

Sometimes, our heart can be aching – if only I had enough to give more money to the poor and the needy. And so the next thing we do is go and buy something useless on the credit card. Hmm. In recent years there's a new word that's appeared in the vocabulary of sociologists. That word is Affluenza. It's about the high social, personal and environmental cost of over-consumption. The bloated sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that people get from over consumption. Work more, shop more, live less. The research tells us that actually in the west it is becoming a serious social disease. And yet 24/7 is seems people are going down to the local shopping centres running the plastic through the machines spending it on stuff that in a years time will probably be lying disused at the bottom of the wardrobe. And then you get the credit card bill. It turns out that there is a lot of people that live in a constant state of debt and for what? Spring Cleaning our lives. I know it's not spring but you know as we look forward to the year its kind of nice to review our lives, to look at different parts of our lives, and think where's some of the rubbish in my life that I can leave behind. Yesterday we talked about spring cleaning our homes. Now some people want to live a good life and feel good about themselves, and yet there house is a pig sty. And they wonder why when they walk into their home they feel depressed. Sometimes we have to deal with the mundane issues to give God some space, to bring miracles into our lives. Today I would like to talk about our finances. What does it means to spring clean our finances? Jesus actually talked quite a bit about money. He said: Where you treasure is there your heart will also be. Sometimes people read that and they kind of miss the sequence that He is using. Sometimes they read it the other way round, they read where your heart is that's where you'll spend your treasure. But actually he puts the money first. He says where you spend your money, where you invest the cash, that's where you will invest your emotional energy. If we invest in conspicuous consumption, what ever that means in each of our lives and our social context, if we buy, buy, if all we want to do is get the new car, get this, get that… that's where we end up investing emotionally as well. Maybe that explains why people end up feeling so empty when all they do is try and spend money. That used to be me. It used to be so important to me that I had the latest up market car. It used to be so important to me that I had the latest this and the latest that, the best this and the most expensive gadget there. You ended up being bloated but you are never satisfied. Yesterday on A Different Perspective we looked at the story that we find in the book of Acts in the New Testament, of the apostle Peter being in jail. He's locked up, he's being guarded by Roman soldiers. And in the middle of the night an angel of the Lord comes to him, taps him on the shoulder and says come Peter lets go. Put on your clothes put on your shoes put on your belt and follow me. Miraculously the chains fall off his hands, he walks past the guards and they are asleep. They get to the outer gate and the gate swings open of its own accord. There are two dimensions to this story. There's the mundane, there's the angel saying to Peter, "Get up, put your coat on, put your belt on, put your sandals on, follow me." Do the mundane things that you can do for yourself. And the other dimension is the miracle. The fact that God showed up at all. The fact the chain fell off, the gate flew open. Sometimes we hunger after miracles in our lives and we ignore the basics the mundane. If only we would spend some time getting the basics right. Maybe that would give God some space to bless us with his miracles. We spend, spend, spend. We just spend money. We end with sky high debt on our credit cards, we cant' pray for a miracle to get us out of that. We can't pray for a miracle, say, "God when I wake up tomorrow morning I pray that there would be a zero balance on my credit card." We live in the days of credit cards. Back in the good old days when I was a little boy we lived in a cash society. My father used to bring cash home. He was paid in cash. He used to give Mum the housekeeping. When housekeeping ran out, well, that was it. And so there was a control on the way in which we spent our money. Now today, you can just keep running it up and running it up on the credit card. And when that one is full you can just go to the next credit card provider and get another one, and run it up and run it up. And so many people live under this power of debt. This is what Jacqui my wife and I have done in our lives in our little part of the globe to deal with the whole money issue, to spring clean our finances. Jesus is heavily into the realities of life. Remember when he teaches the disciples to pray which we commonly refer to as the Lord's Prayer. One of the lines in that is ...