-Money Blog Part 1: Currency vs. Character-

Even if you don't believe anything else the Bible says one thing that is hard to argue with is 1st Timothy 6:10 which tells us, "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil..." Take it from someone who worked in bank branches in Orange County, CA (a region where you can find one of the most concentrated groupings of wealth on the planet), for almost a decade. Loving money can cause problems. I once listened to a brother and sister argue in front of me for 20 minutes about who should get the extra 1 CENT from their recently deceased mother's savings account because it wouldn't split evenly into 2 parts. There's something wrong there. Something terribly, terribly wrong.

I think one of the biggest problems happens when we assign value to money. If you're thinking, "What are you talking about John? Money already has a value. We don't assign it one," that's not at all what I mean. What I mean is the value we allow our money to give us. I'll explain. Often times in our culture, we equate someone's value as a person with their affluence. The car they drive, the area of town their house is in, the places they eat, the clothing they wear. These are all ways in which we gage someone's wealth and, in turn, gage their value. That is a problem in it's own right but it leads to an even bigger problem. Comparison.

We begin to compare what we have with what others have. Is my car as nice as theirs? My clothes? My home? But comparisons like these are actually a double-edged sword. We can't win. If someone else's "stuff" is better than ours then we feel inferior. It their "stuff" isn't seemingly as nice we feel superior to them. either way we are basing not only their value as a human on their money, but also OUR value. Then it becomes about being "as good as" someone else. So rather than basing our value on what we ARE, we base it on what we HAVE. When this happens, money becomes more than just currency, it becomes our character.

We, as individuals, must make conscious decisions to end this mentality. We must stop confusing our self-worth with our net-worth. Until we do, we won't have our money, it will have us. We must remember that money and "stuff" is not the goal itself but simply a tool we can use to help us achieve our goals. Because when our goals in life revolve around the accumulation of cash and "stuff" then in the end, we have done nothing with significance. We have simply hoarded and taken and allowed our currency to be more important that our character.

-Worth Dying For-

As many, if not all, of you know I am, if nothing else, committed to faith. So much so that I have made a life's work out of it. This is not to say that I have more faith or understand God more than everyone else. It simply means that I feel a particular burden that has caused me choose the life of a vocational minister. It's not a job that is particularly more important than any other job or career. It's simply the role I have been asked to play and so I play it out of obedience.

With this "career" and even more so this life-style, come frequent conversations and discussions and debates about spirituality, love, faith, God, Jesus, humanity, sin, prayer, injustice, poverty, mankind, religion, etc, and how we should best interpret these topics through our spiritual lens. One of these discussions came recently in the form of an email I received from another Christian who knows God has blessed him but has a hard time accepting said blessing because of his great "unworthiness." He mentioned that he can never deserve God's love and feels there are so many others who deserve it more than he does. This attitude breaks my heart.

This, "scum of the earth" mentality is validated by a common Christian theme and aphorism that sates, "I am just a sinner saved by grace." I HATE that phrase. It sickens me to the bone, and makes want to jump out of my skin. This view of Christian spirituality sucks and misses the true mark. Because Jesus wouldn't die for the scum of the earth.

Don't get me wrong, I understand not being able to earn God's love or ever do anything to be worthy of it. But that doesn't mean we are not worthy of it. We are worthy. Why, because Jesus says we are. Because God's love is so strong that it makes us worthy of it by its own strength. You are a barer of the divine image, "fearfully and wonderfully made," the most important of God's creations, and most of all...you are worth dying for. Accept it, claim it, and spread it.

We don't want to believe it sometimes...that we're worth dying for. In fact we even fight it. We quote verses like," it is by grace we are saved through faith. Not by works..." or "remember the height from which you have fallen..." to justify our attitude of melancholy self-chastisement. We even throw in when Jesus said that we must "hate ourselves" for good measure. But we miss the point of these verses completely. We have to interpret them in light of the facts AND the truth. FACT: There is nothing we can do to earn God's love. TRUTH: There is nothing we can do to exhaust God's love. FACT: We are sinners saved by grace. TRUTH: Because of grace we are no longer sinners. FACT: Jesus died for all. TRUTH: Jesus died for you.

One of the main goals of a Christian should be to see people the way Jesus does. Not an easy task as sometimes people can be annoying and get in our way. Sometimes people can be stupid and inconvenience us. Basically, sometimes people suck. But we know that Jesus thinks otherwise. We know that when Jesus sees a human, He has only one response...love. And we know that this is the view of people that we must strive for. But if we are to see people the way Jesus does then we must also learn to see ourselves the way Jesus does. And Jesus sees us as worth dying for. Fight it all you want but it's true. It's hard to accept really but accept it we must because until we do, we will never be the person He has truly created us to be. I have a hard time accepting it. I don't see myself as someone who is worth the life of God himself. I don't see myself as someone who is so valuable that another should give up his or her life for me. But the truth is that Jesus DOES feel I'm that valuable and DID give up His life for me. So the "scum of the earth, not worth dying for" attitude is actually at odds with Jesus. By asserting that we are unworthy and not worth it we are actually saying that Jesus is wrong and made a mistake. So who is wrong here Jesus or I?

The awareness of this was a painstaking process that I am still trying to grasp but in accepting it I am freeing myself to be a more effective minister, Christian, and person. By accepting that I am worth dying for it is easier to accept that others are worth dying for and I come closer to seeing people as Jesus does. It also makes me a more effective witness. How can I share the love of Jesus and tell someone that He loves them so much that they are worth Him dying for unless I actually believe it myself. They are worth dying for. I am worth dying for. YOU are worth dying for. Accept it, Claim it, and Share it.