A Purpose to Poverty- Our Faith is Refined to Keep our Focus on our True Treasure
Bible Passage:
I Peter 1:3-9
Pastor:
Pastor Glen
Sermon Date:
2010-10-23
On the internet you can learn how to refine or smelt gold from concentrates. It tells you what you need. You will need a small furnace, gas or electric fired. You will need a crucible, preferably graphite will last longer. You will need smelting flux, tongs, and safety equipment. There is even a recipe to make a flux recipe for the smelting process. This smelting process starts with the furnace at 500 degree Fahrenheit and to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit with an average of 1100 degree for the smelting process. Why is this smelting process of gold necessary? It is a known fact that there can be 4 - 10 times more Gold in your concentrates than the visible Gold that you can see and recover. There are several ways to recover this material including leaching, smelting and others. Remember one thing, when smelting, you are now a chemist. Careful attention must be paid to what you are doing at all times. A mistake can mean serious consequences too and include even death.
The Apostle Peter speaks to Christians whose faith in the Lord was being refined by the hand of the heavenly Father who knew what he was doing. Yet, the Christians in Cappadocia, Pontus and Phrygia sometimes wondered about the great trials they were going through. We can question God’s love, his way of allowing or causing things to happen in our lives. As we once again continue in the sermon series Broke and Blessed we want to understand God’s purpose for poverty and some of the questions we have as our Heavenly Father refines our faith using the heat of financial trials.
Our Faith is Refined to Keep our Focus on our True Treasure
The Apostle Peter was writing to the Christians in Asia Minor that is modern day Turkey because word had reached him in Rome that they were coming under terrible pressure to give up their faith. The evil one was trying to make their lives miserable because of their relationship with Christ. Peter wanted them to see that persecution and pain are not signs of failure, but are to be expected on the path to triumph with Christ. With the help of the Holy Spirit, they can be overcome and even turned into opportunities for growth and blessing.
In our sermon series Broke and Blessed we have remarked that what happens to us financially affects us spiritually. The difficulty often comes when we pray for work and it doesn’t come. Where is God? Doesn’t he care about my struggles? Does prayer really work? When money is my god, the true God becomes a tool to help me serve my god (money). I pray because I want money, not God’s will to be done. I try to keep the commands because I want God to bless me financially, not out of thanks for the gospel. I like God when he gives me money and I’m mad at God when he doesn’t. I don’t want the cross or poverty or hardship because my whole purpose in life is to be rich and comfortable, not to be righteous and live solely to the glory of God .
Sometimes dwindling funds reveal where our real trust was. We said we trusted in God when we had a lot to spare. But we panic when God is still here, but the money is not. Poverty can also affect the other aspects of our Christian living. Financial stress might make us less patient with our kids, less kind with our friends, less generous with our neighbors, etc. We might think, “I’m broke and I need to fix it. I need to work more and pay these bills. I know I should read my Bible, pray, go to church, lead my family spiritually, but that can wait until we catch up financially.” In doing so, we forget that God is the one who gives financial blessings! Being broke financially can lead to feeling broken spiritually.
In the book Counterfeit Tim Keller share these facts about those who have trusted in their wealth.”In the last two years, many wealthy people took their own lives—The CFO of Freddie Mac hanged himself in his basement, the chief executive of a leading real estate auction firm shot himself behind the wheel of his red jaguar, a French money manager who invested money for some of Europe’s wealthiest families slit his wrists. A senior executive from HSBC bank hanged himself in his expensive hotel suite. A Bear Stearns executive jumped from the 29th floor of his office building. –Money was their god and when their god died, they saw no reason to live (p.ix-x)!”
When you start to worry about providing for yourself and others it is important to ask yourselves some questions. . “Is your heart attached to and does it rely on something else, from which you hope to receive more good and more help than from God? And when things go wrong, do you, instead of fleeing to him, flee from him? Then you have another god, a false god.”
Max Lucado in the book “Traveling Light” shares this story: “A man once went to a minister for counseling. He was in the midst of a financial collapse. ‘I’ve lost everything,’ he bemoaned. ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that you’ve lost your faith.’ ‘No, I haven’t lost my faith.’ “Well, then I’m sad to hear that you’ve lost your character.’ ‘I didn’t say that. I still have my character.’ ‘I’m sorry to hear that you’ve lost your salvation.’ ‘That’s not what I said. I haven’t lost my salvation.’ ‘You have your faith, your character, your salvation. Seems to me,’ the minister observed, ‘that you’ve lost none of the things that really matter.’” P.33
Jesus is your greatest treasure. He gave up his place in heaven to win you as his treasure. Peter writes
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you, 5 who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.” 6In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.
When Christians are painfully aware of what is being taken away from them, such as their freedom, their dignity, their health, or their money, it is comforting to remember which treasures cannot be taken from them:
the mercy of God, the new birth of Holy Baptism, and the heavenly inheritance that cannot perish, spoil, or fade away. The stock market may crash; buildings burn down; banks may fail; doctors may fail; businesses may fail; the love of family members may fail; but the good things that Christ gives will never fail because they are based on irreversible historical fact—Christ’s resurrection from the dead. He lives; and because he lives, hope lives too. That hope does not ride up and down like stock prices on Wall Street. That hope is valuable because it is derived not from our achievements but from God’s; it is God’s gift of love, not something he sells us or owes us.
And so the eternal life that God promises is kept in heaven for you, and in the meantime, he shields you. How can persecuted Christians believe that they are shielded? God never promised us heaven on earth. He did not promise an earthly life without pain, sickness, hostility from Satan’s accomplices, or death. What he did promise is that he would set limits to the hardships that come upon us; he would allow only as much trouble as he knows we can bear. He promises that after the night of trouble, relief and deliverance will come in the morning—these troubles are only “for a little while” (verse 6). He promises to work it all together for our good. Somehow, in some way, God turns every disaster inside out and makes it an opportunity for blessing.
Our faith is refined to keep our focus on our true treasure. Our treasure is the certainty of eternal life in the death and resurrection of Jesus given to us by the plan of the heavenly Father and the work of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes the heat of that refinement seems greater than the heat that is used to refine gold. Peter reminds us of the important truth that even though we do not see God he will keep his promises in the last verses beginning with verse 8. “Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9 for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”Our Heavenly Father knows that the stuff of this world can get all our attention that is why he shows us great love in bringing our faith into to focus on our true treasure. In so doing he releases us from the worries of this life to the joy of using his blessings He has given us the truth of His Word to glorify and praise him as we use our stuff to bring the message of God’s unconditional love to those who do not know it and to those whose faith needs to be encouraged and strengthened. This is God’s truth. Amen.
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