Prosperity

Our failure to confront our covetousness and our failure to realize and respond to the impact of marketing on our lives might do irreparable harm to our civilization. I’m not an economist and I don’t want to be too much of an alarmist, however …

Iceland just went bankrupt. California is on the brink of insolvency. This in spite of the fact that we are living in a time of unprecedented planetary prosperity. Let’s be blunt. Americans are up to their eyeballs in debt because of the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. And the American government is taking on levels of debt that may be unsustainable. Please note that I said that they “may” be unsustainable. I don’t really know if they will be or not. I remember that doomsayers back in the 1970’s and 1980’s said that they government debt level at that time was unsustainable and the doom was immanent. Instead of doom we ended up with a decade and a half of some of the most amazing economic growth the world has ever seen. So I don’t want to seem like I know more than I actually know.

But I do know that Iceland went bankrupt, that California is on the verge of insolvency, and that the average American is up to his eyeballs in debt. And none of this needed to happen.

Let me pause for a moment of self disclosure. I am the spender and Nancy is the saver. A couple of years ago she graduated from college and got a much higher paying job. I didn’t adjust our income allocation very much at all. I pretty much kept my share of the bills (which was the lion’s share) and left her with the disposable income. I did this because I knew that she was unlikely to dispose of it. We are renegotiating our mortgage right now, and I recently found out how much money she had managed to save. Without sharing the actual amount with you, I was very pleased to see how much she had put away. If I had kept control of that money, a lot of it would have been frittered away. I’m telling you this because I want you to understand that what you are reading is not coming from a guy who has total victory in this area. I’m way better than I used to be (and understanding the impact of seasonal depression on impulse buying has been a major part of that) but I’m not yet where the Lord wants me to be.

This is what the Lord said to me recently. You can see how much of it may apply to you. “When you spend more than you should, Satan has put a metal ring through your nose. He has a rope tied to the ring, and he is laughing at you as you respond to his direction. Not only does he have your spending money on stuff that doesn’t make you happy, but the resultant financial pressure to pay everything off makes you miserable.” Something to think about. Something to pray about.

Prosperity

So what are we going to do about all of this marketing and it’s impact on our spiritual lives? The most common answer would be to just turn the idiot box off (or watch it less). That’s not a bad idea, especially if you spend some of the extra free time seeking the Lord.

Here are two further suggestions. First, be aware of the danger when you are watching. Most of us wouldn’t be thinking of spiritual danger when the commercials are on, but it’s there. You can be aware of it and you can consciously argue against it. Way back in the day I used to watch 60 Minutes religiously. I knew that the information I was getting was slanted (sometimes horribly so), but I have always enjoyed their storytelling technique and found the program to be informative and entertaining.

But I didn’t just watch it, I sort of wrestled with it. I would be watching a segment and say something like this to my long suffering wife. “You’ll notice that in dealing with the impending bankruptcy of California all they are asking about if the shortfall in revenue. Never once have they brought up the legitimacy of the spending the state is doing. The concept of cutting back in tough times doesn’t even occur to them.”

If you find yourself paying attention to a commercial you might want to do a little inner editorializing. “That guy must be a fantastic actor, but I wonder what happens to that look of stupefied happiness when the director yells, ‘cut!’ I would be really amusing to be on the set and watch the actors turn the happiness off and on as they go through each take. Stuff can’t make me happy. Only Jesus can make me happy.”

A third possibility is the technological option. Most of us have VCR’s and many of you probably have digital equivalents (TIVO and whatnot). Record the programming and fast forward through the commercials. I wonder if we wouldn’t save several times the cost of the TIVO fees over the course of the year from the money that we wouldn’t spend because of the commercials that we didn’t see.

Prosperity

The lying smile commercials are the worst, but all of the commercials can do damage. The message that stuff will make me happy is the subtext to almost every one of them. The reason that the other kinds of advertising can be dangerous is something the apostle John called the lust of the eyes.

“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.” (1 John 2:15, 16 KJV)

In your struggle with sin, I wonder how much thought you’ve given to the lust of the eyes? You’re probably well aware of pride and the lusts of the flesh. Most Christian men struggle with Jesus teaching that if you look with lust you have committed adultery in your heart, but most men probably think of that as the lust of the flesh more than the lust of the eyes.

Eve, in her temptation in the garden of Eden, exhibits all three forms of temptation from the “things of this world” in 1 John 2. “She saw that the tree was beautiful [lust of the eyes] and its fruit looked delicious [lust of the flesh], and she wanted the wisdom it would give her [pride of life]. So she took some of the fruit and ate it.” (Gen. 3.6 NLT)

I’ve been giving some thought to this whole business of looking, and this is what I think. We were originally engineered to live as sinless people in a sinless world. The world was full of good things for us to explore and enjoy. God designed us to look at something, see the good in it, and then want it. It was the mechanism He set in place so that we could enjoy the world He made for us.

The order here is very interesting. Normally we think of the longing (wanting) preceding the looking. I’ve met a woman and found her to be attractive, so I am tempted to look at her and have improper thoughts/feelings. The wanting comes before the looking. But the looking can create the longing (desire). We may find ourselves with little interest in something the first time we look at it, but as we see more and more of it we can be drawn to it.

All of which ties in very nicely with our marketing theme. I never used to care very much about cars. To be honest with you, I grew up kind of hating the internal combustion engine. I waited a whole year past my 16^th birthday to get my driver’s license. But after looking at hundreds (thousands?) of hours of car ads, I now find myself liking cars. I would like to have a new one. A new desire has been created within me.

I’m going to get to some specific recommendations later, but for now I am trying to build an awareness of what marketing is doing to us. If you think that I’m being carried away, consider this. “So kill … all greed and covetousness, for that is idolatry.” (Col. 3.5 Amp)

Prosperity

I first began to realize that the commercials might be the most dangerous thing on TV back in the 1980’s. I was working as the pastor of a very, very small church and we were as poor as proverbial church mice. Mostly the lack of money didn’t bother me. I was doing what I loved.

There were times, however, when driving an old rusty car seemed to bother me. It didn’t bother me all the time, and I began to wonder why this was so. Then I noticed that the time I was most likely to be bothered was in the spring and early summer. And that’s when I realized that it was all Larry Bird’s fault.

I was a Boston Celtic’s fan. And the Celtics were great in the 1980’s. They made the playoffs every year. And I seldom missed a game. Guess who one of the major advertisers of sports program is? Car companies.

Prosperity

In the first Psalm we are given one of the master keys to the spiritual life: meditation. A good man meditates on God’s word day and night and, because he does this, everything he does prospers. Meditation is important because it helps us traverse that grand canyon that separates our head and our heart. The Holy Spirit uses mediation to take what is in our heads and transfer it to our hearts so that the word will come alive with transformative power in our lives.

Unfortunately the process of meditation is neutral. You can meditate good things into your hearts, and you can meditate bad things. All of which brings us back to those lying smiles on the TV commercials. Most commercials are not lying smile commercials. A commercial that simply tells you about a product and the benefits it might bring to you is not a lying smile commercial. In order for it to be a lying smile commercial the commercial message has to imply that the use of the product is the key to happiness. No one actually says this, but the message comes through from the beaming faces of the actors.

The average man watches about 4.5 hours of TV a day. The average woman watches about 5.25 hours. Total watching time for both groups has increased by about a half hour a day from twenty years ago. The average commercial time in an hour of TV is 15 minutes. For the purposes of this illustration let’s assume that about one third of the commercial time is devoted to lying smile commercials. That means that for every hour of TV you watch highly skilled actors put on skits written by highly skilled writers that are directed by highly skilled directors. Four five minutes a hour you are subjected to brain washing. If you watch four hours a day, that’s twenty minutes a day.

That works out to about 120 hours of brainwashing a year or 2,400 hours of brainwashing over a twenty year period. I wonder how many of use spend 120 hours a year meditating in God’s word? That would be twenty minutes a day.

Prosperity

Every year Christmas lies to me. Every year Christmas lets me down. And this is the lie: things will make you happy. I’m almost hesitant to write anything about this because we’ve all heard it before and we all know it’s true. However … this is another one of those deals where it doesn’t matter what you know in your head unless you also know it in your heart. So with a prayer that the Holy Spirit will use this to move the truth to a deeper level within us, I will proceed.

Those of us to live in the electronic generation have been lied to more than any other generation that has lived on the earth. The lie is the smile. We’ve all seen the smile. Thousands and thousands of times.

It is not an ordinary smile. An ordinary smile is a lovely thing. It is a sign that the person behind the smile is experiencing some measure of happiness. The ordinary smile is not the smile that has been used to lie to us. The lying smile is a face that is literally beaming with happiness. It is a face that is radiantly joyful.

Normal human beings are familiar with this smile, although we don’t use it very often. The two examples that leap out at me are the way my wife smiled on the day we were married and the way she smiled right after the birth of our two children. Radiant, complete, total happiness.

This is the smile that all of the people in the commercials wear. Only instead of a wedding or the birth of a child, they are wearing that smile because finally, at last, they can afford to drive the right truck and drink the right beer. I finally got that big screen high def TV. Look at my radiant smile.

It’s all a lie. The people displaying those smiles are all actors. The director yells “action” and all of the actors begin the grin like idiots. Then he yells “cut” and all the smiles vanish. We never get to see what happens after the director yells cut.

Meditation

The Holy Spirit wants to be your teacher and guide. In order for this to happen you need to start trying to sense what He is trying to teach you and then exposing yourself to this material over and over again.

The only permanent transformation that takes place in the Christian life is when the Holy Spirit takes a truth in your mind and writes it on your heart.

Mark this down. Meditate on it. Write it on the walls of your heart. You have to come to the place where what the Holy Spirit is saying to you right now becomes one of the most important things in your life. That’s what I’m going to pay attention to. That’s what I’m going to think about. That will be my priority.

May God bless you as you meditate on Holy things.

Meditation

When I read Christian books, I always try to keep a pencil close at hand. If something speaks to me, I make a bracket on the side of the page in pencil. A bracket looks like this ] only larger. I make the bracket as big as the paragraph or section that spoke to me.

When I get done with the book I go on to the next book, but I will come back to the book I just finished in the near future. Instead of rereading the entire book, I will just read the parts I marked in brackets.

You can apply that same principle to things you read online like the blog. If a particular posting or a thread really blesses you, copy and paste it into a file on your computer. Put down the date that you transferred the material. Reread it once or twice a week for a couple of months. This is how you meditate on holy things.

Here is a good example of why marking and re-reading can be so very important. Take the material in this blog on dealing with death. The principles taught in that section really work. I know because I have applied them in my own life.

My take on dealing with death is a little unusual. I've never read or heard anything quite like the material that I have presented to you on that topic.

Hopefully when you read that thread it will bless you. But if you aren't currently in mourning for someone, you will probably forget what you read or where you read it in a couple of weeks.

But sooner or later someone you love will die. And you will need this material or something like it. If you have reviewed that material a couple of times when the time comes when you need to put the principles into practice, you'll already have some of them in your heart. And you will remember where you read it so that you can go back and apply it to your life.

Meditation

All permanent change in the Christian life is the result of the Holy Spirit’s power being released into our inner man. Our souls tend to be like dry, sun baked soil that is in desperate need to refreshing, life giving water. One way for water to reach dry soil is through irrigation ditches. The life giving water of the Holy Spirit flows into us like water through an irrigation ditch. Our responsibility is to understand the process and then open the gates and let the water flow.

The channels through which the living water flows are well know: worship, Bible study, prayer, and attending public Christian meetings. But there is another, vitally important way to receive the refreshing power of the Holy Spirit, and that is by reading good Christian books. But don’t read just any book, read books by authors that warm your heart.

Here are three little tests you can do to find out if you are receiving spiritual life and power from a book or simply receiving information. These same tests will work when evaluating Christian music or listening to preachers and teachers.

First, when I read this book, does it warm my heart? Am I aware of a sense of life giving power being imparted to me?

Second, when I am done reading, is it a little more easy and natural for me to spend a few moments praying that it would have been before I read from the book? Sin in human nature just flat out hates to pray. But whenever you open the one of the channels into your heart through which the Holy Spirit flows, you will find it easier to overcome the sense of resistance that the flesh exerts on us when we decide to pray.

Third, is it a little easier for me to resist the power of sin after I have spent some time reading this author? Is it a little easier to be good?

If an author impacts you in any of these three ways then you are probably going to want to get your hands on as much material as you can from this person and use it to nourish your soul.

As you apply these tests to the various forms of Christian media that you expose yourself to, you will become more and more aware of what the Holy Spirit is trying to do in your life. Jesus promised us that the Holy Spirit will guide us into all truth and He also promised us that the truth would make us free. We need to put those two things together in our minds and never let them be separated. The Holy Spirit works through the living word and through anointed teaching.

If you start reading a certain author, and you find that he or she is doing you a great deal of good, that doesn’t mean that all of the other authors are in some way inferior – it simply means that the person you are reading has the teaching that the Holy Spirit wants to impart to your life right now.

Meditation

Whenever you are exposed to any material of a spiritual nature, you should always be listening with your heart while you are understanding with your mind.

If you get a sense in your heart that this is material that you really need, or that God wants you to pay special attention to, then you need to mark it and go back over it again and again until it sinks in.

“Wow, Pastor, that sermon really spoke to me. It was almost as if you knew about my situation before you preached it.”

Get the tape or the CD and listen to it over and over again. If it wasn't recorded, review your notes periodically.

Strangers in exile

You discover that you are a stranger living in exile when ...

you realize that there will be no public recognition or understanding of the significance of what you did in this life until you reach the heavenly city.

For a creature born in sin

and living in a world hostile to holiness

resisting the world, the flesh, and the devil

requires heroic determination

and results in

everlasting glory.

Strangers in exile

You discover that you are a stranger living in exile when ...

you realize that there will be no public recognition or understanding of the significance of what you did in this life until you reach the heavenly city.

Holy deeds are not limited to this life; they pass over into eternity. Those who “die in the Lord rest from their labors, and their works do follow them.” (Revelation 14:13) The smallest holy act, even if it is giving a cup of cold water to a disciple, is held in everlasting remembrance and has an eternal reward. All other deeds, no matter how impressive they seemed in this life, will be burnt up in the fires of God's judgment like hay and stubble. But seemingly insignificant, random acts of kindness (that are the result of the Holy Spirit's transforming power in your life) will be gathered up like gold and silver and stored forever in God's treasury. Our Father, who sees in secret, will one day reward openly. John Owen (Brother Mark's paraphrase)

Strangers in exile

Patriotism, the enthusiastic love of one’s country, is based on our hearts’ true longing for a perfect place. I can and do feel affection and appreciation for my earthly country, but the true longing of my heart can never be satisfied with anything less that my perfect heavenly home in God’s eternal kingdom.

I may accept an assignment in a foreign country for a short period of time, but I will probably never feel completely at home there. The customs and sometimes the language aren’t the same, but I put up with the inconveniences because of the job that I have to get done. When you become sufficiently heavenly minded, when the Holy Spirit brings alive within you a clear sense of the heavenly city, you will spend the rest of your life no longer completely at home on this earth. You put up with the inconvenience because of the job you have been put here to do, but once the job is done, you plan to go home as soon as possible.

Strangers in exile

And even when he [Abraham] reached the land God promised him, he lived there by faith—for he was like a foreigner, living in tents. And so did Isaac and Jacob, who inherited the same promise. Abraham was confidently looking forward to a city with eternal foundations, a city designed and built by God. Heb. 11:8, 9 NLT

"He knew that earth could afford no permanent residence for an immortal mind, and he looked for that heavenly building of which God is the architect and owner; in a word, he lost sight of earth, that he might keep heaven in view.” Adam Clarke