According to legend, one of the old saints in his journey overtook two travelers. One was a greedy, avaricious, covetous man. The other, similarly, was of a jealous and envious nature. When they came to the parting of the ways, the saint said that he would give them a parting gift. Whichever made a wish first would have his wish fulfilled, and the other man would get a double portion of what the first had asked for.
The greedy man knew what he wanted, but he was afraid to make his wish because he wanted the double portion, and could not bear the thought of his companion getting twice as much as he had. But the envious man was also unwilling to wish first because he could not stand the idea of his companion getting twice as much as he would get. So each waited for the other to wish first. At length the greedy man took his stello by the throat and said he would choke him to death unless he made his wish.
At that moment the envious man said, very well, I will make my wish. I wish to be made blind in one eye. Immediately he lost the sight of his eye, and his companion went blind in both eyes. That legend reveals to us the malicious nature of greed. It is greed which is dealt with in the tenth commandment found in Exodus 20 and verse 17. What is it that makes the tenth commandment, thou shalt not covet, distinct from the previous ones, which also dealt with human relationships?
The answer is that the tenth commandment is directed toward an attitude rather than an action. For it is more subtle and difficult to observe its transgression. Consider these observations. The breaking of the sixth commandment may cost a person his life. The breaking of the seventh commandment may cause a broken marriage. The breaking of the eighth commandment might result in a prison term. The breaking of the ninth commandment could cause a lawsuit.
But have you ever heard of a man going to prison for envy or being sued for covetousness? Of course not, because man's laws deal with outward acts. God's laws deal with the outward acts, but also with inward attitudes. It is those attitudes which are the source of the actions in our lives. You see it is the root of the attitude that produces the fruit of the action. The tenth commandment deals with the root.
Perhaps it is because it deals with an attitude which cannot be seen that the tenth commandment is usually regarded not very seriously and usually without very much personal application. We are very much like the rich young ruler. We are concerned with our outward actions. All of these have we kept. What are we still lacking is our attitude. But we are often oblivious, as was he, to the attitudes of the heart which equally defile a man.
Covetousness is not only a sin of the person, it is a sin of organizations and institutions. It can be a sin in a church. Douglas Beier, a pastor from California, has written these poignant and striking words. "'Not even the church takes the sin of greed very seriously,' says he. "'There are periodic attempts to boycott television programs that pander to depraved appetites for sex and violence. But whoever heard of a boycott of programs that pander to depraved appetites for wealth and opulence?
Churches pass resolutions against the sin of intoxication by the spirit of alcohol. But where are the resolutions against the sin of intoxication by the spirit of greed? Some churches refuse to allow a person whose love for another made him or her divorce his or her spouse to serve as a church officer. But where is the church that rejects someone on the ground that the person's love of money has made him or her too ambitious?
The rich young ruler is no longer offended by severe demands of Christ-like living, but welcomed and made the treasurer of the church.'" God's word says, "'You shall not covet.'" That is a word that applies to churches. It likewise applies to children fighting over the size of the doughnut or who's going to sit in the front seat. It applies to corporations which exploit third world countries or their own employees.
It applies to unions who demand more than the company can pay, and thus they lose their jobs and perhaps bankrupt the company. It applies to young families which go into financial bondage to fill the home with the latest desired things. It likewise applies to the impoverished person who sits and sulks about his unhappy circumstances. Whoever we are, wherever we are in our standings and circumstances today, the tenth commandment applies to us. "'You shall not covet,' says the Lord our God."
The meaning of covetousness is the opposite of satisfaction. The Greek word for covetousness means to have more. It especially applies to desiring what another person has, wife, wealth, possessions. It is to want what is forbidden. Our late former president, Lyndon Johnson, remarked, "'All I want is all there is.'" I think he stated it well for most of the human race. There is no satisfying, you see, of the craving for things. As has been often said, the more that one has, the more he wants.
An early Greek writer put it this way, "'You might as easily satisfy greed as a bowl with a hole in it.'" The late wealthy J. Paul Getty was asked on an occasion about his billion dollars of wealth. He shrugged his shoulders and said, "'Well, what you must remember is that a billion dollars don't go as far as they used to.'" On one occasion he was asked, "'How much is enough?' And with a twinkle in his eye he replied, "'Just a little bit more.'" So it is with the covetous spirit of man.
One ancient writer said, "'Poverty is want of much, but avarice is want of everything.'" And so we might ask, is it wrong to have things? Is it sinful to be ambitious or industrious? Should we rather take a vow of poverty and disown the things that we have? Well, of course, the answer to those questions is in the negative. That isn't God's plan for us. Rather God's plan is that we should see the possessions that we have as a gift from Him or as a stewardship that we are to wisely care for.
I'd like you to open your Bibles to 1 Timothy chapter 6. Then look at verse 17. We'll come back to this chapter several times this morning because it speaks quite a bit to this matter of money and the things that money can buy. Instruct those who are rich in this present world not to be conceited or to fix their hope on the uncertainty of riches. We look at ourselves and we say, well, this verse doesn't apply to us. There aren't very many of us who are rich.
That may be true in the relative way that we measure it in our society. But if we would measure the poorest in attendance this morning against the rest of the world's population and against the generations that have gone on the earth before us, we would find that the poorest among us is rich in comparison. Rich people have two problems, pride and presumption. Pride and egotism and what is possessed and the presumption that one will always have these things. We are warned here against that.
Rather, it says we are to fix our hope on God who richly supplies us with all things to enjoy. God is the one who supplies us with the things that we have. They ultimately come from Him and He supplies us richly. God is not mean. God does not withhold. Rather God delights to give. He is a generous and gracious God. He richly supplies us with all things. And notice the last two words.
Those words do not imply that we are to enjoy these things selfishly, that we are to become spoiled brats in the family of God, that we should lavish upon ourselves the fulfillment of every desire that we think we can or maybe even can't afford. The idea in enjoying it is that God desires our lives to be fulfilling and so He gives to us richly. As we fix our hope on Him and receive what He supplies and use that wisely, then we will enjoy life.
Having Jesus' Beatitude mentioned in Acts 20 is more blessed, more enjoyable, more fulfilling to give than it is to receive. The gaining of things must never become a person's objective in life. We must never allow getting more to become the obsession that controls us. Rather we should reflect what Jesus said to us in Matthew 6, 33. Seek first the Kingdom of God, the things of God, and His righteousness and all of these things will be added to you.
The problem that all of us face is that we are tempted to get our eyes on the things that are added to us and off of the God that we worship. He is to be the priority in our lives, not the things that are added. The things that are given to us are a means to an end, not the end itself. The end is the glory of God, the things that we have, the means by which we bring glory to God. So it is too with ambition.
Ambition is not to be used selfishly, but the drive and ambition that God gives to us is to be employed and used for the glory of God. What God gives to us is a gift and a stewardship which we are to use for His glory. And yet we face the temptation of greed, don't we? We know these things, but there is not a one of us today who is immune to the temptation of covetousness. There are instructions in the New Testament that come to us regarding this in the context of two words.
The one word is poison. It will kill the human spirit. It will destroy a person. The other is antidote. These two cannot coexist. Whether there is the one, there cannot be the other by the very nature of what they are. The two words that would summarize what the New Testament teaches us about things are covetousness, the poison, and contentment, the antidote. Let's think about those two words and what the Bible says briefly about them.
I'd like you to turn with me to the book of Colossians and the third chapter. Limber up your Bible and let's turn to several passages to see what it has to say first regarding the poison of covetousness. Colossians 3 verse 5 says, Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead. Then he says, Put to death your members on earth. To what? To immorality, to impurity, to passion, evil desire, and greed. Notice that. Which amounts to idolatry.
A similar word is found in Ephesians 5.5. A man who is covetous is an idolater, says the word of God. So the first thing the Bible says about covetousness is this. That it is the moral equivalent to idolatry. Now why does the Bible teach this? Well in the first place because covetousness is just the opposite of the true God that we claim to worship. The true God is generous. He is gracious. He delights to give out of his loving heart.
In his providence he causes it to rain upon the just and the unjust. That is the nature of God. But covetousness, greed, the false God is selfish and grasping. When one is covetous he is worshiping the idol of greed. He is an idolater. The idol he worships is just the opposite of the true God. Likewise when he chooses to worship greed an individual is choosing to worship actually himself. Self with a capital S and my friend that is what our generation lives for. What is it that makes me happy?
That becomes my number one priority, my highest good. What pleases me? When one worships himself he is placing himself above the true God. And in doing that he is breaking the first and second commandments. You shall have no other gods before me and you shall not make a graven image or worship an idol says the Lord. Covetousness God says is idolatry. Now if you'll turn back to 1 Timothy chapter 6 we'll notice something else about covetousness.
Look at verse 10. Here it says the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many a pang. The second thing we see that the Bible teaches about covetousness is this, that it's the root, a root of all sorts of evil. You see it's an attitude out of which actions come.
If you stop to think about it, covetousness can be the root, the love of money can be the cause of the breaking of commandments number 5 through 9. We've talked about those in previous weeks. Honor your father and your mother. A few years ago a man died. He left his money to his family but a certain portion he set aside for the Lord's work and left it to a local church. That was his wish and desire. The children said we are not satisfied with what our father gave to us.
They wrote a letter to the church and said you give to us what our father has given to you and if you do not we will sue. The breaking of the fifth commandment to honor father and mother. Has covetousness ever caused someone to murder every day of the week? What about adultery? God says you shall not covet your neighbor's wife. What about lying? What about stealing? Covetousness you see is at the root of all sorts of evil just as the word of God says.
Our age is particularly characterized it seems by sexual sins. We should not be amazed at that because our generation is a generation of idolaters. Our generation worships self. Inevitably throughout history idolatry and sexual sin have gone together. John MacArthur has written idolatry and sex go together. This is because idolatry is the worship of self in any of its lustful fulfillments and in many cases it is just personalized into the name of a deity.
We should not be amazed that this is the age of sexual looseness and promiscuity. It is but the outgrowth of the worship of the idol of self. Covetousness is the root of all sorts of evil. Turn with me to 2 Peter and the second chapter. I am going to read three verses right at the beginning of the chapter.
But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, says Peter, who will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the master who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves. And many will follow their sensuality. Notice that word. And because of them the way of the truth will be maligned and in their greed, notice that word, notice the sensuality and greed go together. They will exploit you with false words.
The third thing that we see about covetousness is that it is particularly a characteristic of false teachers. The love of money is at the root of many false religions. Think of the flea-bitten Bogwan who was in our country a few months ago and then left. And the something under a hundred Rolls Royces alone that he owned. Now who do you think paid for those? Those gullible followers paid for them. Now the money is I think in the pocket of the United States government.
Our television sets, our radios every day deliver the same kind of stuff to us except in Christian terms. I want to tell you something. When you hear a ministry that is continually begging for money and then the reports come out that the leaders of that ministry are living in opulence and have their several hundred thousand dollar condominiums in Florida or in Hawaii and drive around in Rolls Royces, you better mark it down that something is wrong.
There is something basically inherently wrong in that ministry. The Bible says that there will be that kind of thing in the last days. A characteristic of false teaching and teachers will be that of the love of money. We also learn here that it is a characteristic of the last days themselves. That is repeated for us in 2 Timothy 3 verses 1 and 2 where it says, and in the last days men shall be, goes on to say, covetous.
Now people have always been covetous, but the point is that in the last days people will be especially greedy. There will be an overwhelming love of money. It is a characteristic of the days in which you and I live. One final thing I want to note, and we go back again to Colossians for this, the third chapter, what are we as believers to do with covetousness? Because you see we are tempted this way. We can live with greed expressing itself in our lives, any one of us.
It says in verse 5, therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead, or put to death your members to greed. How am I to handle the temptations for greed that I face? The Bible says that I am to put them to death, to kill them. I am not to court them. I am not to encourage them. I am to kill those temptations and have nothing to do with them. The same with immorality and passion and the other things that are mentioned here. The Bible has a lot to say to us about covetousness.
It is very pointed and directed to our day and to us personally. Let's go on to talk about the other word that is the antidote. Enough of the poison for the moment. Let's talk about the answer, the opposite, the contrast. It is contentment. Again let's go to 1 Timothy, the sixth chapter, and this time we will back up a few verses from verse 10. Then we will start in verse 6. He says, But godliness actually is a means of great gain when accompanied by contentment.
For we have brought nothing into the world so we cannot take anything out of it either. Howard Hughes died a few years ago. He was a multi-millionaire, hundreds of millions of dollars at least. Does anybody know how much he left? All of it. That is the answer. That is what verse 7 says. And if we have food and covering with these, we shall be content, says the Apostle Paul. Along with godliness, contentment is a means of great gain. Contentment is satisfaction with what God has provided.
In Hebrews 13, verses 5 and 6, these words, let your character be free from the love of money, being content with what you have. Once more, it reminds you of what the Apostle Paul said to the Philippians in the fourth chapter of that book. He said, In whatever circumstances I am, I have learned to be content. Now isn't it interesting that even the Apostle Paul had to learn that? Every one of us does. We are not by nature content people.
We are born into the world with an Adamic sinful nature, which is selfish. When we are born again and become children of God, our flesh is predisposed to selfishness. It desires to fulfill itself by continued greed and self-centeredness. And so as the children of God, we like the Apostle Paul, must learn to be content. But now the question, how is it that we can put to death covetousness and learn contentment?
Well there are those who say we do that by pretending we don't want the things that we desire. I think that that is a mental game, a psychological ploy that only works temporarily at best. It doesn't work simply to try to convince oneself that one doesn't need what one wants. Eventually the wants are going to come back up again. How do we deal with covetousness and learn contentment? I would suggest in the first place by learning to trust God.
If you stop to think about it, covetousness is at its root unbelief. It is my failing to believe that God really loves me and has provided the best for me at that moment. That's what it is. It's failure to believe that God is going to provide me with what I'll need tomorrow. And therefore I don't have to be greedy. Convicts at its root my friend is unbelief. It is the same bill of goods that Satan sold to Eve in the garden. God is withholding from you.
We begin to counteract covetousness and to learn contentment when we begin to learn that we can trust God. We can only learn to trust God when we come to know Him because you can't trust somebody you don't know. I don't mean knowing Him initially as Savior. I mean coming to know Him more deeply, more intimately as His child. It is only as we grow in our knowledge of Him that we can learn that we really are able to trust Him, provide wisely every day what we need.
We can only come to know Him as we spend time with Him in the Word. Is the Bible more precious to you today than it's ever been in your life? Do you know more of God personally? Are you better acquainted with God today than you were a year ago? It is as we come into this developing knowledge of God where we are friends with God that we begin to see that He is in fact Jehovah Jireh, the God who provides. We also need to develop a stronger desire for the important things.
In Colossians 3, 5 we read that we are to put to death covetousness. But if you back up a few verses you find him saying something in a preliminary fashion to that. He says, if you are risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sits, at the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. Could I ask you a question? Where is your affection?
Now you measure affection by the amount of time that something claims, the amount of work you give to it, the amount of attention. I mean you love your wife more than that person you work with because you spend more intimate time with that person, with your wife, than you do with the person you work with. There's a different kind of commitment there, a different affection for your wife that you appreciate and maybe affectionate for the person you work with.
Now measure the affection that you have for the things around you with the affection you have for the things above. It is you see only as we begin to develop a stronger desire for those things that these things will have less a hold on us. The only sure remedy for covetousness is to give Christ the preeminence in our hearts and then all the true value of the temporal things will be clear in comparison with him who is eternal.
Are you controlled by your things or are you using them for good and for God's glory? Do you covet what another person has or are you content with what God has provided for you? The story is told of a Quaker who advertised that he would give 40 acres of his farm to someone who could convince him that he was perfectly satisfied with what he had. One day there came a knock at the door. The Quaker said, are you perfectly satisfied with what you have? The man said, I am perfectly satisfied.
Then said the Quaker, why do you want my land? You see greed can cause a person to become a fool. Several years ago there was a cartoon that appeared in a newspaper. It showed two fields, lush with grass, a fence coming right down the middle. At the bottom there was the one word discontent. Because you see also in the cartoon were two mules, one in each field. And each mule had his head through the fence eating the grass on the other side.
If that doesn't describe the coverage of his heart, greed will cause a man to become a fool. One ancient bishop of the early church was known for his contentment. And someone asked him the secret and this is what he said, it consists in nothing more than making the right use of my eyes. In whatever state I am, I first of all look up to heaven and remember that my principal business here is to get there.
Then I look down upon the earth and call to mind how small a place I shall occupy in it when I am dead and buried. I then look around in the world and observe what multitudes there are who are in many respects more unhappy than myself. Thus I learn where true happiness is placed, where all cares must end, and what little reason I have to complain. Just last week Charles Swindoll in his broadcast has been teaching from the book of Ecclesiastes. Perhaps some of you have heard his fine messages.
I quote from him, our material possessions will not be ours forever. It makes no difference how tightly we hang on to them. We will either lose them during this life or leave them behind when we pass on. There are no other alternatives. The touch-me-not-I-ve-got-it-made materialist who lives in earthly opulence is not as well off as he or she might seem. Such people soon discover that money cannot buy happiness, contentment, or peace.
In fact, their insatiable drive for wealth usually fills their lives with futility, resentment, and pain, the end of which is a lonely death and a cold grave. He concludes by saying, we can experience inner peace and joy as we focus on the Lord and revel in his provisions, whether they be adequate or abundant. On the other hand, if we are money-hungry, we will never find happiness and rest. Money cannot buy contentment. Satisfaction is a gift of God. Are you satisfied today?
Are you satisfied with what God has provided in your life at this moment? Are you using your things or abusing them? Are they your employee for the glory of God, or are you their slave for the dishonor of God? God says, you shall not covet. He says that because he knows that greed will make us miserable, shriveled, unhappy people. He wants us to be generous, unselfish with our affections set on things of God. Let's pray.
Only when our affections are set on those things can we know peace, contentment, happiness. I'm wondering if right now in the holy of holies of your heart, right where you're seated, if you need to quietly lift your voice to God and talk with him about the attitude that controls your life. It may be the love of money, greed, covetousness. Our God says, put that to death and learn to be content. Will you take your stand today with that sin? Will you ask him to teach you contentment?
Lord we don't like to talk about this commandment because it is so pointed and strikes the heart of every one of us. But thank you, thank you so much for including it in the list. We need to be reminded of the danger of the love of money. To whatever extent, our Father, to whatever extent greed has captured us, to whatever degree our affection is today set on the things of this earth, forgive us and correct us.
May we go out from here determined to use whatever you provide in our lives for your glory and to be content with what we have. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you. Allelu, alleluia. Spirit of the living God, all fresh on me. Melt me, mold me, fill me, mule me, fill me with the love of God. Mule me, spirit of the living God, all fresh on me.
Now Lord we pray that we may be the kind of clean and yielded vessels in which the Holy Spirit can work and through whom the Holy Spirit can work for your glory. In this important area of our lives, do whatever cleaning and polishing is necessary that we might be truly the sons of God. In Jesus name, Amen. Amen.