Now or Later?

I've been reading and re-reading a book called Primal by Mark Batterson. He has done a great job in this book of helping the reader get back to the basics of Christian living. We need to strip back all the layers that we've added to our faith, things that we think are important, that really have nothing to do with what God originally intended.

We're in week 1 of our Impact series here at Southbrook Church. We're talking about money. Yes - we are a church - and we talk about money. Jesus talked about money more than any other topic. He knows that we are easily sucked into materialism. He knows that our hearts easily stray. And we want to be obedient in teaching and learning about the place money has in each of our lives.

I've been recently thinking about this a lot in my own personal life. It's easy to think that I deserve more. I work hard. I deserve to be paid well! Don't you? I think we'd all say that about ourselves. In Mark Batterson's book he talked about setting a spending ceiling. Decide right now how much you need to live on. Then choose to live on that from now on. Anything above and beyond you simply give away.

Now I can't back this with Scripture, this is just the way I have been thinking about things lately. The Bible says that where your heart is, there will your treasure be also. So the bottom line is this, you can store up wealth here on earth, and enjoy it for a few years. Or you can store up treasure in Heaven, and enjoy it for all of eternity. If you do the math, it's not hard to figure out that eternity is a lot longer than our short time spent here on earth!

It would be nice to have a bigger, nicer house. It would be great to have a bigger, fancier truck (with 4 wheel drive, of course!) But these aren't needs. There are so many things that we have come to accept as needs in our lives, that are in reality just nice comforts.

What's my point? I guess what I'm trying to say is this: I'd rather live on less now, and put as much energy and resources into growing God's kingdom in this life as possible, and spend all of eternity enjoying the fruit of that labor. What about you? Are you going to spend the rest of your life accumulating stuff? Or would you rather spend eternity enjoying the reward for what you do here?