(396)S15E19 Simplicity: Consumerism
Welcome back to The Fourth Wave Podcast. Today's episode, I'm going to be talking about consumerism. Now this is going to be a slightly different format because this is coming from something that I prepared for a Sunday School lesson. And it's actually a lesson that I wrote which was, which preceded all of the other episodes for the season on simplicity. I had been reading a lot on simplicity and economics and you know, simplistic lifestyle and all of that.
Derek:So I had been preparing a lot and I had the opportunity to do a Sunday School lesson before I even started my season on simplicity. So, what you're going to hear here is a pretty condensed version and it's something that I think might be useful because you'll get kind of a big picture and then in the other episodes that I do on money and consumerism and simplicity, you'll be able to kind of hear more extrapolation. I think it'll also be useful because to do a Sunday School lesson, it has a slightly different feel than a lot of the podcast episodes, So it might be something that you like better or worse, but whatever variety is the spice of life. So we'll mix it up here. One other thing to note is that this lesson, even though it's about consumerism, the Sunday School class was specifically looking at James K.
Derek:A. Smith's Desiring the Kingdom and it was the whole scope of the class was to look at our desires and how desire impacts what we do. And so, there's gonna be maybe a little bit more desire language in here than you get in throughout the simplicity season. Nevertheless, that is something that's really important for everything and simplicity especially. So, just note that you might get a little bit more of that in here than a specific focus on just consumerism.
Derek:Alright, so, without further ado, here is the lesson on consumerism. Okay, before we get into anything too deep, I want to prime your philosophical pumps a little bit. Alright, I'm going to ask you to answer perhaps the oldest question in philosophy. What came first, the chicken or the egg? Now, some people might have to think pretty hard through that but I think a lot of us intuitively know what came first, right?
Derek:I mean, the chicken had to come first and that's due to a really simple reason. Now you can imagine if there's some egg that popped out of existence just all of a sudden came into being, that egg would have a long way to go before it was able to survive. If you've ever tried to hatch any kinds of eggs, which I did for my science classes, we did some quail eggs, I learned a lot about that, this the fact that you need specific humidity, the fact that you need a specific temperature and you know, you need to protect these eggs from damage, from predators, all kinds of things. Eggs do not fare very well on their own. They require extremely precise conditions and they're very dependent.
Derek:A chicken on the other hand might not be the best defensive creature out there, right? It's, you might think that they're pretty stupid and they have a difficult time surviving, but they can hunt down their own food, they can try to escape from predators, they can, you know, they've got various mechanisms that are going to help them survive long enough to have an egg that they can then take care of and protect and provide the precise conditions for the egg to hatch in the future. So, a chicken on its own would have a much better chance of, continuing its existence as opposed to an egg. So, very clearly, I think that the chicken must have come first. Now, why do I ask a silly question like that?
Derek:Well, because there's a similar difficult philosophical conundrum centered around the idea of our will. Does our will precede desire or do desires precede the will? When I taught a Philosophy of Science class, I loved this topic, the idea of the will and I would post this statement to my students. I said, You only do what you want to do, always. You only do what you want to do.
Derek:And of course, teenage kids, they're like, That's ridiculous. There are lots of things I I don't want to do. And of course, there's that one verbal kid who who has to like, you know, prove themselves right and they they say, Well, I I know something that I don't want to do that I do. Said, Okay, what is that? Homework, right?
Derek:Always the answer. I don't want to do my homework but I do it. I'd say, Great, don't do your homework. If you don't want to do it, don't do it. Then they get this puzzled look on their face and they say, So, I don't have to do my homework tomorrow?
Derek:I said, No, of course not. So, you're gonna give me a 100, you're gonna give me a good grade for it? Like, Well, no, you didn't, if you don't turn it in, you don't get a good grade for it, get a zero. Like, But you said I don't have to do my homework. Well, of course you don't have to, right?
Derek:If you don't want to. And then they go down this list of well, I don't want bad grades, I need a scholarship, my parents will ground me, all kinds of things. I won't get into the college that I want to get into if I get bad grades. It's like, of course, that's true. So, what you're telling me is that you want to do your homework.
Derek:Maybe not because it has intrinsic value, but you want what the homework will give you and so you want to do that act for all the things that are wrapped up in it. And there are hardly any actions that we do that don't have these subsidiary reasons for them, right? Everything that you do almost is to get to another thing that will get you to another thing that will get you to another thing. There are very few things that we do because they have just intrinsic value. Now, especially as Americans and as Westerners, we don't really like to think too much about desires, right?
Derek:We don't want to think that we're controlled, we want to think that we do the controlling. And so we think that we can just conquer our desires, right? I can just do whatever just because I choose to. And we even have this famous phrase that's, You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. And if you've listened to our propaganda season, you know that that's just not true.
Derek:You can lead a horse to water, you can get the horse to go to water and you can get it to drink. Now, lot of people would say the reason you can't get a horse to water and make it drink is because like as humans, we're just not strong enough to force a horse to the water and even if we can pull a horse to the water with its bit and everything else, you know, inflicting pain with a whip, however you'd get them there, even if you get them to the water, you can't bend that horse's head down to the water. And even if you could do that, you can't get them to ingest the water, like to force them to swallow the water. You just can't do that. But notice there that when we're focused on the horse, we are focused on the volition, right?
Derek:We're focused on its will, its choosing to do something. But I can get a horse to go to water and I can get him to drink all on his own with, you know, just like a dollar's worth of materials. You just go and you get some salt from the feed store, you just dump a bunch of salt in its hay. That horse is going to get thirsty and soon it's going be begging for water, right? And it'll follow you to the water and it will drink of its own free accord.
Derek:And that's not because you altered the horse's like being, you didn't change it from being a horse, you didn't give it new desires, you tapped into desires that it already had and you manipulated those. Humans are the same. There was a famous Torches of Freedom campaign back when big tobacco was just getting started with their propaganda and what the tobacco company said was, you know, we've got a lot of the population who's not smoking. It sure would be great if we could get women to smoke because it just wasn't, like it was uncouth for women to smoke back in the day, and it was looked down on. And so, the tobacco companies, I forget, I think it was Bernays, but it might have been the other big propagandist, but whoever it was, it was this famous propagandist, he goes in and he's like, Hey look, we've got this women's suffrage movement.
Derek:Women are all about freedom and liberation. Here's what we do. We, we call these cigarettes torches of freedom and we say, Women, you need to be liberated. Don't let people tell you what to do. Like, prove that you are are your own person.
Derek:And so, cigarettes became torches of freedom. The cigarette was attached to larger ideas, to desires that, women had especially at that cultural moment and all of a sudden, women became smokers. And ironically, the women who thought that they were liberated by the cigarette, right, that it attached itself to this legitimate desire, they actually ended up being captivated and beholden to it. They had salt put in their hay. Now today, we're the same.
Derek:We are extremely free if by free we mean not violently forced to live how someone else tells us to. We're constantly thankful that we don't live in a place like North Korea where you have a gun put to your head to do something, right? You have this violent force. But let me tell you, there's a lot of salt in our hay and in some ways, this type of thing is even more dangerous because we do, we start to choose things on our own because our desires are changed. We're not just forced to exert our wills, we have our desires altered or manipulated.
Derek:But, here's the thing, telling the horse that there's salt in its hay doesn't really do it any good. The horse is still thirsty, right? So telling you guys that you have salt in your hay, that doesn't really help, right? I mean, I remember vividly when I was in Romania and I'd go into the store, lots and lots of people buying cigarettes there. And on the cigarettes, if you look at them, they've got like pictures of black lungs and just all these terrible physical images of people who have had negative consequences from smoking, like these negative health effects.
Derek:And that's meant to deter people from smoking, but if you look at smoking rates, there are parts of Europe that almost have double the smoking rates as those in The US, and The US doesn't have those nasty pictures mandated. You know, like, so seeing a picture doesn't just make people stop smoking. What ends up changing behavior is desire. Now, today's Sunday School lesson was slated as a case study on consumerism, but you know, as as I was preparing it, I felt like focusing on that alone would be just giving you a picture of a black lung. We're so used to all the salt in our hay and it wouldn't do me much good to tell you how salty your hay is.
Derek:Intellectually, you know that. But if you keep on eating it, you're going to keep getting thirsty. So today, what I want to do is I want to identify three ways in which our hay is salted and then give you a vision of living water. Now, warning before I start, withdraw hurts. Because we're entering the application phase and because our desires are so skewed, I know that I'm gonna step on some people's toes.
Derek:And because of this, I want to try to stomp on my own toes for you all to see and hopefully you'll be able to put down your defenses, to reflect on the lessons that, I myself am trying to learn from based on my own wayward desires and actions. So, why consumerism? Why is that something that we're going to talk about? Why is that so important? And I think probably if I were to sum it up succinctly, I'd say that the reason consumerism is so important to consider is because it turns us into sodomites.
Derek:Woah, woah there. You might be saying consumerism turns us into sodomites. How does that work? Well, what's really interesting about human nature is that we have very sneaky mechanism when we want to avoid guilt for something. A lot of times what we do is we will reinterpret something.
Derek:We will shine the spotlight on other sins that we don't worry about, that don't affect us, and we kind of shy away from the sins that that do shine a spotlight on us. And so I want you to listen to Ezekiel sixteen forty nine and which tells us the sin of Sodom. Ezekiel sixteen forty nine says, Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom. She and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. It's not what you thought a Sodomite was, is it?
Derek:Why is that? Why is it that we think that the people of Sodom were judged for one thing that isn't really even explicitly taught While this other thing that is very clearly laid out is not what we think of Sodom for. Interesting, isn't it? So the sin of Sodom, or at least some of the sins of Sodom were that she had pride, excess of food, prosperous ease, and did not aid the poor and needy. Consumerism turns us into sodomites.
Derek:So how do we have this salt in our hay? How does consumerism salt our hay? Well, are three main ways in which the peddlers of consumerism are going to put salt in your hay and prey on your desires. First, they activate our fear, then they activate our pride, and finally, they activate our desire for control. The first way that consumers insult our hate is by producing fear.
Derek:They declare scarcity where the Christian knows there's abundance. Now, every day when I wake up and I check my email, I see this just so blatant in in Costco ads which, know, come returning to The States, I finally have the the privilege of having a Costco membership and I get emails every day that says, Hurry, while supplies last, final day, you know, only three days remaining and I have to hurry. There's scarcity, right? Even though I live in a world of abundance, I am taught day after day, moment after moment, ad after ad, minute by minute that there is scarcity. And that's not at all how the Bible portrays what the Christian life is.
Derek:Matthew six talks about how we shouldn't worry about our lives, what we're going to eat, what we're going to drink because God takes care of us. And just a story from my own life that highlights this for me. When when our family was first considering going to Romania, it seemed like the absolute dumbest thing to do, like terrible timing. I had I had like $80,000 in private loans for college, my wife had tens of thousands for private loans for her master's degree, we had two car loans and we had just bought a house a couple years before, so you know, over $100,000 there. So we had like 200, between 2 and $300,000 of debt at that point in our lives.
Derek:And on a missionary salary, like you just, you're not able to kind of have that hanging over your head. And so, we were like, Okay God, if you want us to go there to move to Romania, then sure, we'll do it. And so, we started to pray about it. Now, we were influenced by one of Catalina's professors out at Biola who, J. P.
Derek:Moreland, taught there in the apologetics department. And so as we were praying for God to provide for us to be able to get to Romania, I remembered a conversation that I had with Doctor. Morland. When I told him, told him, I said, Look, I hate the idea of Christian prayer, like Christians saying that God answered our prayers. I was like, it's almost always just the most ridiculous thing ever.
Derek:It's it's such a it's such confirmation bias. Like, a Christian prays a thousand prayers, nothing, nothing, silence from God. And then one thing happens that's really oftentimes not that big of a deal, right? Like, oh God, I pray that, you know, grandma will get healed from cancer. Oh wow, she got healed from cancer.
Derek:Yeah, it's probably the chemotherapy, right? It's not like a miraculous sort of thing, it's just, you know, one out of a thousand is just gonna happen by natural chance. And so, it's just confirmation bias. You don't see that Christians don't acknowledge the silence of God in the majority of their prayers. But anytime something happens that could have easily happened by sheer coincidence, they attribute that as answered prayer by God.
Derek:And I hate that. And I said, so, if I'm gonna pray, I I want if I'm gonna attribute something to God as an answered prayer, How do I do that? Like most assuredly, right? Obviously you can't be a 100% sure of anything, but like how can I attribute this to God? And so he said, well, the two best ways are first of all, you pray with specificity and second of all, you pray with improbability.
Derek:So the more specific you are, you know, God, I pray that this will happen at 1PM on March 13, right? Because the chances of something happening at a precise moment, like with specificity, are kind of crazy. And then if you pray with improbability, like something that's just hard to comprehend how it could work out, like it's complex, then that's going to indicate that if it gets answered, if something specific and big, improbable gets answered, that probably that God had His hand in it. So even if I prayed a thousand prayers and they were all like extremely specific and extremely improbable, even if only one of those thousand happened, I could be like, You know what, I'm still very confident that that was God. God, I wasn't in line with His will on nine ninety nine of them, but on this one, yep, God really answered.
Derek:So as we're preparing to go to Romania, we started to pray and we said, God, get our debt down so that we can go to Romania. And as we're praying and thinking about Doctor. Morland's conversation, we're like, You know what? Let's pray bigger. Let's pray that God would take care of all of our debt.
Derek:And we're like, No, no, that's not even, that's not big enough. Like, let's pray that God would get us $10,000 over our debt. Okay, that seemed impossible. Two school teacher salaries, 200 some thousand dollars in debt and we're not very skilled at like, you know, we can't do Etsy stuff, like we don't have secondary job sorts of things that we can really do, that's gonna be quite the feat. And so we started praying that and as we're praying we realized that a big part of getting our debt paid is going to be being able to sell our house for more than we bought it for.
Derek:And so we're considering everything, we're like, Man, we're gonna lose like 10 or $15,000 on the roof because I know we're gonna have to replace that to sell it. And so, we start praying, God, please take care of our roof, like, get us a new roof. But as you're praying that, you you live in a neighborhood and you look around and you're basically praying for a hailstorm to come and like damage your house. What you're really praying for is that like the hailstorm is going to come and damage everybody else's house and cars and everything. And, that just didn't seem quite right.
Derek:So we started to pray specifically. We said, God, send a storm or something like to get us a new roof, but like only damage our house. And so we continued to pray for that. Well not too long later, as we're preparing to go to church one day or, to go to school one day, we hear this like train outside of our house and we look out and the wind is blowing like sideways. And so, that lasts like twenty or thirty seconds and we come out, we expectantly look up on our roof and there are no missing shingles like it doesn't look like anything happened.
Derek:Oh well. Go to school, come back and there's a flyer for roofing companies on all of the houses in our neighborhood. I'm like, you know what, we'll give it a try, like why not? Call the company, they get an insurance adjuster to come out, that guy takes a look and he's like, Yeah, you get a new roof, I mean, your shingles are all turned up at the corners. Great!
Derek:So, it's like, you've been all around in the neighborhood, who else is getting a roof? I was like, you're the only one. He's like, nobody else was touched. He said, it looks like there was a storm that came down right on top of your house. He said, we call it a microburst And it just landed on top of your house and went up.
Derek:And that was pretty darn amazing. And it ended up that after after we sold our house and and everything that we had, it was like $10,012 over the amount of debt that we had. And it was pretty amazing, those two things together. So can I attribute that 100% to God? No, not 100%, but I'm really confident that God had His hand in us raising that money, covering that debt, and getting us to Romania, indicating that that was His will for us at that point, and building our faith and just providing for us like Matthew says that He will, because God, right, has the world in His hands.
Derek:He can provide all things and there is not scarcity for the Christian. Right? We know that God can provide all things and He will provide all things where He wills it. And so that was also very convicting for me, you know. You look at the disciples you look at the disciples on a boat when Jesus is sleeping and they're in a storm and you're like, they're all scared and freaking out and you're like, Dude, you got God sitting right next to you and you're freaked out about a storm?
Derek:Like, that's kind of ridiculous. And two thousand years later, I have the story of the disciples and what God did for them along with the cloud of witnesses two thousand years and following, and I've got God Jesus through His Spirit living in me and I don't even believe He can control a storm, right? I have my doubts about it. And so God really convicted me and showed me that, no, He is in control and He provides. So, consumerism is going to activate our fear declaring scarcity where the Christian knows that there's abundance.
Derek:The second way that consumerism is going to salt our hay is by producing and activating pride. And it does this by doing the opposite of what we just talked about. It activates pride by declaring abundance where the Christian knows there is scarcity. I remember watching this documentary on North Korea a while back, you know, this clear propaganda. It shows this grocery store stocked with all kinds of food and everything and you know that it's fake because you know how the people there live and you know that they have like all these minders who are leading them to like the propaganda sets that the leadership has set up and you know it's just fake, like it's illusion.
Derek:Well, in Georgia where I am right now, 17% of children live in poverty which is defined as less than $26,500 for a family of four. I mean, can't even comprehend that. Close to one in five, and you know, that doesn't even count those living with $26,500 $5.00 $1 or more, right? This is just a small amount of money for 20%, nearly 20% of kids in Georgia. People in The United States, they can't choose their houses, not really, especially with prices where they are now.
Derek:And if you can't choose your house, you can't choose your school. If you can't choose your school, you can't really choose the quality of your education. And if you can't choose the quality of your education, the chances of you earning enough money, more money in the future are going to be less. Meanwhile, we've got sitcoms like the show This Is Us, which my wife and I are constantly when we watched it, we're like, How do these, how do these people live? Like, they've got, they're never working, they're always like flying across the country, they're always like going on excursions, they like have in vitro fertilization, I mean, their lifestyle is insane.
Derek:The houses that they live in, right, this is not us, not us at all. And modern sitcoms most of the time show you lifestyles that do not mimic the average American. And so, you know, you think to yourself, North Korea's got a bunch of propaganda and this abundance is illusion for us. These things that were being fed on TV, on advertisements when I walked down the aisle in a Walmart or you know, in the mall, like this is not us. Like most people can't really afford most of these things, like this lifestyle that's being, flaunted in front of our eyes.
Derek:It reminds me of, the comedian Dan Carlin, he says, You know why they call it the American dream, right? Because you have to be asleep to believe it. All of the products that we see on the shelves and the lives that we live, like me and my group, my church, my community, the people that I tend to know and hang out with, right, it's very different than a large portion of the population. We are propagandized with the appearance of abundance which really is only an abundance for the few. Our experience of availability, it makes it really easy to believe that because we consume, we're better, right?
Derek:I can consume, I have access to this stuff because I earned it. I worked harder, probably, right? That must be true. And sometimes, sometimes, there's truth in that, but a lot of times, not really. Simultaneously, we believe the correlative which is that ones who can't consume, they earn their lot in life.
Derek:We believe consumerism's lie that value is determined by our ability to consume and that we're better than others because we've earned access to consumption. We make that easier to believe by consuming real estate with people who are just like us, right? In The United States this is terrible that, that with zoning laws and everything like, we just, we basically group up based on socioeconomic status. Daniel Berrigan has a great quote that you've probably seen a lot and that I know I've used a number of times, which is that, The poor tell us who we are, the prophets tell us who we could be. So we hide the poor and kill the prophets.
Derek:That's so true. We hide the poor. We surround ourselves with things, with products, with people just like us. It's an economic echo chamber that allows us to hide the reality of poverty, oppression and injustice so that we don't have to learn who we truly are. It was the poor who showed me who I truly was.
Derek:When we went over to Romania, we had a goal of working with the Roma community, the Gypsy community. We didn't want to be naive do gooders when we went over there, so we wanted to do things right. We had read when helping hurts and we didn't want to enable people by giving to them, just just giving freely. But it was a really inconvenient set up over there to do things right and because the poor lived next to everyone else. They came knocking on our door and when we were at the store, there were always Roma there begging for food.
Derek:Of course, we didn't give them anything, we did good, right? Good ministry, don't give the Roma, don't give the poor people anything, right? We don't want to enable. And one day as we were coming out of the store, one of our kids said to us, he said, Hurry daddy, get to the car before the Roma come. Yeah, sure.
Derek:I didn't want to enable the Roma, right? I didn't want to enable the poor. But isn't that what grace does? It enables? It enables us to love God because He first loved us when we didn't deserve it and we weren't seeking it.
Derek:Now, that's not true that I didn't want to enable those people, right? I mean, that wasn't my primary goal. I knew that I wasn't gonna enable them by giving them stuff. No, the truth was I didn't want those people to have my stuff. They didn't deserve it.
Derek:But man, when I saw what I was doing to my children, man, that broke me. I've come to realize that the God of Molech and the God of Mammon really are kind of the same gods, right? If you think about it, we have a big problem with Molech here, the conservative Christians do. They talk about him all the time, the terrible god of the Canaanites, Molech, who required sacrifices of the bodies of their children and we've got that same God right now. We've got Molech in abortion clinics and whatnot.
Derek:We sacrifice our children for ease and comfort and wealth, right? And that's the line that they use. But, you know, you think about Mammon, Mammon kind of does the same thing, doesn't he? He asks for a sacrifice for your welfare, for your benefit, for your wealth. And really, of the two, Moloch and Mammon, I think Mammon might be worse because where Molech requires the bodies of your children, Mammon requires their souls.
Derek:I mean, you see that I was sacrificing the souls of my children for material things, right? For my comfort, for consumerism. And that's a huge, huge problem with consumerism. But just like with the definition of sodomite, conservative Christians often don't want to see this, right? If you talk about pride or if you talk about hoarding wealth, if you talk about riches, those things are pushed to the side as well, you know, we need to vote for somebody who's not gonna kill children, right?
Derek:And sure, right? I have a whole season on abortion and talk about how that's an issue, But man, like if you can't see how problematic Mammon is and how he is right up there with the God of Molech, then you're just not reading the Bible. It's a big deal and my kids helped me to see that, how much I was failing by sacrificing their souls on the altar of mammon. It's this consumerism that teaches that there's abundance, that I'm better because I have more, that somebody's worse because they have less, they didn't work as hard. It just fosters pride and it blinds to injustice and ultimately what it does is it destroys grace.
Derek:The third way that consumerism is going to salt our hay is through control. Now, consumerism tells us that there is ownership where the Christian knows that there's stewardship. This might be best seen in Psalm 24, The earth is the Lord's and everything in it, right? And we know that God, Jesus made all things and in Him are all things. He sustains all things, all that kind of stuff, right?
Derek:We know that God created all things. This one's not really hard for us to grapple with too much, at least we think, because we all agree on this stuff. But I would say that the issue here is that a lot of times what happens is that we tend to think of wealth as a transfer of ownership. Like in our culture, it's a transfer of ownership. We don't see things like a commonwealth.
Derek:We don't see that we hold all things together collectively. I think that would be socialism, right? So even though that's like the more historical view globally as well as like Christianly speaking, so we say, yeah, of course God created all things. Of course God owned all things but like, He transferred ownership to me, like because so we don't have this concept of stewardship where, you know, something is still God's and I'm just I'm trying to use that for Him. Like that doesn't compute in our minds.
Derek:We think it does and we say, well of course God owns all things. Of course, you know, God is entitled to all things, but yet we don't really act like it because of the type of economic system that we have and the culture that we live in. So, and what I'm gonna do for this one because that's a little bit harder to show and deal with, the way that I want you to take a look at that is I'm gonna attach some quotes into the show notes from the early church. There's a great book called All Riches Come From Injustice where the author takes a look at a lot of different church quotes, early church fathers and how they thought of wealth and usury and all kinds of things. And so, that's going to help you to see their line of thinking and compare that to our thinking.
Derek:And a lot of it's just really foreign and it seems really scary, like if another leader from another country would say some of the things a lot of the early church fathers said, The US would have fomented a coup there long ago. And it's just, it's kind of foreign to us. So I want you to kind of do that as homework to touch on this point a little bit more, this idea of differentiating stewardship from ownership. Alright, so fear, pride, and control. Those are three extremely powerful motivators that salts our hay, that the peddlers of consumerism are putting into our hay constantly.
Derek:So what is the answer to this then? Like, great, I showed you a picture of the black lung, nasty, yucky, so now what? I'm gonna argue that the answer to consumerism is going to be the Sabbath. That sounds like a really dumb simplistic answer, especially to those who maybe aren't familiar with the idea of Sabbath like really, especially if you don't come from as high of a church order or a culture that has maybe more various practices that you kind of do together collectively. But I'm going to argue that the Sabbath is really something that God instituted that is going to help us to fight consumerism along with a number of other things.
Derek:So, let's take a look at each of the points in light of the Sabbath. So the first thing that the Sabbath is going to do is it's going to fight our fear by showing us the faithful provision of God. And we're going to see that, you know, Hebrews ten twenty four says, Don't forsake the assembling of yourselves together, but come together and spur one another onto love and good deeds. And why is that? Because when we come together, we get provided for by others, the hands and feet of God, and we can be the hands and feet of God to others in need, and we can get stories from people of God's faithfulness, just like you got a story of God's faithfulness to me as we support Raised for Romania, that can encourage you, this cloud of witnesses in the physical hands and feet.
Derek:I think there's a beautiful picture of this you get in the Old and New Testament. In the Old Testament, in Deuteronomy fifteen:four, it says, There need be no poor people among you, in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, He will richly bless you. Well great, and that's awesome for ancient Hebrews who are going into the land of Canaan, that's not us, right? Okay, listen to Acts four thirty three and thirty four, And God's grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or house sold them brought the money from the sales.
Derek:Now, think about that. In Deuteronomy it says, In God's land, the land He's giving you, there should be no poor among you, right? Because He's gonna bless you. Acts four says, God's grace was at work, so there were no needy persons among them. Why not?
Derek:Because they held all things in common, like they provided for each other. In God's Kingdom, there should be no needy persons because we should hold all things in common so that if there is a need, that takes precedence over my rights quote, and my desires, right? It shouldn't even be a question for me as a Christian to provide for somebody. There are all kinds of early church stories of, you know, running to plague victims as Christians or, you know, fasting so that they could provide food for travelers and those in need. There's just so much that's beautiful about what the church should be.
Derek:This isn't just a weekly Sabbath of, Oh hey, I'm taking two hours out of my day to come together. This is a weekly Sabbath but it's also a seven year Sabbath that frees the slaves and it's a fifty year Sabbath that releases all from debt. Like it's it's Jubilee Sabbath. Like that's what Sabbath is. It's not just this once a week thing, it's like the big Sabbath picture of God is that you have a kingdom that has no one in need because we share all things in common, we provide for each other, we love each other, we are hands and feet And that involves knowing each other's needs, that involves proclaiming one's own needs, and that involves actually doing stuff with your hands and feet.
Derek:Second, beyond providing us with a community that is provisional for us and helps us to see the goodness of God, the Sabbath is also going to fight the second aspect of consumerism here, which is this pride that it creates within us. And the Sabbath is going to fight pride by creating humility through the extension of our communities. Now, this is one of the hardest things in The States for us because we have such a self selected homogenous community, especially in regards to socioeconomic status. Rich people are with rich people, poor people with poor people, and a lot of times that's not even just in one particular neighborhood, but that's in a whole area because of the way zoning is and know, white flights and just the way that you select your communities. Rich people live with rich people and poor people with poor people.
Derek:And so, that sense, a lot of times it's kind of easy for us to provide in the community that we're in, especially if you're in a wealthier community because our community is largely self sufficient, right? The wealthier communities, it's like most somebody is going to need in our community is meals. You know, if somebody's getting surgery, okay, well, let's have a meal train for them, which is great and very useful and helpful, we've been helped by that a number of times, But that's not really a sacrifice on my part to make a meal for somebody else. A little bit financially, but I mean, that's not I wouldn't even call that a sacrifice, it's more of like an inconvenience. So, rarely are we ever asked in our communities, in the wealthier middle class or up communities, rarely are we asked to truly sacrifice for somebody else.
Derek:So, we are extremely homogenous when it comes to the Kingdom of God as seen through churches. Our churches are very, maybe not monochromatic, mean, they are, right? A lot of times monochromatic, but also homogenous in terms of socioeconomic status as well. But when we think of the Kingdom of God, what should we think about? Who should we think about?
Derek:Now I can think of four groups that are explicitly related to the Kingdom of God in the New Testament. Luke tells us that the poor are blessed for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. And I know that Matthew says that the poor in spirit, but let's give Luke his say here too, right? He says that the poor are blessed for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Revelation or Matthew is going to depict the Kingdom of Heaven as belonging to children or to those like the children, you know, let the children come unto Me, you know, for such is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Derek:And Chrysostom, he kind of elaborates on what is meant by children here, but children or those like children are associated with the Kingdom of God. Revelation depicts the final Kingdom of God as those from every tribe, tongue and nation. And Luke tells us that those who are persecuted for righteousness, which that word for righteousness there is essentially tied up with justice as well. So righteousness and justice can be read interchangeably as far as I understand. So I think we should use the term justice just because righteousness has other connotations for us and we read it as righteousness, so reading it as justice is going to help us to round it out.
Derek:So Luke tells us that those who are persecuted for justice are, you know, are part of the Kingdom of God, inherit the Kingdom of God. So the children, the poor, the foreigner, and those seeking and fighting for justice are closely tied to the Kingdom of God. Now my particular culture, and the particular culture of a lot of those listening most likely, if you're in middle class or up in The States, you know, lot of times we do pretty well with at least one of those groups, with the children part, right? We say we value them, we have multiple children, we push back against things like abortion, so we think that we value children pretty well. And we probably think that we do okay with the foreigner too even though our churches don't look very diverse.
Derek:We would say, well, we support missionaries in other countries. So I, you know, I've got problems if our churches aren't diverse and, you know, but that's a whole another topic that we could talk about anyway. But regardless of if your church does well with those two areas, we certainly struggle to keep the poor in front of us and I would argue that we struggle with issues of justice as well as evangelicals because that word justice has become a really big taboo in our circles, right? It's all about what you believe and what your politics are, but it's very little about true justice for the orphan, for the widow, you know, for the poor. That whole feeding the hungry thing, visiting the prisoner, and you know, giving drink to the thirsty, all that stuff, we don't do really well with and which means that we don't serve Jesus, right?
Derek:Because that's who He said when we serve those people, we are serving Him. Now here's the thing, like I know that the Gospel is for all people and I'm not trying to say that it's just for the poor or groups like that. I know that the Gospel is for the middle class and the rich and the white as well. But at least in my circles, I think we need to tread very carefully because I hear this used often as an excuse for, well you know, I'm moving into this really nice community because rich people need Jesus too, you know, how are they gonna hear if I don't go into that community? And my question would be, like, how are we demonstrating the Gospel by simply living amongst wealthy people?
Derek:Is our worshiping the same God that they do, Mammon? Is that going to declare the Gospel to them? Yeah, maybe living like them and amongst them isn't what they need. See, Incarnation is a two step process. It's not just living among, but it's also living above.
Derek:Jesus incarnated not merely through proximity, but through example, through maintaining a set apart life, a unique life which was a compelling one or a revolting one and there weren't people who were really in between with Jesus. You were revolted by Him and wanted Him crucified or you were drawn to Him because He was compelling. We declare Jesus to those around us not by living like them or with them, sweating and slaving for mammon. We declare Jesus by bleeding for Him, offering ourselves as living sacrifices. And I mean truly sacrificing ourselves and shunning amongst other things, our value system of consumerism.
Derek:Tertullian declared that it was the blood of the martyrs that was the seed of the Church. It was the sacrifice of self, not the sacrifice of other that transformed the pagan society. I need you to hear this now. The commodity for which the gods trade is always the same. It's always human life.
Derek:But the currencies are different. Mammon asks us to sweat in his service and to sacrifice others like the souls of our children or the bodies of the poor that we like to hide, sacrifice them through direct or indirect action. But Jesus doesn't ask us to sweat for Him and let others bleed, He asks us to bleed. Jesus' blood is the currency which bought us and now we are to pour our blood out to build the kingdom because the blood of the martyrs are the seed of the church. And sweating is a whole lot easier, isn't it?
Derek:Work hard for it. Rise to the top. Sweat but don't bleed. But we are not greater than our Master and we ought to be willing to bleed for Him as He bled for us as our Savior builds His upside down kingdom because it is the blood of our Savior that was the seed of the church and it's our blood, not our sweat that's going to continue to be the seeds of the Kingdom. Lest the seed fall to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.
Derek:So the Sabbath is coming together as one people. It's not just a quaint and pleasant event, it's meant to be a formative one. It shapes our beliefs and our desires or at least it ought to and that in turn is going to shape our actions. The Sabbath is supposed to bring a group of people, fishermen, tax collectors, prostitutes, rich, poor, and foreigner all together because they have something more in common than they do different and that's their need of grace. In the humbling light of grace, it's difficult to think of oneself too highly and another too lowly.
Derek:Finally, the Sabbath is going to fight our desire for control and it's going to do this by upholding the one who laid down control. Philippians two is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible which talks about kenosis, this idea of Jesus not counting at equality with God as something to be grasped. It's the laying down of His life, enduring hardship for us and for His obedience. And at church, our church takes Communion weekly and this Communion is the, this bread and wine, it's the culmination of the service and it depicts the ultimate submission and forfeiture of control that is depicted in Philippians two, which is the suffering and death of our Savior. It depicts God's provision of salvation for us and it depicts a community of diverse believers all coming together to partake of that and all through this depiction of relinquishing control to the One who holds all things in His hands.
Derek:And when you compare consumerism to the Sabbath, they're diametrically opposed. Consumerism produces greed and everything that that entails while the Sabbath produces generosity. And it produces generosity because that's what God is like. Now we all know that God is a generous God and you could probably point to a lot of different passages like, you know, He causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust and whatnot. But my favorite depiction of God's generosity is a passage that you probably don't really think to when you think of generosity.
Derek:It's Isaiah 55. Let me read this. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. Beautiful, right?
Derek:What does that have to do with God's generosity? Well, I want you to hear this, right? God's mysteriousness. We know that God's mysterious, right? But we always evoke this in relation to the Trinity or the Incarnation, right?
Derek:All of these mystical events. What's really interesting though is we kind of have explanations for all of that stuff. The incarnation, oh, have the hypostatic union. What about sin? How does sin get passed on?
Derek:You know, is it genetic? Like, how does that work? And we have things like Creationism and Traducianism. So, not saying that those things are correct, right? But we can kind of work that out in our minds.
Derek:How were these things possible? Well, maybe it's like this. But listen to how God's mystery is invoked in verses eight and nine of Isaiah 55. I'm going to read what precedes that. Behold, you shall call a nation that you do not know and a nation that did not know you shall run to you because of the Lord your God and of the Holy One of Israel for He has glorified you.
Derek:Seek the Lord while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts. Let him return to the Lord that he may have compassion on him and to our God for He will abundantly pardon. So why how is God mysterious?
Derek:Because He makes a nation out of nothing even though they don't deserve it. Because the wicked, if they forsake their ways, God will let him return and God will have compassion on him and he will abundantly pardon him. For God's ways are not our ways. Man, how is God generous? I don't know.
Derek:I have no explanation for that. No hypostatic union, no traducianism, I just don't know. He is mysterious and amazing. Our God is a generous God. This is about not about how God works, the mystery of God is is in who He is and we just can't understand that as as the creatures that we are.
Derek:Consumerism flies in the face of who God is, this generous God. And it flies in the face of who we as His children ought to be. It's the peacemakers who are called the children of God and it's those who are persecuted for seeking this peace through justice who hold the kingdom. But we can only enact those things if we allow ourselves to be shaped by our generous God of the Sabbath who asks us not to work but to rest in Him, to become more like Him. Sabbath is a time when we get to eat the bread of life and drink living water so that we will never hunger and never thirst again because our God provides.
Derek:If we don't see the Sabbath as a formative event or if we make it something that it isn't, it's not going to shape our desires. But if we allow our lives to be seasoned with the gospel of the Sabbath, then we will become new creations who desire the Kingdom. That's all for now. So peace and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network.
Derek:Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to nonviolence and Kingdom Living.
