Unlearning What We Think About Money

Learn the Best Way to Enjoy the World, Chapter 8, Part 1

For this week’s post, we’re returning to the book in progress, “The Art of Unlearning.” I’d love to get your feedback on this as we spend a few weeks talking about what we need to unlearn when it comes to money and possessions. Please let me know what you’re thinking in the comments! We’re also planning to fire back up the Zoom discussion calls for paid subscribers. This will be a discussion format allowing us to communicate together. If you’d like to take part, please email alli@garythomas.com with some suggestions for the best time of day and day of the week for you to be available for this.

“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”

                                                                                    Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Unlearning What We Think About Money:

Learn the Best Way to Enjoy the World

There’s no getting around the fact that Jesus challenged opulent living.

And there’s no getting around the fact that throughout Scripture God promises to bless his people, including with “earthly” pleasures.

The commands of Jesus can either supersede (replace) or fulfill the teaching of the Old Testament. If we accept that the entire Bible is an authoritative word for God’s people, properly understood and interpreted, we’re likely to conclude that some people need to “unlearn” materialism and greed, while others may need to unlearn a poverty mindset that refuses to receive the earthly blessings God wants to give them.

For you to wrestle with the thoughts of this chapter, you will have to decide, is it possible to fall off on either end—materialism and asceticism?  Or is the temptation primarily one way? Paul skirts the nuance of this challenge when he writes to the Corinthians and refers to “those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:31). There’s a place to use the things of the world. There is no place for an obedient Christian to be engrossed in them. 

In the first century, the common thought among the Jewish people was that financial prosperity was a direct sign of divine approval and affirmation, even as poverty was a sign of divine disfavor—a notion Jesus tore apart quite vigorously.[i] It seems clear that Jesus had a mission to help the first century “unlearn” a faulty message many assumed from reading what we now call the Old Testament—if you follow God, you’ll become prosperous. If you reject God, you’ll pay a financial as well as spiritual price. That’s why the disciples were utterly astonished when Jesus said it was actually difficult for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. They thought it was exactly the opposite—earthly riches were a clear sign of God’s favor.

Taking Scripture as a whole, however, shows that there’s a reason the first-century disciples held those assumptions, as we’ll see in just a moment.

The challenge for today is twofold: rejecting the error the disciples made (assuming God’s favor means affluence), but also perhaps rejecting the error some have made assuming Jesus wasn’t just pushing back against an exaggerated belief but in fact was calling all of us to live lives of poverty.