The Passions of the Soul | Avarice/Greed : Fear, Control, Possession: Forgetting That Everything Belongs to God

Friends, our teaching scripture this morning comes from Luke's

Gospel, the 12th chapter, verses 13 to 21.

It says someone in the crowd said to him, teacher, tell my

brother to divide the family inheritance with me.

But he said to him, Friend, who set me to be a judge or

arbitrator over you? And he said to them, take care,

be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one's life

does not consist in the abundance of possessions.

Then he told them a parable, the land of a rich man produced

abundantly. And he thought to himself, what

should I do, for I have no place to store my crops.

Then he said, I will do this. I will pull down my barns and

build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my

goods, and I will say to my soul, soul, You have ample goods

laid up for many years. Relax, eat and drink, be merry.

But God said to him, You fool, this very night your life is

being demanded of you, and the things you have prepared, whose

will they be? So it is with those who store up

treasures for themselves, but are not rich toward God.

This is the word of the Lord. Are you guys doing this morning?

It's good to be with you. How about that extra hour?

Did you guys soak that up so good?

Woke up this morning, asked my wife what time it was and I

thought to myself, wait, is that the real time or is that the

fake time? Like you know that moment?

It's good to be with you this morning.

If you are new or newish, my name is Jared.

I'm one of the pastors here and we've been in this series over

the past number of weeks on the passions, which I will tell you

more about in just a minute. A few years ago, I was talking

to a volunteer who was serving on the West side of our city at

a drop in center. Some of you know and are already

involved in the work of Sanctuary Night.

Sanctuary Night was founded by Hannah Esterbrook and Heather

Mormon, both of which are part of this community.

I know that many of you have given to Sanctuary Night, you

have volunteered with Sanctuary Night.

And we consider Sanctuary Night to be some of the work that we

partner with in the city and we hope to continue to partner

with. And it's a drop in center that

offers a place of sanctuary to women who are on the West side

who are caught up in a cycle of poverty or human trafficking.

Did I get that right? Does that does that sound good?

You can talk to these two right here if you are interested in

hearing a little bit more. But I heard this story from

someone that had been serving on a Monday night and she overheard

a conversation between two women as the drop in center was

closing for the evening. So that's like setting the scene

a little bit there for you. These two women from the

streets, they walked in the front doors and one of these

women was extremely hungry and one of them did not have

adequate clothing. So the the food from the meal

that was served at Sanctuary Night.

So one of the things that Sanctuary Night has done is

serve meals as they are available, but the food from

that evening's meal was completely gone.

And so the first woman became distraught even more so because

she walked in thinking that she was going to get a meal and it

was gone. She's super hungry.

Meanwhile, the second woman was helped by some of the volunteers

to grab a pair of boots. You know, the winter was on its

way. And so as it came time to lock

up the doors, the first woman is still trying to figure out where

she's going to get her next meal.

And the second woman says to her, why didn't you tell me that

you were hungry? When have you ever asked me for

food? And I have not been able to find

you food. Everything I have at home is

yours. Let's go get something to eat.

Everything I have is yours. But when was the last time that

anyone ever said that to you? Or when was the last time you

ever said that to someone else? We're going to come back to

that. So within a few weeks of hearing

that particular story, I was at the grocery store where you

could find people on the front side of a snowstorm stocking up

with household goods, filling up grocery carts with toilet paper.

You may remember a few weeks or not a few weeks, though.

It feels like that. Do you guys remember the

pandemic? The COVID times, you might

remember during the early days of 2020, you might remember

reading several stories about people across the country who

bought up hand sanitizer. There's a guy in Tennessee that

bought 18,000 bottles of hand sanitizer all that he could

find, only to attempt to resell it at a marked up price of $70 a

bottle. Do you guys remember reading

stories about this? I know, kind of gross.

It's OK. Wash, let it wash over you.

It's all right, or maybe you have been witness to just after

the midnight opening of a store on Black Friday, which is coming

by the way, and you know, people are literally stampeding over

others to try to get to that 40% markdown on a new flat screen

TV. Listen, by the way, I'm not

necessarily throwing shade at Black Friday.

I got my eye on a dishwasher. I'm not going to lie, because

our dishwasher is leaking, it works about half the time.

So listen, if you can find a good deal, that's wonderful.

Please just do not push somebody out of the way in order to get

there. Everything I have is yours, she

said. And listen, you don't have to be

religious or trying to follow Jesus to understand that there

is at a deep level. There's something really right

and resonant about that kind of posture and invitation to

another human being. And something doesn't quite feel

right about the hoarding of toilet paper out of fear, or

trying to make a quick buck in a moment of crisis, or upgrading

your TV to what is new and bigger every other year.

How do we become the kind of person that would so

instinctively posture ourselves towards others?

Like the first woman in the story, Everything I have is

yours. And how do we be on the lookout

for ways that some version of those other stories might be at

work in our daily lives? That's the question.

Those are the two questions that I'm trying to wrestle with us

this morning. This first story about the

hungry woman feeling some anxiety about where her next

meal is coming from is met with what the biblical authors call

mercy. And all of those other stories

are different versions of what the early church fathers and

what the biblical narrative calls avarice or greed.

Avarice or greed? So we've been in this teaching

series over the past number of weeks called The Passions.

And if you were with us a number of weeks ago, one of the ways

that we described with the Passions are is to say that the

passions are desires and attitudes and the sometimes

obsessive emotions and thoughts that are at work inside of us.

Can anybody sort of pinpoint the reality that there are those

kinds of things that work inside of your eye?

Had coffee with somebody this week and they said, you know,

you know, Jared, you keep saying that, you know, could you

identify with one or two of these?

And, and they said to me, well, how about all of them?

And the reality is, is that there is there is something of

all of these passions at work inside of all of us that much of

the time there are these sort of unspoken desires and thoughts

that work their way out in the everyday actions and the habits

of our lives. And the men and women in the

first few centuries of the church on their journey of

formation after the death of Jesus, they begin to develop

some preliminary psychological categories and a tradition that

began to recognize that there were all sorts of things that

seem to be getting into the in, in the way of my adoration of

God and my desire to follow after Jesus, to live a life of

prayer and self sacrifice and to stay present to the reality of

our lives. There's all kinds of things that

are kind of in the way of that project, aren't there?

And so they begin to see all of these things that work within

them and and they begin to recognize that of the things

that are in my life that are taking away my freedom to love,

we can basically enumerate those things like a little bit of a

list. And they came up with these

eight different kinds of what they called afflictions.

And these are afflictions that often originate in our thoughts.

For example, we might find desire some things in an outside

way related to our sexuality. The early church fathers and the

biblical authors call that lust. Or we might discover that, you

know, we tend to gravitate towards sort of distracting

ourselves or numbing ourselves with food or drink.

And the early church fathers and the biblical authors call that

gluttony. So here's the list if you're

wondering sort of where we've been and what we've been up to.

Gluttony, lust, avarice and greed, sadness or despondency,

anger, acedia, Vainglory, and pride.

I promise you there's really good news coming.

By the way, I know that's a heavy list.

We're not just making our way through this list of the

passions as information, by the way, like we're not just trying

to learn all that we can about this.

What we're trying to do is we're trying to see together as a

community is that we all have these various ways and in which

are habitual and mental and, and like, like spiritual condition

is 1 in which we just don't quite see the world clearly.

And these are the kinds of things that are standing in the

way. They cause us to see one another

in skewed ways and they blind us to the needs of others.

They take away our capacity to see the way that God is wanting

to work in US. And they form us in this way

where they kind of like terrorize us on the inside.

Do you have anything that you're aware of that you're kind of

being terrorized by in this like little microwave and up for

today is this passion of avarice or sometimes referred to as

greed? Avarice is not like the

household name, but it is the list that shows up in the early

church. And so I just felt like we

should keep it. But greed, think about greed.

John Cashin, one of the early Church fathers, he says that

avarice is not only the desire for money, but the fear of

losing what one has. And his buddy Evagrius says that

avarice is the desire to possess more than one needs.

So for Evagrius, excuse me, who helped articulate this tradition

of the passions in the 5th century, he talks about a

vaguerous or avarice is not just about actual wealth, but it's

about this interior attachment that we have to security that we

maintain by gathering possessions or seeking after

wealth and possessions. It's really about what's

happening on the inside. There's all kinds of people who

who I know who have actually quite a bit of money, but their

disposition to that money is not to grab onto it.

It's actually to relinquish it and to give it away.

And so it's really what is happening on the inside interior

attachment to security through possession.

So avarice is present when we place trust in our material

means rather than in God's care or in the care that we might

receive from somebody else. It's that it's that feeling that

you might have when you, you or I are paying too much attention

to the stock market or to your investment accounts.

Some of you, like, I have no idea what those are.

Some people have those, by the way.

It's also that feeling that might arise for you when there's

money in your pocket and you're walking maybe downtown or you're

walking in a public place and you know that there's somebody

around you that probably needs that money more than you do.

But it's just sitting there and there's this little bit of

anxiety that comes up with the thought of reaching into your

pocket and handing over that 20 to the person.

And I'm not talking about the kind of anxiety that is

thoughtful, like, hey, is this going to be the best use of this

money for this particular person?

I'm not talking about that kind of pause inside.

I'm talking about the kind of pause about just actually

allowing the money to release from your hands.

Avarice is that feeling or that fear or anxiety that comes up

when the 20 or the 50 leads your hand or if you decide to sort of

make a donation to our shared economy fund, you drop $100 in

there and and it doesn't feel joyful.

It feels like, oh, that's going to hurt.

That's avarice. It's the inability to simply say

everything I have is yours. Everything I have is yours.

That's where we're headed in our life of following Jesus.

That's where my hope is, is that we can head together over time

as a community. But I want you to hold on to

that because we're going to come back to it.

In Luke chapter 12, Jesus is giving us a clear remedy of how

Luke 12 · chapter mention

to spot avarice or greed and how to respond to it when it shows

up in our life. Let's look back at the text.

He says this beginning in verse 13.

Someone in the crowd said to him, teacher, tell my brother to

divide the fair, the the family inheritance with me.

So Luke just sort of throws us into the middle of a scene, by

the way. And there's this guy who wants

Jesus to settle a little family dispute.

And in the ancient Near East, here's how the inheritance

concept would work. The eldest brother would receive

twice the inheritance of the younger brothers.

This was called a double portion.

It is just the way it worked. It goes all the way back to the

Jewish roots. And so if there was an

inheritance say of like 10,000, whatever dollars or whatever it

is that they use 10,000 bars of gold, I doubt it was that.

But if if there are three brothers, they would divide the

10,000 by 4 and each of the brothers would get a single

portion and then the oldest brother would get a double

portion. And so clearly this guy who's

trying to use Jesus authority as a teacher is a younger brother.

But it's not that the older brother is withholding what is

rightfully the younger brother's portion.

It's not really an issue of justice.

It's that the younger brother is stuck in a story.

He's stuck in a narrative. He's fixated on getting more

than he actually has, and he's feeling slighted in some way

because someone, namely his older brother, has more than he

has the the free money or the cattle or the sheep or the land

that was given to him out of the abundance of the family estate.

It simply wasn't enough. And it's kind of under his skin

a little bit. And so he is carrying around

this outside desire to have more than he actually needs such that

he can't see the abundance of what has already been provided

to him. I mean, this guy is listening to

Jesus teach. So there's this giant crowd

around and Luke tells us there's probably like 1000 people

around. And Jesus is getting into some

really good stuff about what it means to acknowledge him in

public. And Jesus basically says to to

the people is like, if you claim that you know me in front of

other people, I will declare that I know you in front of the

Father and all of the angels. And so there's this great

teaching that swells up and then this guy says, hey, could you

tell my brother to give me some money?

Do you, do you ever have this moment?

You know, you're just kind of going about your day.

You have this sort of outsized desire that just sort of springs

out of you. Is that just me, like you just

sort of blurting out things in conversations with people that

don't really belong? Great.

Thank you so much, man. I was like, OK, man, maybe it is

just me. No one is responding right now.

You sort of date. You're daydreaming about the

anxiety about the thing, the conversation, the finances,

whatever it is. OK, So out of the middle of

nowhere, this guy pulls Jesus into his own pattern of thinking

and into his own anxiety about money and the inheritance and

some perceived slight that he is fixated on.

And Jesus's response to him is this.

He says be careful, be on your guard against all kinds of

greed, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of

possessions. Isn't that interesting?

Because so much of our life actually is consisting of the

abundance of possessions, what we do with our time and our

energy and our focus of our attention in this modern 21st

century world. So side trail that will leave.

But then he told them a parable. He says this.

He says the land of a rich man produced abundantly.

So this guy has a bumper crop and he thought to himself, what

should I do? For I have no place to store my

crops. And then he said, he said, I

will do this. I will pull down my barns and

build larger ones, and there I will store all of my grain in my

goods. And I will say to my soul, soul,

you have ample goods laid up for many years.

Relax, eat, drink and be merry. But you kind of notice what he

doesn't say here, right? He doesn't think about his

neighbor. He doesn't consider that maybe

this abundance is not just for himself.

He's making plans for increasing his own comforts.

He's thinking to himself, You know, I'm going to be able to

retire early, man. I'm going to make a plan for

this. I can buy better wine.

I can eat at better restaurants. I can spend the extra I have on

more enjoyment and the security of knowing that everything is

going to be taken care of for me.

And in a sermon on this particular passage, again, one

of the early church fathers, St. Basil the Great, he's one of the

church leaders in the 6th century, he talks about how this

kind of abundance, this kind of abundance that has us thinking

of creative ways of storing all of that extra.

He says that it's a form of stealing from the poor because

in his mind, in the minds of those following Jesus in those

first few centuries, was that storing up treasures on earth

just for yourself eventually corrodes one's own view of what

your life is. For.

He says this. The bread in your cupboard

belongs to the hungry. The coat hanging unused in your

closet, it belongs to the one who needs it.

And if we do not have the disposition, he says, to think

about our neighbors and to think about the people in need, it is

just the same as though we stole the thing that is now in our

closet. You know, the stuff in the back,

the very back, back of your closet, he says.

It belongs to the poor. So the person who tears down a

perfectly good barn or a perfectly good ballroom to build

a bigger one, to to, to to store more than what they need

externally might have what appears to be abundance, but

internally, this is the kind of person who's living within a

scarcity mindset. A scarcity mindset is when a

person believes that the resources that they care about

is in short supply. You know, whether that be money

or time or emotional support or security.

They believe that, you know, all of that stuff is in short supply

and that the lack of it or even the perception that there isn't

going to be enough begins to shape their thinking and their

behavior. So social scientists and

psychologists actually have done some research on a scarcity

mentality and what it actually does to our brain and what it

does to our mindset. They they tell us that if we

believe that a resource is scarce or will be scarce in the

future, it can shrink our vision for what we're paying attention

to. It can close us off to the

capacity for seeing the world for what it really is.

It can cause us to filter our life in ways that align our

priorities to taking care of the thing that we think is scarce

off into the detriment of other things that maybe we could be

paying attention to. Now, that was all a very fancy

way of saying that if we're afraid that something we need is

not going to be there for us, it will cause our attention to

focus on the thing that we think that we need.

That is running dry. You ever been in a season where

you just feel like your relational network is kind of

shrinking? Your friendships are kind of we

have an name in from the sister down here.

OK, what do you become fixated on then?

Finding new friends. If your if your grocery budget

is expanding and your bank account is shrinking, what are

you going to be focused on? You're going to be focused on

where can I find the cheapest groceries?

How can I keep enough money in in the bank?

It's just human behavior. It's human psychology.

So modern psychology and behavioral science are telling

us exactly the same thing that John Cashin and Evagrius, living

in monastic communities in the 4th century, writing about.

When we become too focused on the accumulation of resources,

it's usually because we're looking for control and

security, and we think that whatever we need is not going to

be there in the future. And so we build bigger barns to

help us feel safe and more in control.

Man, what a terrible way to live, isn't it?

But what it actually does is it changes the way that we see the

world. It changes the way we Orient our

lives, and our vision gets blurred and narrowed.

And building on the tradition of those early desert fathers and

long before psychologists discovered the ways that

scarcity can narrow our vision and reduce empathy and

imagination that our life might be for others.

Basil the Great Again says this. He says you are poorer than all

your insatiable desires. So a scarcity mindset tells us

that we're never going to have enough and avarice and greed

acts on that mindset and builds bigger barns.

But the story that Jesus invites us into confronts both of those

things. He says this, you fool.

He says to the man, this very night your life is being

demanded of you and the things that you have prepared, where

were they go? All of that stuff that you store

in barns. This is how it is, he says, with

those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich

towards God. So the story that Jesus tells in

order to confront the man who's caught up in scarcity about his

inheritance is a story about scarcity and a scarcity

mentality. But the scarcity isn't real for

this guy, is it? Like he has an inheritance and

he just want, he just wants more?

What about when scarcity is real?

What about when the resources are actually shrinking?

How do we, how do we manage that?

Any anybody see what's happening in our world right now?

Doesn't it feel like the resources are shrinking for lots

and lots of people? If it's not shrinking for you,

you're in like the top 5% of the world.

You know, in the ancient world, 90% of the people lived at a

subsistence level. There is no storage of wealth.

90% of the people were just getting by in various degrees.

So what about when scarcity is real?

When we feel like we actually don't have enough, when we're

not, When we're we're not trying to figure out what to do with

the bumper crop or the bonus check.

We're just trying to make ends meet.

We're just trying to balance that grocery budget.

Last year, I was having dinner. It was actually a pretty nice

dinner with a friend down in Atlanta as a new friend.

And we're we're still sort of getting to know each other.

And he's a businessman, he's a follower of Jesus.

He loves the Lord. And we're talking about kind of

what it feels like to to be a startup person, to be starting

something. He has started 8 businesses over

the past 12 years. And some of you know that my

work outside of the church is to to lead a nonprofit

organization. And so for better or worse, and

in a way that I hadn't planned on it, I, I'm like an

entrepreneur. I'm a start up guy and I'm not a

typical one. And so I was sitting with this

guy over dinner and I was asking him how it has felt for him to

be a founder of all of these businesses.

And I'm listening, we're getting to know each other.

And he says, well, how's it felt for you?

And we were talking just about the pressures.

Some of you who lead nonprofits or part of nonprofits, you might

know there's some pressure involved in leading a nonprofit

organization. And I had one of those moments

where I, I realized that we were talking a little bit about fear.

And I asked him whether he struggles at all with fear and

which is the thing that I have struggled with.

And so we're talking about all this and he just sets down his

fork and he looks at me. He's like, what is it that

you're afraid of? And I knew that we were in one

of those moments of like a new relationship where like, I had a

choice to make about whether or not I was going to demonstrate a

little bit of vulnerability and just to kind of lean in a little

bit. And I'm like thinking to myself,

man, we're eating great chicken wings right now and drinking

some beer and what I'm about to say.

So I just paused a bit and I said, honestly, I think the

thing I'm afraid of and starting a new venture is that I'm going

to run out of money, plain and simple.

I've got people on payroll, I've got families that I support.

I've got my family that I support.

I've got kids in college. You know, the whole thing.

I just started saying to him. And then he says to me, he says,

well, have you ever run out of money?

And I thought that was a great question and never really

thought about that before. And then my answer back to him

was yes. And he was like, really?

I said yes. There was a season in my life in

the late 90s as a college student.

You know, I had bumped up against some really challenging

years. I was working my way through

college. My parents had done the best

they can to support me. I had a season where I was

really struggling and I was doing the whole thing, the cans

of tuna and the ramen noodles. I got free sandwiches three days

a week at Brennan's Cafe where I worked, free coffee, half price

bagels. And I still ran out of money.

Like $20 in my bank account. Run out of money.

I know some of you have been there.

And as I relayed this story to my friend, I began to realize in

that moment that my own struggle with the fear of running out of

money was rooted in an actual event in my life.

It wasn't make believe. It was real and I, I share that

to say to you friends that this whole series on the passions all

leave that list of things that we're talking about.

We're not trying to pull the curtain back to expose us to our

faults in some great like aha moment where where we're

overwhelmed with shame or we're trying to hustle our way out of

that thing. We're not trying to do that so

that we can wag our finger at our self in some ridiculous way

or bootstrap ourselves and set us out on a course of self

improvement just to do better. This whole series and the whole

tradition that we're drawing on recognizes that these complex

sets of emotions and thought patterns and behaviors, these

automated responses and coping mechanisms are almost always

rooted in stories in our life. There's wounding and there's

trauma. There's, there's feeling

overwhelmed in some way. And so all of these things that

we've been looking at over the past few weeks, the lust and the

anger and the acedia and the gluttony and the avarice, we're

seeking to pull back the curtain and see if we can get a good

look at the way these things are at work in our lives so that we

can cry out for the mercy of God and to say to God, God, I know

that there are things in my story that are causing these

thought patterns and this sort of miniature terrorizing things

going on inside of me. And I know that the only way out

is mercy. The only way out is for you to

heal me. That's the reason that we're

doing this work, friends. The passions are not necessarily

evil. And if you spend any amount of

time sitting before God in prayer asking God to reveal

where these things might be at work in your life, what you'll

notice is that most of these things are showing up not as

conscious acts of rebellion, but as deeply rooted patterns that

have formed us in reaction to some of the really hard things

that have happened to us. And so, friends, listen.

I know that you are sitting here and you are a human being, and

you will hear me say over and over again, I think being a

human being is incredibly difficult.

I think there's struggle that is built into the whole thing.

And the reason that we're trying to build a community that can

actually do the real conversations is because at the

end of the day, God has us on a journey to healing.

And we need each other. We attach ourselves to things

because we find them useful at some point in dealing with these

sort of outsized emotions. And then those things that we

attach to, they curve back in on us and they end up controlling

us. And God is inviting us on a

healing journey. So one of those journeys for me

has been in this this journey of avarice, of greed, and it hasn't

really shown up and tearing down barns and building a bigger one.

Let me tell you, it's mostly shown up for me in an anxiety

that I'm going to run out of money.

In my young adulthood, I had very little resources.

And what that season did to my brain was it made me hyper

fixated on scarcity and I developed this outsized fear.

And then in that same season, my parents went bankrupt and they

lost their home. They lost everything they had.

And So what do you think that did to my brain?

It impacted it. And so I have never really had

to think about what it would look like to tear down a barn

and to build a bigger one. But I have been in seasons when

I could feel myself hoarding more than I needed in a way that

had me fixated on security. And do you know what that does

to us? It narrows our vision.

It causes us to forget the needs of others.

And it causes us to forget God. So this guy in the middle of a

teaching blurts out in front of Jesus.

Teacher tell my brother to divide the family inheritance

with me. And Jesus reveals how narrow

this guy's focus is by telling a story about a rich man who has a

good year and he decides to build a bigger barn to store up

the extra. He says, you fool, this very

night your life is being demanded of you and the things

that you have prepared and set aside.

Where all of those things going to go?

So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are

not rich towards God, which is another way of saying

accumulating a bunch of stuff and fixating on the control and

the security of possessions and investments is a really narrow

and short sighted way of living in the world.

And then he says there's a there's a better story for you

to live in. If we keep reading the passage

which I have up here, He says this, Jesus says to his

disciples. Therefore, because of this story

I have just told you, do not worry about your life, what you

will eat, or about your body and what you will wear.

For life is more than food, and the body is more than clothing.

Consider the Ravens. They neither sow nor reap.

They have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them of.

How much more value are you than the birds?

And can any of you, by worrying, add a single hour to the span of

life? If then you are not able to do

so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest of it?

Consider the lilies, how they grow.

They neither toil nor spin. Yet I tell you that Solomon in

all of his glory was not clothed like one of those flowers.

But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive

today, and tomorrow is thrown in the oven, how much more will he

clothe you, you of little faith. And do not keep seeking what you

are to eat and what you are to drink.

And do not keep worrying, for it is the nations of the world that

seek all of these things, and your Father knows that you need

them. Instead, seek His Kingdom, and

these things will be given to you as well.

Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good

pleasure to give you the Kingdom.

Feel free to sell your possessions and give to the

poor. Make purses for yourself that do

not wear out an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no

thief comes near and no moth destroys.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be.

Also. Remember, avarice is the desire

to possess more than you need. But it's also about loop, the

fear of losing what you already have and the healing path.

And the invitation of God is to live in a story that believes

that God's posture towards us is everything I have is yours.

That's what God's posture is towards us.

Everything that we have, we have been given by God and we think

that our desire for the next thing, or you know, what we

think we need is going to satisfy us.

And listen, friends, if you struggle with avarice as I have,

if you're trying to break free from a scarcity mentality and be

healed of the passion of avarice.

The temptation that we're fighting is this belief that if

we get a little bit more, if we store up a little bit more that

that anxiety that we have or that need for control that just

sits below the surface, it will somehow go away if we just get

the thing right. If I could just get my savings

account above that particular marker, but you know that this

is not how desire actually works, right?

Desire. All of your desires that you

could possibly name. Stay with me here.

They're unquenchable. There's no satisfaction in the

things that you desire. And the moment I know that I'm

saying this, I know that there are some of you who are agreeing

with me in a very deep way that you just know that you have

insatiable desire for something. Intimacy, security, being well

thought of, getting to the top of the food chain, getting that

promotion, having enough in the bank.

Those desires are insatiable desire itself.

Is not the problem. And we try to fight all of this

stuff by somehow minimizing our desire.

The problem is that we think that there is anything in this

world that can quench those desires, but the capacity of our

desire is actually infinite. Why?

Why is the capacity of our desire infinite?

Because God is infinite. Gold Star for this one.

And the only thing, the only reason that God has made your

desires infinite is so that he can be the only thing that fills

it. And if you think about your

desire that way, it's like, oh, thank you.

Thank you for giving me this little wonder inside of me.

It's just the natural consequence of our life that we

have this fire that is burning inside of us and we're

constantly trying to to quench that desire.

And God's like, you could try whatever it is that you want, go

for it because it's a drop in the bucket to the degree of the

desire that God has given us. And the reason that God has

given us that great desire is to lead us to Him and to one

another. So our soul is shaped such that

our desire is stretched out towards what it longs for, and

it longs for God. And God gives us what we need,

and His hope for us is that we could just keep wanting.

He actually wants us to want, but He wants us to know that He

is the fulfiller of those desires.

Desire is not a defect, friends. It's a signal.

It's in a it's a, it's an alarm bell in our soul that says there

is something infinite that I have put in front of you.

It's why the birds aren't anxious.

They take the food that they receive for that day with the

expectation that there's going to be more food for tomorrow.

Because God is a God who says everything I have is yours.

Everything I have belongs to you.

I'm getting signals from the room that perhaps my time is up,

which is great because I'm at the end of my notes.

But here's what we're going to do.

Everything I have is yours. That's God's posture towards us.

God also desires us to become like him in this particular way

so that we get to the point where we say to one another,

everything I have is yours. So I'm going to invite the

worship team to come back up. We're going to get really

practical for our time of ministry.

Welcome kids. It's OK.

We're going to start the music any minute now.

Can those who are on our prayer team, can you guys begin to make

your way around? Here's a couple ways that I want

to invite you to maybe respond. If, if you can notice that fear

inside of you that you're going to run out, if you can notice

that that's actually true, I would love for you to get some

prayer today. Friends, we cannot combat what

needs to be healed by ourselves. And the second thing that I

would just invite you really practically to do is to make use

of that shared economy fund, both asking of it, but even more

important is if you notice some anxiety around money in your

life, around having enough. I would invite you to give to

the shared economy fund as a way of discipling your heart towards

recognizing that God is going to supply everything that you need.

And some of that will come through the community.

What I would much rather have happen is for you to give a

bunch of money to the shared economy fund and then six months

from now realize I think I need some of that money back.

And then you make a request. Does that make sense?

That creates A mutuality that we're trying to build.

So think about what's in your savings account.

And what we're trying to do with the shared economy fund is

imagine a shared savings account so that maybe in this season

you're giving into that account with the trust that when you

have need some time down the road that you can actually just

ask for some of that money. OK, so we can do this together.

I want to invite you to stand and worship Parker.

Do you have anything that you want to add?

No Parker's like you got it. OK, Come forward for prayer.

Let's worship together.