What scares me most, though, is that we can pretend that we are the people of God. We can comfortably turn a blind eye to these words in the Bible and go on with our affluent model of Christianity and church. We can even be successful in our church culture for doing so. It will actually be a sign of success and growth when we spend millions on ourselves. “Look how big that church is becoming,” they’ll say. “Did you see all the stuff they have?”
I think we actually believe that what we’re doing is biblical. And so did Jesus’ disciples. That’s one of the reasons they were so shocked when Jesus walked away from his conversation with a rich young man, saying, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!” The very next verse says, “The disciples were amazed at his words.”12 Why were they so surprised?
The answer is steeped in Old Testament history. From the beginning of the nation of Israel, God had promised to bless them materially. God poured out material blessings on Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. God promised his people that as they obeyed him, they would receive abundant material prosperity.13
Why the promise of material possessions? God was forming a nation for himself that would be a demonstration of his greatness to all other nations. In so doing, God established a place for his people and his glory to dwell. David and Solomon amassed great amounts of wealth as they established a kingdom, and one important part of that kingdom was the temple that Solomon would build. As seen in 1 Kings 8, Solomon dedicated the temple and asked God to make his glory known through his people in that place.14 Material blessing aimed toward the establishment of the people of God in a physical place with a physical temple is a fundamental part of the history of Israel.
So when a rich Jewish man came up to Jesus, and Jesus told him, “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor,” the disciples were naturally confused.15 Why would obedience to Christ lead to this man losing his possessions?
The disciples would soon realize that a radical shift was taking place. It was not that God had changed or that the God of the Old Testament was somehow different from the God of the New Testament. Instead, the eternal plan of God was unfolding, and Jesus was ushering in a new phase in redemptive history, one that would affect the relationship between faith and material blessing.
In the dawn of this new phase in redemptive history, no teachers (including Jesus) in the New Testament ever promise material wealth as a reward for obedience.16 As if this were not startling enough to first-century Jews (and twenty-first-century American Christians), we also see no verse in the New Testament where God’s people are ever again commanded to build a majestic place of worship. Instead God’s people are told to be the temple—the place of worship.17 And their possessions are to be spent on building, not a place where people can come to see God’s glory, but a people who are taking God’s glory to the world.
All this begs the question, have we taken this shift in redemptive history into account in the way we approach our possessions today?
Isn’t the hidden assumption among many Christians in our culture that if we follow God, things will go well for us materially? Such thinking is explicit in “health and wealth” teaching, and it is implicit in the lives of Christians whose use of possessions looks virtually the same as that of our non-Christian neighbors.
One evening I was meeting with an underground house church overseas, and we were discussing various issues in Scripture. A woman who lived in the city and knew some English shared. “I have a television, and every once in a while I am able to get stations from the United States,” she said. “Some of these stations have church services on them. I see the preachers, and they are dressed in very nice clothes, and they are preaching in very nice buildings. Some of them even tell me that if I have faith, I too can have nice things.”
She paused before continuing. “When I come to our church meetings, I look around, and most of us are very poor, and we are meeting here at great risk to our lives.” Then she looked at me and asked, “Does this mean we do not have enough faith?”
In that moment I realized the extent to which we, as churches and Christians across America, are in some cases explicitly and in other cases implicitly exporting a theology that equates faith in Christ with prosperity in this world. This is fundamentally not the radical picture of Christianity we see in the New Testament.
Further, when we pool our resources in our churches, what are our priorities? Every year in the United States, we spend more than $10 billion on church buildings. In America alone, the amount of real estate owned by institutional churches is worth over $230 billion. We have money and possessions, and we are building temples everywhere. Empires, really. Kingdoms. We call them houses of worship. But at the core, aren’t they too often outdated models of religion that wrongfully define worship according to a place and wastefully consume our time and money when God has called us to be a people who spend our lives for the sake of his glory among the needy outside our gates?
My heart aches even as I write this, because the reality is that I preach every Sunday in one of these giant buildings. How do we even begin to reverse the trends regarding where we spend our resources? I constantly wrestle with this question, and I don’t believe it’s a question for just pastors and church building committees. Like the rich young man in Mark 10, every Christian has to wrestle with what Jesus is calling us to do with our resources as we follow him.