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How to accumulate wealth, part 2
Proverbs
How many of you are super, super rich?
I want to start this morning with a little Broadhurst Poll. Its similar to the gallup or Barna poll only it has no recognition and I thought about the wording of the question for no longer than 10 seconds.
Raise you hand if you are super, super rich.
Not just super rich, but super super rich.
Ok, lets go a step further and play a stand up sit down game. I don’t want anyone nodding off yet.
Stand up if…
…You own your own home
…You have enough money to rent your own home
…You have enough money to rent a room from someone who owns a home
… You have electricity in a house that you live in
…You have a means of transportation other than your feet—skateboard, scooter, bicycle, car, truck, boat, etc.
…You have eaten a meal today
… you have eaten out this month, in any place, whether mcdonalds, starbucks or Ruths Chris.
…you have enough money to buy drinks that include sugar
I do that at the beginning of this time to give some balance to our topic this morning. The facts are simple. You are already rich. If your home is being foreclosed on and you are living in your parents basement and you have to sell half of your belongings and you have credit card debt you are still in the top 50% of the wealthiest people in the world. If you have a job, at all, you are probably in the top 30% of the world.
Most of you in the room are in the top 10%, you only need to make 24,000 to be in the top 10%
Most of you in the room are in the top 1%, making more than 45K.
Americans spend more annually on trash bags then most people earn in a year.
So you are rich. You have heard me speak about the negatives of wealth, but I don’t want to go so far in one direction that you think its wrong for you to have been smart and used your money well and worked hard and put money aside for you family. The Bible is thrilled with that kind of dedication and wisdom.
Today’s topic is simple. I want to tell you how to get rich. The Bible actually has a formula for getting rich.
I don’t want to be balanced today, so here is my only balance:
1) You are already rich. Please count your blessings
2) If you are among the more poor in our congregation I want to prepare you. The Bible makes fun of people who aren’t wise. So if you are poor because you made many bad choices the Bible is not going to sound kind to you. But I don’t want to make you think I don’t like you, or Jesus doesn’t like you. Proverbs is written to teach us how to be, how to make wise choices. It is designed for young men just starting out. It isn’t rebuking as much as it is trying to give you advice before you make the mistakes. But it is good advice after you have made mistakes as well.
3) The Bible does not ridicule the poor because they are poor. It ridicules the foolish. If you are poor for righteousness sake, praise God. Do not feel ridiculed here or in any way guilty. I applaud you for losing your fortune for standing strong. If you are poor because you were born into poverty and you are trying hard to get out of it but aren’t there yet, I applaud you. It takes time. If this is your situation, you should come talk to me. We have great advisors here who can help lead you in smart moves. I can tell you several great websites to get on.
4) Even though I am going to tell you how to be wealthy, material wealth is not the major theme of the Bible. The wealthy are constantly insulted. It is harder, after all, for a rich man to get into heaven, than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. But it is not wealth that is bad. It is what so often comes with wealth.
Those are my caveats to where I am going in Proverbs. I feel the need to make so many more, but I am preaching for PBC mainly and you guys know how far I always go in the other direction talking about suffering and giving money away etc, so lets get started.
Last week I gave you two of the most important things you need to do to get rich:
1. Plan well
2. Work hard
Not meant as a rebuke. Proverbs is for young men. If you have made dumb decisions in the past, I am not here to rake you over the coals and make you feel worse. I am here to teach those of you willing to listen, willing to admit that you have made mistakes, how to make money.
Planning is absolutely essential. Do not think you will be wealthy unless you have a budget and ambition. And then work your behind off. I hope I have not lightened this too much when we laughed at the sluggard and spent nearly half our time last week talking about working hard.
But lets move onto other things that are needed in regard to wealth
3. Don’t wear ourselves out
We are to plan and we are to work hard, but be careful. Everything can’t be about work and planning and gaining money.
23:4 Do not wear yourself out to get rich; have the wisdom to show restraint.
This is a proverb against workaholism. We were looking at this in Devotions about a month ago and I was trying to describe it. You know, those men who pretty much work all the time. They leave early and come home late and don’t have enough time for important things like their family.
And one of my boys said, “oh, like you dad.” That did not make my heart leap. I have thought about it a few times since then, lots of times and tried to prioritize accordingly, but I am not convinced they are right. I think they just live a pampered life with Dad around a lot and who comes at the drop of a hat. They just want more.
But the point of this is that there must be balance. Men, your job is to provide, protect and prepare. Do you do the provide thing well, but forget that you must prepare your children for the future—you must be there to teach them ethics and dating and how to earn money, and how to love a wife and you must protect them from false security and from greed and from false doctrine and from hackers and from easy girls and from abusive boys. You have to be there. A lot.
4. Keep priorities right
21:17 He who loves pleasure will become poor; whoever loves wine and oil will never be rich.
If you are only interested in pleasure, wine and oil, you will never be wealthy. These are things you have at a party. Wine refreshes the throat, oil the skin and all brings pleasure. This is a condemnation of hedonism and living for the moment and just for pleasure. You will waste your money on those things.
What are you wasting your money on? Cigarettes? Too much wine? Chocolate? Shoes? Decorations? Soda? New car (20% depreciation off the lot)? New technology? Netflix? Coffee?
I don’t like this next one a lot. I seriously thought about leaving it out. I can’t say everything after all. But this is a particularly big problem for me.
This next one may fit just as well under the same category.
5. Don’t be stingy
23:6 Do not eat the food of a stingy man, do not crave his delicacies; 7 for he is the kind of man who is always thinking about the cost. {7 Or for as he thinks within himself, so he is; or for as he puts on a feast, so he is} "Eat and drink," he says to you, but his heart is not with you.
28:22 A stingy man is eager to get rich and is unaware that poverty awaits him.
I am not stingy, I say, I am prudent. In many cases where people accuse me, I stand firm on that statement. I am VERY prudent. I barely even need a budget because I would never spend on anything. I save everything. I think about how money should be used and am very kingdom focused. But too high of a percentage of that prudence is nothing more than stinginess. My personality is flawed in that I abhor spending money on anything.
This first verse (23:6) seems to imply that we shouldn’t be hanging out with stingy people because they are hypocritical. They say, eat and drink, but they don’t really want to be doing it. This is so me. I do the right thing, because I have a wife who wants to be involved in my sanctification process, but my heart is often not in it.
This verse even suggests that we as Christians should throw parties.
Wow, do I get into this here? Did you know that the OT tithe is first of all not just 10%, but closer to 25% and included a pretty healthy amount to go to celebratory feasts—parties. I think Christians have forgotten that we are to be celebratory. We celebrate on Sunday and think that is sufficient, and its not even much of a celebration. We don’t even raise our hands.
But when is the last time you threw a big party just to celebrate God’s awesomeness and you put some real money into it. I love that Reneta does this. She uses a lot of her own money to celebrate new babies. And she is generous, never stingy. I am so impressed by this and so want to be like this. Pray for me.
6. Be Generous
An area that I have improved greatly is in my generosity. It’s only been a few years since I recognized the tithe as a significant piece of my worship. Giving was always theologically important but it wasn’t a tithe. It was whatever I felt like giving. But now thanks to my wife’s influence, I don’t hold the purse strings quite so tightly. I want to see the joy in giving to others.
11:24 One man gives freely, yet gains even more; another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty. 25 A generous man will prosper; he who refreshes others will himself be refreshed
This is saying that if you are generous with others, then God will be generous with you. It’s the way he likes to work. Again, not a claim that you can make as if its some kind of a law that we can bind God with, but he does say, “see if you can out give me.” That’s the end of Malachi right?
3:10 Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this," says the LORD Almighty, "and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.
Doesn’t this absolutely go against all logic? The way to gain wealth is to be generous. So men (and women) if you are waiting to give more to missions and to the poor and to the church until you have acquired wealth, you are going about it all wrong. You are not only sinning as the rest of scripture says, but as Proverbs says, you are just being stupid. The way to acquire wealth is to be generous with those in need.
When was the last time you opened your wallet for one of those guys on the street. Or men, picked that guy up and took him to Chik Fil A?
I remember my dad on two different occasions bringing a homeless guy to our house for a shower and some of his older clothes and a meal.
7. Be Slow, steady and honest
13:25 The righteous eat to their hearts' content, but the stomach of the wicked goes hungry
13:11 Dishonest money dwindles away, but he who gathers money little by little makes it grow.
We must acquire wealth honestly, righteously, fairly. No cheating in your weights. No fudging on your taxes, no raising the price exorbitantly.
Honest work is key to gaining true wealth. If you own a business, you must be careful to charge what things are worth.
But I have mentioned that already, let me remind you of this. There are no legitimate get rich quick schemes out there. Wealth isn’t meant to be made quickly. In fact, if you make money quickly and without hassle, then you wont know how to use it wisely. Wisdom is fought for. It is every day doing the right thing over and over again and in so doing learning for the future.
It is most likely that you will not go through your basement and find an old stick with mold on it and a cool carving and the next thing you know you are on the Antique Road Show. Sure it’s a cool show, but it pretty much never happens.
You almost definitely will not hit the lottery, you will not find boardwalk on your McDonalds cup, you will not have a rich uncle that you didn’t know about die and give you everything he has. You will not get the magic Mcmuffin worth $1 million.
Did you hear about the guy who did?
Associated Press, on Sept 3, 2001, did an article on Patrick Collier and his fiancé Sandy Fabian.
According to this article they lived together in a cardboard box doing day labor and making about $50.00 a day.
Now there must be something about this guy Patrick, because I don’t know very many women who would want this kind of a guy.
When they make enough money they would put it together and spend a night in a overnight hotel which is where he has been for the last several days frequenting the McDonalds across the street. Whooo, classy. He is engaged ladies, so don’t get your hopes up.
Now, Patrick and apparently Sandy are living the American dream.
He says, “Thank God for that sausage and cheese Mcmuffin.”
What will he do with all the money? Remember my point here, money made quickly is often a liability.
Money without wisdom is an opportunity for great foolishness.
So let’s figure this out. He has a million dollars, which means he is taking home 600K after taxes. What would you do?
He should be creating assets, but my guess is this guy will be making liabilities
What is the first thing he will do?
“I am getting a Harley. And a couple of houses. And one for me, he always said he would get one for me, his mother said.”
They are getting two houses and a Harley.
I don’t know what kind of Harley he wants. Perhaps just a sportster at 12k, but maybe a Dyna? Softtail? Touring, CVO. A CVO can cost as much as 39K
And two houses. Average price where he lives is $250,000
That’s well over 500 K if he is modest, which I don’t exactly expect him to be.