“Material Things”

Diposkan pada oleh 𝑱𝒆𝒓𝒓𝒚 𝑰𝒈𝒏𝒂𝒄𝒊𝒐

We should enjoy and give thanks for material things without allowing them to rule our hearts.

Let’s consider God’s purpose for material things.

1. Material Things Are For Sustenance

You and I literally could not survive without the material world that surrounds us. The proper relationship is not to hate it or to separate yourself from it. No, you should celebrate how God, in his infinite wisdom and abounding love, built a physical world that sustains you.

2. Material Things Are For Pleasure

Biblical faith must not be antipleasure. You should never feel guilty for pursuing, participating in, and enjoying the pleasures of the material world God created.

3. Material Things Are For Remembrance

All the variegated glory of the material world has a divine purpose. Everyone who has eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart to receive encounters God every day in and through what he made (see Psalm 19 and Romans 1).

The Creator knows how quickly we forget, so in tender love and grace, he purposefully designed the material world to point to him. We are designed to see, and in seeing, we are prompted to remember, and in remembering, we are called to worship.

Simple theology, right? I don’t know about you, but I am regularly guilty of three things ;

  1. I take for granted the material world that God generously provides.
  2. I tend to allow created pleasure to become the principal motivation of my heart.
  3. I enjoy this pleasure but struggle to remember God, let alone worship him.

Grace Is Available

God not only provides the common grace of sustenance and pleasure, he provides redeeming grace for our spiritual struggles with idolatry, remembrance, and worship.

The grace of God rescues, transforms, and delivers our hearts. Our Redeemer frees us from our bondage to our self-centered desires, even when we don’t want it.

This grace our only hope is not something you earn by your prayers of guilt or by your material asceticism. It is only ever God’s free and eternal gift to us.

This grace will fight for us until it finally wins the war, so that material things will never again lay claim to our hearts.

God Bless…😉