THE BOOK OF JAMES
WEALTH
DR. JIM DIXON
JUNE 2, 1985
JAMES 5:1-6
What is the wealthiest family in the world? Perhaps you think of the Kennedy family. Perhaps you think of the Rockefeller family or the Hunt family, or perhaps the Rothchild family of Europe. But it is said that the wealthiest family in the world is the Du Pont family. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the Du Pont family is worth an incredible $150 billion. It all began on January 1st, 1800, when Pierre Du Pont de Nemours, having left France, arrived in the United States of America. Pierre Du Pont was brilliant—a financial genius. He became a friend of Thomas Jefferson’s and he helped to establish and form American educational policy. It was his son, Éleuthére Du Pont, who took his father’s assets and established an explosives company that today has grown into the largest producer of chemicals in the world.
In the last 200 years, some of the Du Ponts have served as military officers in the armed forces of the United States. Some have been congressmen, both senators and representatives. Some have served as governors, some have been philanthropists, and some have been Christians. But most of the Du Ponts have been respected because we live in a world that respects wealth. But have you ever asked yourself how God views wealth, what God thinks of wealthy families? At first glance, when you look at the scriptures, you might think that God hates wealth. The Lord Jesus said that it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. The Bible says that the love of money is the root of all evil. The Bible says that those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge men into ruin in destruction. Jesus once instructed a rich man to go and give away all that he had and give it to the poor and come and follow Him.
In our passage of scripture for today, James the Apostle says, “Come now you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you.” But when we look at scripture as a whole, we see that God does not really hate wealth per se. Indeed, throughout biblical history there have been many of the saints who have been wealthy—including Abraham and the patriarchs—and they viewed their wealth as an expression of the generous provision and blessing of God. But in our passage of scripture for today, James does tell us that there’s two types of wealth that God hates.
First of all, James tells us God hates tainted wealth. He hates wealth that has been derived from immoral methods. On May 6th, 1626, a man named Peter Minuit made an incredible purchase. Peter Minuit has been described as the greatest real estate salesperson in history. On that date, May 6th, 1626, Peter Minuit, representing the Dutch West India Company, purchased Manhattan Island from the Canarsee Indians for the price of 60 guilders. He paid in beads, cloth, and trinkets 60 Dutch guilders, which was the equivalent of 24 American dollars. Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan Island (31 square miles) for $24. He paid less than 80 cents a square mile. Today, Manhattan Island is among the most valuable property and real estate in the world.
When we think of Manhattan Island, we think of Broadway, Chinatown, Carnegie Hall, the Empire State Building, the United Nations building, and the Rockefeller Center. Perhaps you think of Central Park, Greenwich Village, or Wall Street. Certainly you think of theaters and skyscrapers. Indeed, the value of Manhattan Island has inflated 391 billion times since Peter Minuit purchased it 360 years ago. And that purchase has been called one of the great shams of the white man—the great Manhattan Island swindle is what it’s been called. But perhaps we are confused as to who swindled who. $24 was a great deal of money 360 years ago. Comparable pieces of land were purchased for similar sums of money, but the incredible truth is that the Canarsee Indians did not ever own Manhattan Island. The island belonged to the Wecquaesgeek Indian tribe. The Canarsee Indians were simply visiting Manhattan Island, and when they received their 60 guilders they got in their boat and they returned home to Brooklyn. Now, in the years that followed, the Wecquaesgeek Indian peoples protested to the Dutch West India Company and they wound up having to pay them as well.
The whole of history is filled with swindles. People are swindling people today. Some people think swindles are kind of funny—some of them—but God doesn’t view swindles as funny. God doesn’t view anything immoral or dishonest as funny. God hates tainted money. He doesn’t like us to cheat on our income taxes. “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesars.” He doesn’t like us to participate in false advertising, for that is lying. He doesn’t like us to present a false portrayal of our assets that we might attain a loan from a bank, for that is deception. He doesn’t like us to cheat, lie, steal, deceive, or abuse.
In the passage of James that we have for today, we are told that the rich—some of the rich of James’ world—participated in fraud. They withheld wages from their laborers. You see, the day laborers in the New Testament world received their wage at the end of every day. In the book of Deuteronomy, the commandment of God is that employers were to pay their day laborers every evening before the sun went down, because they were a poor people. They needed their money daily. It was barely enough for them to survive on. If they went one day without payment, they might go a day without food or shelter. Many of them wore clothes that were tattered and torn. And James tells us that the cries of these laborers, the cries of the starving harvesters that had been abused by the rich employers, had reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts.
You see, before God nothing is hidden. He knows your life and how you live your life (and He knows how I live my life). He knows whether we’ve been honest or dishonest, whether we’ve abused people, and whether our profits are tainted. He knows—and you know in your heart—whether any of your money is tainted. And if it is, God has a solution for you. That solution is repentance.
2,000 years ago there lived a man named Zacchaeus. He lived in the town of Jericho, an oasis town south of the city of Jerusalem. He was rich. He was a tax collector. His money was tainted. He had cheated the masses. He was loved by no one, but he was rich and he had power. Now, Zacchaeus heard that the Son of God was coming to Jericho. He was curious. He was also short. He climbed into a sycamore tree that he might look over the crowd and see the Lord Jesus Christ pass by.
As Jesus came by, He looked up and He saw Zacchaeus in the tree. Now, I’m sure Zacchaeus wanted to see the Lord, but he didn’t want the Lord to see him. There’s no evidence that Christ had ever met Zacchaeus, and yet a word of knowledge was given, for as Christ looked at Zacchaeus, He knew his name. He called him by name and He said, “Zacchaeus, come down. I want to have lunch with you this very day.” So they went to the home of Zacchaeus and they broke bread. Zacchaeus encountered the living Christ and his life was never the same. It changed. In his heart, he was filled with repentance and remorse, and the Bible tells us that Zacchaeus promised that every person he had defrauded he would pay back fourfold and of whatever was left over he would give half to the poor.
God hates tainted money. He offers forgiveness to all who truly repent. I doubt that many of you have money that is tainted, but James tells us that there’s a second kind of wealth that God also hates. James tells us that this wealth is what we might call wasted wealth. If God hates tainted wealth, He hates wasted wealth too. James speaks of rich people of his day whose riches had rotted. Their garments were moth-eaten and their gold and their silver had rusted, James says. And he says that rust shall be evidence against them at the day of judgment. God hates wasted money.
I’m sure most of you have never heard of Benjamin Wood. Some of you perhaps have. He was a very powerful man in the city of New York about a century ago, one of the most powerful men in the entire city. He was the editor and owner of the New York Daily News. Benjamin Wood had great power, but he also had one flaw. That flaw was gambling. He was a compulsive gambler. He was addicted to gambling. He gambled vast sums of money and he lost far more than he won. But Benjamin Woods’s wife, Ida Wood, made a deal with Benjamin. She said, “You can go ahead and gamble all you want as long as the money you gamble is your own money and set aside for you. Therefore, whatever you lose will be your loss. However, whatever you win, half of what you win you have to give to me.”
Benjamin Wood agreed to this. One night, in an incredible streak of luck, Benjamin Wood won $100,000. Now, this was a century ago. That’s a lot of money today. He went home and gave his wife Ida $50,000 in cash. Another night, Benjamin Wood won $150,000. He literally broke the bank at Saratoga. He went home and gave his wife $75,000. Benjamin Wood never could have known what he was doing to his wife, what was happening in his wife’s heart. She was beginning to live for money, beginning to be possessed by it, beginning to covet it, seeking its accumulation in her life. As the years passed, Benjamin Wood died, but Ida lived on. She decided to sell the New York Daily News. The terms of the sale were this: she had to be paid in thousand dollars bills. She received a vast sum of money in that form.
The years passed. People rarely saw Ida Wood. They knew that she was very rich. They wondered what she was doing with her money. At one time, she had been considered the most beautiful woman in the whole city of New York. She was a socialite. She had loved to get out and be among the people, but she became a recluse for the final 30 years of her life. She died at the age of 92. She had hardly come out of her hotel suite. When they went into her hotel suite, they were astounded by what they found. In her bed they found stashed $750,000 in cash. In one of her dresses in the closet they found 50 $10,000 bills in the pockets (this was when the US government minted $10,000 bills with a picture of Salmon Chase on the front). I’m sure that none of you here today brought that kind of pocket money with you, but if you did, I hope you put it in the offering plate this morning. They found money stashed under the mattress, under the pillows, and stacked up in piles on the floor. They found it in the kitchen cabinets. They found it in every nook and cranny of the house. Millions of dollars were wasted. They were just sitting, not used for any good on the Earth, not even reinvested in the world’s economy. It was just sitting being wasted.
God hates wasted wealth. I am sure that none of us so blatantly waste wealth as Ida Wood did. We don’t hoard cash in our home. We don’t have that kind of cash to just stash around the house, but perhaps we waste money by accumulating it in other ways. I’m sure that many of us live to some degree for the accumulation of money. God wants us to understand that money was never meant to be accumulated, not in the ultimate sense. Money was meant to be used. It was meant to be used for the good of the people of this world. It was meant to be used for the service of the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Jesus said, “Beware of all covetousness, for a man’s life does not consist in the sum of his possessions. The land of a rich man brought forth plentifully and he said to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place in which to store my grains and my goods.’ And he said, ‘I’ll do this: I’ll tear down my barns and there I’ll build larger barns. There I will store my grain and my goods and I will say to my soul, soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years. Take your ease. Eat, drink, and be merry.’ God shall say to him, ‘You fool. This very night your soul is required of you. And the things which you have accumulated, whose shall they be?’”
So it is, Jesus says, with all who are rich towards themselves and not rich towards God. Money was meant to be used for the kingdom of Christ, not to be hoarded for ourselves. But not all wealth is wasted through accumulation. Sometimes wealth is wasted through foolish spending. For most of us, this is probably the way that we waste wealth. We spend it foolishly in this world, primarily perhaps on ourselves. In our passage of scripture for today (and for some reason I left this out of the scripture reading) James spoke of those people who had lived on the Earth in luxury and in pleasure, and he spoke of them as having stored up fire for the end days and having fattened their hearts for a day of slaughter.
God has not called us to extravagant living. What I’m about to say is perhaps going to be offensive to some of you. Sometimes it’s offensive to me, but it’s a word from God and it’s true. God has not called us to live extravagant lifestyles. God has created the material world and He has called us to enjoy material things. He’s given each one of us a capacity for enjoying pleasure. We are called to experience pleasure within the context of His will, but the Bible says that God has not called us to materialism (a preoccupation with material things) and He has not called us to hedonism (a preoccupation with pleasure). He’s not called us to extravagance.
I can’t tell you what’s extravagant in your life. I can’t tell you the kind of home you ought to live in. I can’t tell you the kind of car you ought to drive. I can’t tell you the type of vacations you ought to have or the amount of money you need to save. It’s not for me to judge anyone and I don’t judge any of you in terms of your material possessions. And I trust that you do not judge me. But God wants each and every one of us to explore our hearts. Certainly He calls us to different lifestyles. We’re not all called to be clones. We’re not all called to have the same lifestyle, but He does call each and every one of us to search our hearts, be still before Him, seek His will, and say, “Lord Jesus, am I living on this Earth in the way that You would have me to live?” He calls each one of us to acknowledge that He is the owner of everything. We own nothing.
We are simply stewards, and one day our stewardship will be evaluated before the throne of the Son of God Himself. He’s given each one of us a principle in His Bible. And that principle is, “Seek first My kingdom.” According to a survey reported on in the Psychology Today magazine, 95% of the people in the United States of America claim to believe in God. But how does their belief affect their life? As Christians, we have found God through Jesus Christ. We believe that God is uniquely manifested through Jesus Christ. If you’re a Christian, you’ve given your life to Jesus Christ and you call Him Lord. And His commandments are clear: “Seek first My kingdom and My righteousness, and I’ll give you everything you need.”
“Seek first My kingdom” refers to the way we speak, the things we do, the way we live, and the way we spend our money. Our church is in the midst of a building program and it’s a challenge. We need to raise $3 million and borrow $3 million (although some of that will go to mission). In the flesh, it’s kind of scary. In the Lord, it’s not scary because God has given us the provision to meet His call. God has called us to build this new church building. It’s not extravagant. Some people say, “Well, if the building is built, that means it’s God’s will. If we’re not able to build it, that means it’s not God’s will.” God has already told us His will. If that building’s not built, it won’t be because it wasn’t God’s will. It’ll be because we weren’t faithful and God will just get on with the work of the kingdom of Christ and we’ll be left behind. He has told us what He wants. We have made pledges to the building fund. We have not honored those pledges. I honestly believe that if we are seeking first the kingdom of Christ, every need will be met and the kingdom of Christ will be glorified and you will be blessed.
God has a message for us, and that message is in His Son. We see how we’re supposed to live when we look at Jesus Christ. He’s the richest man in the universe. The Bible says He owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and Jesus said, “Everything the Father has belongs to Me.” He owns everything in the heavens and on Earth. And yet the Bible tells us that, though He was rich, for our sake He became poor. He gave His life for us. He entered our world. He died on a cross for you. But the Bible’s message is clear: if you’re a Christian, then He’s called you now to lay down your life for Him. “He who would come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me. He who would save his life shall lose it, and he who would lose his life for My sake and the gospel’s sake will find it.” He laid down His life for us and He now calls us to lay down our lives for Him.
As we come to communion this morning, He would have us search our hearts. As we come to the bread and the cup, we acknowledge that our Lord Jesus Christ’s body was broken for us and His blood was poured out for us. God would have us be still before Him and examine our hearts and see if our lives are fully consecrated to Him. God has blessed us. By this world’s standards, we are all wealthy. To whom much has been given, much is required. God does not like tainted wealth. He does not like wasted wealth. He calls us to be good stewards of His kingdom. Let’s pray.
Lord Jesus, Lord of Heaven, Lord of Earth, You own everything. We own nothing. You have entrusted some things into our care. Help us to be good and faithful stewards. Help us to live lives of integrity on this Earth. Help us to live lives of service for You and for Your great kingdom. Lord, as we come to this table, we cannot thank You enough for Your forgiveness of sin. We cannot thank You enough for Your salvation, for Your promise of resurrection and eternal life. We cannot thank You enough for Your church all over the world and this church in this little corner of the world. We cannot thank You enough for the brothers and sisters You’ve given us in Your name. Lord, we thank You for Your grace and for Your mercy. Thank You that You laid Your life down for us. We know, Lord Jesus, that You have now called us to lay down our lives for You daily. Search us, know our thoughts, see if there be in us any wicked way. Cleanse us, purify us, and use us. We consecrate ourselves to You anew this day. In Your great and matchless name we pray. Amen.