I liked this week. I’m finding right now that I don’t want to be critical at all, but since I’m supposed to be evaluating honestly, I suppose I’d better at least mention the concerns I had. Afterwards I’ll move on to what I learned from the week.

Concerns

In the first week, I thought that the author was mostly accurate, but the basic message was disappointingly business-as-usual for me. In the second week, it was the opposite. He has a strong message here that I loved hearing, but he seems to be one-sided in presenting it. He is accurate when it comes to expositing individual Scripture passages, but I’m not sure he’s worked out how they are to be balanced with other Scriptures that point in the opposite direction.

That’s OK; I can balance things myself. What I need is to hear someone make a strong case for things I may not have sufficiently considered. That’s what this week did.

The other thing I disagreed with this week was that the study guide was pushy about how to apply the Biblical principles involved. It kept giving very specific steps we might take to show our love for the poor and then asking us to commit to doing it, right here!, right now! I found myself answering No a lot. No, I don’t think that’s wrong. No, I don’t think that’s important. No, I’m not going to be doing that. We all need to obey the Scriptures, but the Holy Spirit may lead us to do so in very different ways.

By the way, as a young Christian I heard a similar message from Think of your Future by William MacDonald, and I seem to recall that it also suffered from being a little too pushy and a little out of balance. Nonetheless it’s something I’m glad I read and took to heart as a young college student. I recommend it if you want to read another strong call to abandon possessions and live for the kingdom alone.

What I learned

The primary message of the week was to encourage us to be aware of the danger of the desire for material possessions, and to be willing to live more simply and give more generously to the poor. It encouraged me to do a lot of thinking about poverty and wealth in Scripture, and it’s been fruitful. Additionally, our pastor preached a moving couple of sermons on Sunday about truly feeling compassion for people around us. The Holy Spirit’s been using both of those things together to give me slightly clearer direction on how I should focus my life and ministry this year. I’m still letting it simmer for now, though, so I don’t think I can get any more specific than that.

Anyway, one of the last questions in the study guide for this week said this: “How does the gospel shape what you believe about wealth and poverty? Write a simple statement of your views on material possessions.”

I suspect that by “simple” they meant a sentence or two, but I took the prompt as an opportunity to systematize everything I’ve been thinking about from this week, inspired and guided by Platt’s teachings among other things. I’m putting it in a separate post so I can link to it by itself later if I want to. Here it is.