Monday Motivational - Who Said That?

                                                                  Monday Motivational – Who said that?
 
      Welcome back to another Monday Motivational guys! I hope that these short reads are helping make your Monday’s just a little bit better. If they aren’t, I’m sorry to hear that but I also never claimed to be good at this. Speaking of things I am not good at—I have a horrible memory. I can most times recognize a face and potentially place where it was that I saw that face before, but when I comes to names, information about a person, or details of an event that happened I am not great at all. This is a horrible problem to have when a majority of your job is supposed to be about making people feel cared for, involved, and worth investing in. As I have aged the severity of this problem has lessened, and I do a little bit better but it takes full effort. The same thing sort of happened in my spiritual life as well.
 
      I was blessed to have grown up in the church, but I am not sure that I was given that much of an advantage because of it. I know that I was taught the stories of Jonah, Noah, Daniel, Joseph, Samson, Ruth, etc.—all with those classy 90’s felt boards I am sure—but I do not remember learning about them the first time.  I am not sure if my views on these people come from the blind obedience of a child following  a leader, or if I have been able to reinvest in the life and story of these people to create my own thoughts through the guidance of the Spirit. What I do know is that I have a small number of misguided truths because I heard something one to many times as a child without getting the context or, more realistically, not understanding the context of it. A great example of this is something that I think most of us have heard anywhere from one time to one thousand times.
 
      You guessed it—maybe—but the saying I’m talking about is “money is the root of all evil”.  I cannot count high enough to tell you how many times I heard that or some variation of it growing up. And I do not mean only in the church or from church people, but I heard this saying everywhere. The actual scripture behind this saying is found in 1 Timothy 6:10 , “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.”. It is clear here that the money has little to do with the problem, but rather the construct of loving and craving something that does not deserve to be loved or craved. By loving money you are putting value where it does not belong. Our love should go to God and to others—in that order. In all three accounts of Jesus being asked which commandment is the greatest or most important in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Christ responds by telling them to love God and love others.
 
      It is important for us to validate, test, and discern what we are told is truth and biblical. Moving forward take time to challenge what you are told and see if it holds up to the word of God. If you don’t take time to do this you will grow up believing something ridiculous like money is the root of all evil. One of the ways that I try to avoid doing this is to ask myself “who said that?”. Whenever you are told something is a truth that you should cling to, make sure that truth is actually a truth from God and not just an opinion of the person who told it to you. Find out who said it and what the context is so that you can avoid craving things that do not deserve to be craved.
 
I hope that your week is full of intentional moments of asking yourself “who said that?” in a way that helps bring you closer to the truth of God.
 
Happy Monday!