-Transcript-
00:36 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the program.
00:42 Welcome to KJV Cafe. Oh what a wonderful day it is. I’m so excited here that you’ve joined us today as we get into God’s Word.
00:49 Today we’re talking about wealth. Do you want to be wealthy? Maybe you are wealthy and you’re saying, well I’m already wealthy. Well maybe you can learn what that wealth means.
00:58 Or maybe you’re striving to gain some kind of wealth, contributing to a retirement fund, or starting one, or starting a savings, or picking up extra work, thinking about things like wealth. You know God doesn’t avoid wealth in His Word, being in the fundamental church. Wealth kind of can feel like a dirty word, can’t it? But it is God that provides wealth.
01:28 Our text verse here Deuteronomy 8:18. But thou shalt remember the Lord thy God, for it is he that giveth the power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he swear unto thy fathers as it is this day. This is Deuteronomy 8:18.
01:43 We’ll get to the context of this verse in a minute. Before we do that, let’s just look at the idea of God providing the ability to get wealth, the power the word says. Have you ever thought about that? That God provides the power for us to breathe, to live, to work.
01:58 Have you ever thought about God gave you those talents that you use on the job site? God gave you those. And thus he gives you the power to get wealth. What is too hard for God, an all-knowing and all-powerful God? What’s too hard? Is it too hard for him to give you wealth? Certainly it’s not.
02:26 And he was telling the Israelites here, the context, in Deuteronomy 8:18. Moses, if we go back a few chapters to Deuteronomy 5, is God through Moses is giving the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5. Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not covet, thou shalt not commit adultery, and many more important commandments. In Deuteronomy 6, like the Lord is one God.
02:58 Amen. You remember back then there was a lot of pagan idol worship and this type of theology where there are many many gods. The Lord is one God, loving the Lord with all your heart soul and might, teaching these commandments like the Ten Commandments to your children as they get up in the morning, throughout the day, and even in the evening.
03:24 I mean this is good stuff. Amen. This is all applicable here today.
03:33 People say, well we’re not under the law. We’re not in, you know, we’re New Testament Christians or New Testament Church. But think about it.
03:38 If these rules came from God, amen, and God does not change, are these rules bad? I don’t think so. Now you want to get into all 600 laws the Israelites were given and there’s one peculiar one or this or that. The point is we could never keep the law and that’s the point of the laws.
03:58 We can never fulfill it on our own. But that in and of itself doesn’t make the law bad. This is what is in God’s heart and this is what is good for man.
04:06 And he’s telling the Israelites, hey, don’t forget about me as you go to this promised land. That brings the wealth into context. Deuteronomy 8, you know, you think about the Bible.
04:18 You’ve gone through Genesis, Amen, and the creation of the earth and the flood account and all this. You’ve gone through Exodus where the Lord delivers the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt. And now in Deuteronomy they’re in the wilderness, Amen.
04:32 They have spent 40 years in the wilderness. They’re getting ready by the leading of Joshua, which God has appointed to lead them into the promised land as Moses is taken off the scene. They’re getting ready to go to Canaan land, the land of milk and honey.
04:48 And God’s saying, don’t forget me when you go to this rich, wealthy place, when you have these rich, wealthy things. Well, isn’t that interesting? Have you ever spent time in a very rich place? I have, Amen, I have. I didn’t have the bank account to belong there, but I spent many years in a town and I live in with grandma in her house, which was many years, she had built, or not built, she had bought many years earlier.
05:17 But that town had become quite wealthy. And it’s interesting, instead of people turning to God to solve their problems, they were turning to their wealth. Then you’d see on TV some village in the mountains of Brazil or Colombia or somewhere in South America and the people had nothing and they were praising God and rejoicing.
05:38 You say, wow, that’s different. Because in this town, people have everything and they’re complaining and turning to the world. Now, I don’t want to generalize.
05:44 I know there are people individually that are wealthy that love the Lord. I know that they were in the Bible, Amen. Joseph of Arimathea was one of them, Amen.
05:58 But that doesn’t take away from the fact that it seems as if, hey, you get a lot of wealth, you’re going to turn your back on God. And God’s saying, don’t do that. And by the way, when you turn your back on God, what happens? You don’t fear him, right? Because if you feared him, you wouldn’t do that.
06:08 So God’s saying, don’t forget me and you should fear me. This is saying that through Moses here, he’s telling the Israelites to serve him again. When you turn your back on God and you don’t fear God, then you say, I’m not going to serve him.
06:22 You start trying to live for the world, Amen. He implores through Moses, the Israelites has chosen people to keep his commands and to cast out all the enemies. And people will read that and say, well, how can a loving God call the Israelites to cast out all of the residents of the promised land? But yet for many, many years, the Lord had allowed them to stay there to repent and to get right with him.
06:48 And they were living in abject sin and reproach, and they refused to get right with him. Surely he sent prophets their way. Surely he gave them discernment enough to understand what he desired of them and they wouldn’t do it.
07:00 And so his judgment on these people was to send the Israelites in and get them out. And he’s saying, cast them all out. Don’t have a mixed multitude, get rid of them and teach the next generations what God did for Israel, leading them out of bondage in Egypt.
07:16 And I love when the Lord puts this through his prophets on the hearts of men in the Bible about keep my, keep, keep what I’ve done for the next generation. And I love this because you can look up these holidays, amen. And it’s wonderful to look up these holidays, these Jewish holidays that still exist today.
07:35 And they have a direct relation to something that happened in the Bible and a command from God to keep that forever. And then here it is kept forever despite all odds. And if you know anyone that is of the Jewish faith or Orthodox faith, faith or even not, these holidays are incredibly important to them because they were commanded by God himself to keep them forever and, and to remind the children and the next generation of what God did.
08:04 Now, all of this is taught to, to, to, um, the Israelites for their preservation. It was for their sake to do these things. Is this not true with the Bible as a whole for us as people today that the Bible is, um, as my old preacher used to say, basic instructions before leaving earth, I think that was the acronym B I B L E. Amen.
08:32 That the Bible is our guide and, and, and what God is putting in there for us is for our own preservation. Amen. Like I’m going to take a very simple one, thou shall not steal.
08:44 Okay. If I listened to that, then I don’t have to worry about ever being accused of stealing because I’m listening to what God told me to do. And I don’t have to worry about transgressing God’s law.
08:51 I don’t have to worry about, uh, hurting someone else. I don’t have to worry about, uh, the consequences of that, like going to court or jail is the Bible says thou shall not steal. Amen.
09:05 And you take that down all the way, uh, to the littlest thing. Amen. The littlest, littlest thing, uh, not taking an extra straw from the restaurant or something.
09:16 And you become a pretty good abiding citizen in that regard. So you see, it is for my good that God’s commanding me to do something that he has designed for me to do, or to stay away from things that he has not designed for me to do. Amen.
09:30 It’s taught for my preservation. Like it’s taught for your preservation. Bring this back to the idea that God provides power to get wealth.
09:42 Well, he is giving throughout Deuteronomy, the Israelites has chosen people instructions on how they can essentially be wealthy. Right. He’s saying, okay, here is this list of things I want you to do.
09:51 And of course I’m paraphrasing, but you can start Deuteronomy five and go all the way up chapter after chapter. He’s giving these sage instructions, these wise instructions as a wise master builder. Amen.
10:03 As the wisest of all. Okay. Of the, uh, of the all knowing, how do we not recognize God’s great wisdom? You know, we’ll look at the Bible.
10:13 We’ll look at life and we’ll just say, ah, well it’s, it’s different now, or I’m so busy or whatever. We’re ignoring God’s great wisdom. The Lord has a plan and it is a good plan.
10:23 It’s a good plan for you. It’s a good plan for me. It was a good plan for the Israelites, even though the minority is the only one that will follow them.
10:34 Right. Even though the minority for, for example, uh, the Israelites were a great minority, right? And he gave them victory over seven different people groups that occupy the land of Canaan. That’s Deuteronomy seven, including giants.
10:52 If you remember that they, there was giants in the land and here are the little Israelites and they’re worried, but he gave victory even though they weren’t the majority. Amen. And today there’s a small minority that might, maybe following the Lord.
11:04 Amen. But he will give that minority victory, even when it looks like defeat, trust me, it’s victory if it’s from God. Amen.
11:13 And so God encourages throughout Deuteronomy, don’t be afraid. Don’t be discouraged. Remember what God did in Egypt.
11:21 We can again, take these principles, imply them right back to our life that we should not fear tomorrow because we, we can look back at yesterday and see what God did yesterday and be assured that he’s going to do it today and tomorrow. And that hope that blessed hope we have in Jesus Christ alone should not allow us to be discouraged. We should not be discouraged.
11:38 And then on top of that, if we’ve accepted Christ as savior, we have the comforter living within us to comfort us in this broken world. Cause God knows the world we live in. And on top of that, we’re told throughout scripture, especially in the new Testament, that we are to look for that blessed hope that we are to basically, or essentially, I don’t know how to put it, but we are to endure what’s happening here today.
12:03 One church I visited, I love this. They’re saying was suffer well. And I can’t remember the church.
12:15 Uh, it was a really interesting church. I think it was like a Dutch reformed movement or something and a great pastor there. And he was talking about suffer well.
12:23 And I was like, suffer well. And there were, there were full, how you guys keep a full church when you’re telling everyone to suffer. But, um, that’s just a little joke for the fundamental preachers out there.
12:28 Uh, but yeah, it was true. It is true because we suffer well because we’re looking for that blessed hope, all that blessed hope. If the Israelites would just keep God’s commandments and believe in fear in him, God would bless.
12:43 They wouldn’t have sickness or barrenness or hunger or enemies to conquer or take them away. That’s not my word. That’s God’s word in the Bible.
12:47 Amen. Deuteronomy eight says, look, you’ve been hungry. You’ve been humbled in the wilderness, but you proved by what God had done, uh, through, through those 40 years in the wilderness.
12:57 If you recall, God provided shoes that didn’t wax old. If you have shoes, I’ve got, I like running shoes and stuff. My wife, you know, we try to exercise a little bit here and there.
13:07 And you know, these shoes, you wear them a month and they’re done. Well, these Israelites all the way back then had shoes that never waxed old garments that never waxed old, that never got old, that never ran out manna that fell from the sky. Every need that they had was provided by God.
13:24 How about this? Let’s look around here today. What need do we have core need? Do we have that has not been provided by God? In fact, in the word, he tells us not to worry about where we’re going to have our meal or what clothes we’ll have because he already knows what we need. And how true is that? And if we look around, we can see God providing that for us.
13:43 And so we need to loop back here for the sake of time and realize that yes, this is old Testament, but it’s still applicable here today. If we follow the Lord, we will have peace. And if we trust and fear the Lord, we will understand his power and we’ll realize that he provides the power to get wealth and that he will give us true wealth, which is only found in Christ alone.
14:05 That is true wealth and it’s only found in Christ alone and it comes from God himself and he wants you to have it here today. Tune in next time as we get back into this message. Thank you for listening.
14:15 Take care. God bless and Amen.