Alan Hardy’s Blog

This is Session One from Money and Life, a seminar held at St Peters Anglican Church in September 2007.

As far as money is concerned, some things in life are beyond our control. We don’t choose the country in which we are born, which is a key factor affecting our scope of opportunity. We don’t choose whether we will be born in to wealth or whether we will be groomed by parents or mentors at some formative stage of life to manage our finances well; whether our broader social environment will endow us with vision or horizons which inspires us to amass wealth. Or whether by virtue of our vocation, our natural giftings, we have the capacity to earn well. We don’t choose whether we, by some other stroke of providence, have been in the right place at the right time to take advantage of some opportunity. As in the parable of the talents, where one was given five talents, another two, and another one, we have been endowed unequally.

However we are equal in a crucial way: not in how much we have or will have, but in the way in which we take what we have and use it responsibly and wisely.

What do you think about money? The question could rather be caged as what do we think about money? It is common enough to talk about the idea of a person’s worldview; their overall framework of beliefs about the ways things are, the way things should be. The thinkers who discuss these things extend this by talking about worldviews as bundles of belief that are shared among people in a culture, who live in the same period of time. If this is true then we might talk about my ideas on money, but we can also talk our ideas on money.

Read on: Money and Life

“He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need” Eph 4:28

At the outset this verse seems to be answering a ‘how do I live as a human being’ type of question. We can see a face value meaning readily enough: don’t steal, work at something useful, and in so doing have something to give to others; that in this way we can live as responsible members of society. It’s the beginnings of a Christian work ethic, of sorts.

But, we should hesitate to view the passage in isolation. It’s important first to understand Paul’s purpose in writing to the Ephesians and where the text is coming from in terms of its purpose, flow and content.

In the broadest view, Ephesians is concerned with “the eternal purposes of God, which He is fulfilling through His Son Jesus Christ, and working out in and through the Church” .

And Paul urges us to comprehend the breadth of these things, before he speaks to us about our manner of life and how we should behave. Consider his prayers in 1:18 (“that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints” etc) and 3:18 (that you “may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ”).

There are a number of threads of thought which Paul keeps restating and these form a basis to understand the verse we have before us:

1. God’s purpose is to bring all things in heaven and earth under the headship of Christ. The church, as Christ’s body is swooped up in this grand task
2. The idea of us being God’s possession. Being His possession, we are called to be his workers.
3. God enables us to the task he has called us to. We are His workmanship and he is bringing us into conformity with what He is like.

Read on: Christians & Work

This is an excerpt from a recent study on decision making.

The human faculty for decision making is the will. In the words of Jonathan Edwards, the will is “that by which the mind chooses any thing.” The will is the mind deciding. When a decision is to be made the will is determined “by that motive, which, as it stands in view of the mind, is the strongest”. Thus, according to Edwards, decisions are made on the basis of the strongest influence.

It follows that the goal of a man who wants to make good decisions should be to acquire, as it were, the right store of strongest influences. Another way to put this is that such a man should seek wisdom and experience which will guide him properly in his decisions.

This helps us to better understand why Romans 12:2 says that we are transformed by the renewing of our minds.

It also becomes clearer how God, through His sovereign control over all things, arranges the experience of those He loves so that the strongest influences in us are shaped in a way that will direct future decisions according to His will. In this way He directs our paths, causing various acts of our will to be irresistible, whether they relate to matters of salvation or otherwise.

The ways of God are intriguing.

Read On: Decision Making
See also: Decision Making and the Thinking Christian