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Wayne Grudem explains what the Bible says about spending, saving and charity

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Bible study that hits the spot
Bible study that hits the spot

A practical lecture on money – spending, saving, charitable giving – from famous pastor Wayne Grudem.

I like the way that Wayne Grudem navigates the Bible finding the passages that tell you who God is, so that you can make better decisions by analyzing alternatives and choosing the one that gives your Boss a maximum return on investment. He’s very practical.

The MP3 file is here.

The PDF outline is here.

Spending:

  • Christianity does not teach asceticism (= don’t enjoy anything in this world), Paul condemns it in 1 Timothy 4:1-5
  • When you buy nice things, even if it is a little more expensive, it’s an opportunity to be thankful for nice things that God has provided
  • Even being rich is OK, but don’t let it make you haughty and arrogant, and don’t set your hopes on your money (see 1 Tim 6:17)
  • It is important for you to earn money, and you are supposed to use it to support yourself and be independent
  • It is possible to overspend and live recklessly (Luke 15:13) and it’s also possible to overspend and live too luxuriously
  • Increasing your income through career progression is wise, because it allows you to give away more and save more
  • God gives us freedom to decide how much we spend, how much we give away, and how much we save
  • every choice a Christian makes with money will give him or her more or less reward in his or her afterlife
  • Do not spend more than you have – you should make every effort to get out of debt as quickly as possible

Saving:

  • Saving money is wise so you can help yourself and others, and have money in your old age when you will not be working
  • If you do not save your own money, you end up being dependent on others (e.g. – family or taxpayers)
  • Not saving money for the future is a way of “putting God to the test” (Matt 4:7)
  • You are to “be dependent on no one”, to the extent that you can (1 Thes 4:12)
  • We don’t know the future, that’s why we should prepare for an emergency, and buy insurance to guard (James 4:13-17)
  • It’s right for us to learn how to save to be able to buy bigger assets, like a car or a college education
  • Saving and investing in stocks and bonds lets people in business start and grow companies, creating jobs and new products
  • Don’t over-save, trusting too much in money more than you trust in God (Ps 62.10; Matt 6:19,24; Luke 12:15-21)

Giving:

  • it is required for the people of God to give something out of what they earn, but no percentage is specified (Deut 26:12-13)
  • you do not give money to become right with God, you can’t earn your salvation
  • a Christian gives to show God that you trust him to take care of you, and to experience trusting him through your giving
  • the quality of your resurrection life with God is affected by giving you do for the Kingdom (Phil 4, Matt 6:19-21; 1 Tim 6:18-19)
  • when you get involved in the lives of others and give to them, you have the joy of experiencing caring for others (Acts 20:35)
  • it’s possible to give too little, but it’s also possible to give too much – be careful about pride creeping in as well

The first part of this lecture made me think of my treat for the week, which is to get a double chicken burrito bowl after my weight lifting. It is very easy to say grace when you are hovering over a double chicken burrito bowl. It is good to have nice things especially when it makes you thankful for what you have.

I was so happy listening to this talk because he was condemning bad stewardship, which I see in a lot of young people these days. I was happy until he got to the part about trusting in your savings for your security, and then I thought – that’s what I do wrong! I save a lot but it’s not just for emergencies and to share with others, like he was saying – I want a sense of security. This was more of a temptation in my 20s than it is now in my 30s, though.

Charity should hurt

I can remember being in my first full-time job as a newly hired junior programmer when the 2001 recession struck. I would cry while signing checks to support William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith ministry, because I was so scared. I had no family or friends where I lived to help me if anything went wrong, and that’s been the story of my working life. If anything goes wrong, there is no backup. But it’s that experience of crying when I gave that allows me to say today “that’s when I became the man I am, that’s what a man does when he is a follower of Jesus”. If you are not doing the actions of charity, then you will not having the experience of trusting God and letting him lead you. There is more to the Christian life than just saying the right things – you have to do the right things.

Don’t follow your heart

If you’re scared about giving when you are young, then do what I did in my 20s: work 70-hour weeks, get promoted often, and save everything you earn. I volunteered every Saturday for 9 months in order to get my first white-collar part-time job when I was still in high-school. The faster you increase your savings, the easier it’s going to be to take a genuine interest in caring for the people around you. Read Phil 1 (fellowship), Phil 2 (concern for others), and Phil 4 (charity). Turn off your emotions and desires when it comes to choosing what to study and what work to do, and put Philippians into practice. Your freedom to give is very much tied to the quality of your decisions of what to study, where to work, how much you spend on entertainment, and so on. That’s why you need to turn off your feelings and desires and do what works, even it it’s not fun, and even if it involves responsibilities, expectations and obligations.

News

NY Times deletes tweet about sexual assault after Biden campaign complains

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I wanted to get the facts on the woman who has accused Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden of sexual assault. I have a rule such that I don’t believe women who make accusations without involving the police. But this accuser has involved the police, and she also has many, many witnesses. After we get the facts, we’ll see how Democrats in news media are protecting their boy Biden.

This article from Current Affairs had a pretty good description of what we know about the accuser:

And I remember he just had me up against the wall and the wall was cold. It happened all at once. The gym bag, I don’t know where it went. I handed it to him. It was gone and then his hands were on me and underneath my clothes. And then he went down my skirt, but then up inside it and he penetrated me with his fingers. And he was kissing me at the same time and he was saying something to me. He said several things, I can’t remember everything he said. I remember a couple of things. I remember him saying first before, like as he was doing it, “do you want to go somewhere else?” And then him saying to me when I pulled away, when he got finished doing what he was doing and I pulled back and he said, “come on man, I heard you liked me.” And it’s that phrase [that] stayed with me because I kept thinking what I might’ve said [to make him think that]. And I can’t remember exactly, if he said “I thought,” or “I heard,” but it’s like he implied I had done this.

A different Current Affairs article reports that groups that help women who allege sexual assault won’t help Reade.

According to a report by the Intercept, in January of this year Reade approached Time’s Up, a project of the National Women’s Law Center designed to provide legal and public relations assistance to sexually abused women. Time’s Up declined to help Reade… Notably, the PR firm that Time’s Up uses to help publicize women’s stories, SKDKnickerbocker, is run by Anita Dunne, a senior adviser to Joe Biden.

The article notes that “believe all women” writers from Salon and Jezebel don’t believe this woman. I’m surprised they didn’t slut-shame her or mansplain to her that rape is OK for Democrats.

If you only watch CNN or MSNBC to get news, then you still haven’t even heard about the story.

Fox News explains:

For 18 days… Reade’s claim was not covered by the biggest media outlets… CNN, MSNBC and the three broadcast networks did not offer any on-air coverage or articles on their websites about the alleged assault. The New York Times and The Washington Post, two papers that dedicated extensive reporting to sex assault allegations made against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, were also mum on the matter.

In addition, in seven televised interviews Biden has done since Reade came forward with her allegation, he was never asked about it. This includes three interviews on MSNBC, two appearances on CNN and appearances on the Sunday morning news shows on ABC and NBC. Prominent anchors like Anderson Cooper, Chuck Todd and George Stephanopoulos never questioned the presumptive Democratic nominee, instead focusing on the pandemic and President Trump’s handling of the crisis.

The New York Times wrote a report about the accusation but they had to remove anything damaging to Biden from their report.

Fox News reports:

The Times raised eyebrows on Sunday after it deleted a tweet and tweaked its report about the 1993 accusation made by former Biden staffer Tara Reade, which originally read, “No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade’s allegation. The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.”

No correction or editor’s note was made in the report…

Why was the report modified to cover for Biden?

On Monday, Times media columnist Ben Smith sat down with his boss to discuss the report and pressed him on several criticisms of the report, including the edit.

“I want to ask about some edits that were made after publication, the deletion of the second half of the sentence… Why did you do that?” Smith asked.

“…I think that the campaign thought that the phrasing… made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct…” Baquet responded.

I can imagine that if the mainstream media “journalists” were present during the Biden sexual assault, they would have cheered him on. “Hold her down and force yourself into her body! We’ll lie about it later to cover for you, don’t worry! She’s just a stupid, weak female employee!”

Now, if you ask the journalists who write the newspapers and talk on TV, they will all say “we shouldn’t believe her because she’s accusing a Democrat” or “you have to let Democrat men rape because we don’t want to lose abortion and gay marriage”. Remember, this is the party that voted for Bill Clinton. Harvey Weinstein was celebrated by Democrat politicians for his many, many donations to the Democrat party. Jeffrey Epstein gave huge donations to Democrat candidates, and Democrat politicians loved him too.  They don’t have a problem with rape, when it’s their guy doing the raping.

News

CNN and MSNBC cut off Democrat governors praising Trump’s handling of virus crisis

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Did you see Trump’s briefing on Monday night about the Wuhan virus? He was able to show a timeline of his responses to the virus, as well as clips of various Democrat governors praising his handling of the crisis. He also had tons of good news to report, and re-affirmed his intention to re-open the country at the beginning of May. But CNN and MSNBC were not pleased.

Here’s the 4-minute video that Trump showed that got him into trouble with the Democrat journalists:

The Daily Wire explains:

President Donald Trump played a video during the White House Coronavirus Press Briefing on Monday that showed the media’s initial response to the coronavirus outbreak and highlighted his response to the outbreak and showed Democratic governors around the country praising the Trump administration for the work they did.

[…]The video highlighted the following comments from governors across the country. Here are a few of the examples included in the video:

  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D): “His team is on it. They’ve been responsive late at night, early in the morning and they’ve thus far been doing everything they can do and I want to say thank you and I want to say that I appreciate it.
  • California Governor Gavin Newsom (D): “He returns calls. He reaches out, he’s been proactive. We could that Mercy ship down here in Los Angeles, that was directly because he sent it down here. 2,000 medical units came to the state of California, these FMS, these field medical stations, and that’s been very, very helpful.
  • Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R): “The president has been outstanding through all this, the vice president has been outstanding, members of the Coronavirus Task Force, very responsive.”
  • New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy (D): “We had asked if we could have, if New Jersey could access to a piece of the beds that are on the USNS Comfort and the president came back, called me, assured me a few minutes before I walked in here to say that they would grant that to New Jersey. So that’s big step for us in addition to all the other capacity. I thank the president and vice president who were on the call.”

CNN cut away from the press conference shortly after the video started playing and MSNBC followed suit several moments later.

And here’s what CNN had on before cutting away, when Trump was explaining all the things that everyone (nurses, doctors, Army Corps of Engineers, etc.) were doing to solve the actual problem:

You won’t be able to get an accurate view of the world if you watch CNN and MSNBC. They can’t tell you anything that makes Trump look competent. They can only tell you things that make Trump look incompetent. And they’ll even lie, in order to do the latter.

I noticed that the mainstream media is bashing Trump for not taking the virus seriously, but the fact is that he took action to ban incoming flights from China at the end of January. Dr. Fauci didn’t even think there was a problem as late as the end of Fenbruary – which is not an insult at all, because that’s how things looked based on what we knew at that time.

The Daily Wire explains:

Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has served under three Republican and three Democrat presidents, apparently did not realize the threat of coronavirus as he said on February 29 that the virus did not pose a significant threat to Americans.

Fauci was asked on NBC News, “Dr. Fauci, it’s Saturday morning in America. People are waking up right now with real concerns about this; they want to go to malls and movies, maybe the gym as well. Should we be changing our habits, and if so, how?”

Fauci responded, “No. Right now, at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis. Right now the risk is still low, but this could change; I’ve said that many times, even on this program. You’ve gotta watch out because although the risk is low now, you don’t need to change anything that you’re doing. When you start to see community spread, this could change and force you to become much more attentive to doing things that would protect you from spread.”

Far-left “journalists” are trying to make it look like Trump doesn’t listen to Dr. Fauci or the other scientific experts, but Dr. Fauci says that’s not true:

I think it’s important for everyone to understand that the mainstream media is in league with the Democrat party, and they are constantly lying and distorting the truth in order to get their boy Joe Biden into the White House in November. (And they don’t care that he’s been credibly accused of sexual assault, any more than they care about the credible allegations of rape against their boy Bill Clinton).

It’s almost time for the campaign to start. Get yourself lawn sign, make a donation, volunteer your time, share stories on social media, etc. Whatever it takes to stop these secular leftist fascists.