daily java

Daily Java:

What is causing the quarrels and fights among you? Don’t they come from the evil desires at war within you? You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it. And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong—you want only what will give you pleasure. (James 4:1-3)

The Occupy Wall Street thing is going on full swing. Several cities have been “occupied” and people have made known their dissatisfaction with the way things are going financially.

But it seems that the main point of all of these “occupations” has been: We want more and we do not want to have to work for it.

There is a basic desire in the hearts of all humanity to have more. We want better homes and better living conditions, a better car, nicer clothing, better food – everything we have, we would like to upgrade to something better.

This is a natural desire. And there is nothing wrong with it in and of itself.

It is when the greed comes in that it becomes wrong. It is when it begins to possess you – your possessions begin to own you – that it becomes bad.

Wealth and better stuff as such is not bad. it is the love of the stuff that is bad.

The apostle Paul said in 1 Timothy 6:10: For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. And some people, craving money, have wandered from the true faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows.

It is not money, or for that matter stuff, that is the problem. It is the love of money, the love of stuff. You fight for it and grasp for it and devote your whole life to the acquisition of stuff and yet you still do not have enough.

James, in this passage, even says that you don’t have it because you do not ask for it, and when you ask for it, you are only asking out of greed.

I am not sure how that plays out in a life of people who are devoted to God and yet still do not have what they need. But in general, it is true.

Any time you spend your life trying to get things, you never have enough.

The end result of the Occupy Wall Street philosophy? 2 Timothy 3:2: For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents, and ungrateful. They will consider nothing sacred. The problem is, the more you have the more you want. The more you are given, the more you want. The richer you become through greed, the richer you want to become.

Hebrews 13:5 says: Don’t love money; be satisfied with what you have. That is kind of hard, especially in our modern society where all the things you do not have are paraded daily on TV and billboards and in the stores. You are constantly reminded that your furniture is tired, your car is broken, your clothing is out of style, that you are dissatisfied.

And the fighting begins. Not over noble things like freedom, but over income distribution and thinly disguised greed.

Anything that comes from that will hurt you far more than bless you.

And have you noticed, that these kind of things always end with people looting and stealing. Nothing that ends this way can possibly be blessed by God.