Our third meditation on this text considers the emphasis, “why have you forsaken me?”  If we are honest, this is the version with which we most closely identify.  It is not just the forsakenness, or the fact that it is happening for some reason, or even that it comes from a loving God.  It is the fact that it is happening to me! The result of this emphasis is either guilt or anger.  We .

We are looking at the different interpretations of this text that come from the way the key words are emphasized.  In the first blog we looked at, “why have you forsaken me?” and we contemplated the purposes of God.  Here we will look at, “why have you forsaken me?”  This is a question of the character of God.  It is direct, stinging and personal.  It skirts the universal, theoretical form of the question and .

Have you ever played the game where you take a simple sentence and see how the meaning changes when you change the emphasis?  Start with, “Why did you eat that apple?”  Now read it as, “Why did you eat that apple?” or “Why did you eat that apple?” or “why did you eat that apple?” or even “why did you eat that apple?”  The meanings change significantly, don’t they? Matthew 27:46 records Jesus’ anguished .

The comment caught me completely off-guard.  I was proudly showing a colleague my new truck; a sleek black Dodge Ram 2500 long bed with a V8 Hemi engine that my kids named Darth Vader.  Instead of the expected words of admiration, however, this friend just retorted, “You are really supporting terrorism with that thing.”  He said it with a smile, but I heard the seriousness in his tone. What took me back was not .

The sixth and final temptation in the way we as leaders deal with money is to play the owner and not the steward. The previous five temptations may be wrapped up and subsumed under this one powerful Christian concept. We are stewards not owners. Our earthly existence can be understood on four planes; our relationships with God, with ourselves, with our neighbor and with the creation itself. On all four planes we live in .

The fifth temptation in our role as leaders in relationship to money is to separate our personal spiritual journey from our work as a Christian leader. In our postmodern culture we are encouraged to compartmentalize our private life from our public service. Postmodernism teaches us that It is perfectly acceptable if not downright beneficial to live one life at home and another at the office. We are told that there is no meta-ethic that .

The fourth temptation we face as leaders is kingdom building. Loving one master and despising the other calls us to be one-kingdom Christians. Christ’s call on our life is uncompromising and unequivocal. We are to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow him. There is place for only one allegiance, one Lord, one master. The abundant Christian life is only found in the total surrender of all we have and all we are .

We are dealing with the temptations that face us as Christian leaders in relationship to money.  The third temptation is to yield to the power that is inherent in all dealings with money. The apostle Paul warned his young colleague Timothy, “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” (1 Timothy 6:10) What tempts us is not the love of a neutral medium of exchange but the desire for the .

The second temptation, and one that is a natural product of the first is the seduction of tying our self-image and that of our organization to our financial status. This may seem less threatening than the first temptation, but beware. Consider the ways that organizations talk about themselves and measure success. While not-for-profit ministries may pride themselves on leading with mission-focused accomplishments, true success is almost always measured in financial terms. Pastors talk to .

Consider the following definition, “Money is any object that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given country or socio-economic context. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally, a standard of deferred payment.”  In this functional definition money is amoral; a neutral medium for the exchange of value. It carries no .