6:9-13 The Lord’s prayer. It’s not an incantation that you should repeat verbatim so that you receive things. It’s a model of the spirit in which we should pray. Make God first in your life, desire to do His will, trust in Him for daily needs and treat others in the same way that God has treated you. Specifically, you have been forgiven a great deal. Imitate that forgiveness for others.
6:14 tells us how important forgiveness is. If you don’t forgive, then you aren’t forgiven. Think about this: what would the world look like if we forgave each other when we did something wrong? How many wars would never be fought? Without war there is a greater likelihood of prosperity…how many countries would have clean water, food and medication if we simply learned to forgive one another, and not hold onto offenses? Children have a better chance of becoming normal healthy adults when their parents are together. What if we learned to forgive each other in our families? How much different would our society be? Our prisons might be half full, and our police departments fully funded. This isn’t rocket science, but it has more potential to change the world than rocket science does.
6:19-34 Greed is the foundation for all kinds of evil. I was talking about war a moment ago…many wars are fought based on greed. Robberies, Auto theft, workplace theft, etc. all based on greed. Everyone of us pays the price for greed. Our insurance rates are higher, our gasoline prices are higher. It’s possible that our whole system of commerce is based on greed. It’s not based on what the product is intrinsically worth, it’s based on “how much can I get out of it”? Greed from the top or the bottom of the social order translates into higher prices, and we have them both.
Why is our first thought to spend everything we have on ourselves? That’s greedy. and it’s out of focus. The passage about “your eye is a lamp” seems to me to be talking about how we process what we see. If every time we see something new we say “I want that” our lamp is bad. We could be greedy and not even know it! It would be wise for us to pray that God would take any hint of greed out of our lives.
Think of this: when we greedily hoard away money, resources….whatever.. we are in effect saying that we cannot trust God to provide for us in the future. I don’t want to go overboard here….it is possible that God is providing NOW for future events, so you need to prepare wisely. (I’m thinking of how Joseph was told about 7 years of plenty, to be followed by 7 years of famine in Genesis) There is such a thing as godly planning ahead for your future. But I also think we have to balance that thought against what our expectations and plans for the future are. Here’s what I mean: planning for the future is fine, but are you planning to live more luxuriously in the future than you do now? Have you talked to God about that? Maybe if we asked God what He wanted us to put away for the future it would look a little different than what we are currently planning.
For some it would be a call to save more and spend less now. For others it would be to give more generously now and save less for later.
Don’t let greed and desire for things get it’s teeth into you. It is a hard and unpleasant process to break the hold that greed has on us. Better not to be caught up in it in the first place.
Thinking aloud,