How Much Do You Need?

      A girl won a place on her California high school cheerleading team.  These cheerleaders were elected by the student body.  It wasn’t based on skill.  To win a position on the team was simply to being voted one of the cutest and most popular girls on campus.  They weren’t very good cheerleaders but they didn’t have to be.  That wasn’t the point.

       Unfortunately, popularity contests inevitably create "losers." Among the losers of this election was a girl whose envy had no limit.  This girl had lost out to a rival of many years standing who time and time again had won the recognition she craved.  Her envy got the best of her.  Eventually she murdered her competitor, and was able to take her position on the cheerleading team.  Yes, I know it sounds like a bad movie but it actually happened.

       When the truth was discovered, emotional shock waves ran through the school and community.  The incident clearly demonstrated the extremes to which a young person could go in pursuit of glamour and popularity. 

       The morning newspaper and the Bible are filled with examples of desire that are nurtured and are then expressed in destructive behavior. 

       Paul writes in Colossians that covetousness is the same thing as idolatry.  If you are willing to disobey God in order to have something -- a person, a thing, a position -- that something has become your true God.

       Covetousness may seem petty compared with the sins of murder, adultery or robbery or deceit, but it is often at the core of these.  It is what drives people to betray a spouse, to steal, cheat, lie and even kill.  It compels people to evil in order to grab money, fame, prestige and power. We need to know the power of God over our desires as in no other areas of our lives.      

       Now we are creatures of desire.  That's how God made us.  Desire is healthy and good until it becomes disordered or obsessive. It then takes a quick step from desire to covetousness.

       The tenth commandment differs from the preceding commandments because instead of forbidding an action, it forbids a state of mind. The tenth commandment goes where no other human being can see.  You can be living an orgy of covetousness, and no one will know it.  It is an easily camouflaged interior sin.

       I don’t think this sermon is going that well.  I see a few people over here checking out.  I don’t blame them.

       I have to apologize for this sermon.  I didn't have much time to work on it.  I wish I had written a sermon like John Ortberg wrote on this text.  Of course he has the time -- he has a full time secretary.  But that's not really the issue.  God gave him an ability to illustrate and pick up ideas that I just don't have. I couldn't have written a sermon like his if I had six full time secretaries and could spend 40 hours working on it.  But maybe if I had a better computer. John has a great computer.  It takes a lot of time but his wife doesn't mind.  Maybe if my wife was more supportive.

       Do you know what I just did?  I just broke the tenth commandment.  I coveted someone's stuff, someone's staff, someone's spouse and someone's spiritual gift. Covetousness is very subtle.  It tells us the great lie that once we get when we want we will attain happiness.  Our experience tells us once we get what we want we want a little more.  We are like children who discard their Christmas toys hours after they have receive them. We want new ones.  This is the law of diminishing returns.  The more we get, the less satisfied we are, so the more we want.

       A  Russian peasant named Pahom in Leo Tolstoy's short story "How Much Land Does A Man Need?" has become a man of property.  His ownership inflames him with a desire for more land.  Pahom learns of vast lands that can be obtained for a relative pittance from a far-off nomadic people called the Bashkirs.  So Pahom travels to this distant land.  It is all virgin soil, as flat as the palm of one's hand and as black as the seed of a poppy, with grasses chest high.  "And what will be the price?" asks Pahom. 

       "Our price is always the same: one thousand rubles a day."  Pahom does not understand.  "A day? What measure is that? How many acres would that be?"   "We do not know how to reckon it out," says the chief.  "We sell it by the day.  As much as you can go round on your feet in a day is yours, and the price is one thousand rubles a day." 

       Pahom is surprised.  But in a day you can get round a large tract of land," he said.  The chief laughs.  "It will all be yours!" he confirms. "But there is one condition: if you don't return by sunset the same day to the spot where you started, your money is lost."

       Pahom reached the plain as the morning sun was beginning to kindle.  Placing his thousand rubles in the fur hat the chieftain had set on the ground, he began.  His pace was neither slow nor quick, but as he walked through the land, he picked up stride because with each step the land seemed better.  In an effort to include a particularly inviting field, he went much too far before he set his marker and turned.  Such was Pahom's procedure as he hurried along even faster under the hot sun.

        Exhausted after circling such a huge tract, Pahom turned back toward the starting hill, walking with difficulty.  His legs began to drag.  His chest was working like a blacksmith's bellows, his heart beat like a hammer, his legs sometimes failed him.  But Pahom could see the hill with Bashkirs cheering him on.

       Tolstoy closes: “Pahom looked at the sun, which had reached the earth: one side of it had already disappeared.  With all his remaining strength he rushed on, bending his body forward so that his legs could hardly follow fast enough to keep him from falling.  Just as he reached the hillock it suddenly grew dark.  He looked up -- the sun had already set! He gave a cry: "All my labor has been in vain," though he, and was about to stop, but he heard the Bashkirs still shouting, and remembered that though to him, from below, the sun seemed to have set, they on the hillock could still see it.  He took a long breath and ran up the hillock. It was still light there. 

       He reached the top and saw the cap. Before it sat the chief laughing and holding his sides.  Pahom uttered a cry.  His legs gave way beneath him.  He fell forward and reached the cap with his     hands.

       The chief’s servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahom to lie in, and buried him in it.  Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed. 

       "How Much Land Does A Man Need?" is a tale of immense power and universal appeal because covetous greed diseases the soul of humanity. Pahom's race is being run right now through the streets of Tokyo and New York and Los Angeles and along the tree-lined avenues of Moorpark -- with the same tragic ending.

       We of course, reject the disease as sub-Christian.  But the fact is, every day a preacher somewhere presides over the grave of a buttoned-down Christian brother or well-groomed Christian sister who has neurotically and compulsively sacrificed everything, including family, health and faith, in the headlong charge up Pahom’s elusive hilltop.

       We somehow believe that if we had lots of money, we would be the exception.  But the Bible is clear: Ecclesiastes 5:10 --"whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income.  This too is meaningless." Paul will later say in 1 Timothy 6:10: "The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil."

       There is no problem with what the Bible says.  The problem is us.  We need to believe the Bible!

       There is, however, a positive side to this commandment.   Put positively is a call for contentment.

       The Apostle Paul knew the secret of contentment. He wrote from prison to his Philippian friends and converts, "I have learned to be satisfied with what I have. I know what it is to be in need and what it is to have had more than enough.  I have learned this secret, so that anywhere, at anytime, I am content, whether I am full or hungry, whether I have an abundance or too little."

       Paul was not super human.  He was not above the drives and labors of life.  He had suffered disease, hunger, shipwreck, beatings, snakebite, and imprisonment.  He knows his secret doesn’t lies in himself, but in Christ.   So he says, “I have strength to face all conditions by the power that Christ gives me."

       Focus on Jesus.  That’s the cure for covetousness.

       It is all right to want.  We can't control our feelings.  Only when desire is left unchecked does it become covetousness.  Martin Luther's comment is really helpful here.  Luther said of temptation, "I can't stop a bird from flying over my head, but Ii can keep it form making a nest in my hair." We may not be able to stop the desire for more, more, more from surfacing, but we can prevent that desire from ballooning into a consuming passion.

        Is the song of your life the song of the peasant Pahom -- just a bit more -- just a bit more?  Then the song of your life is covetousness.  Your life song is idolatrous and the root of evil in your life.  Look deep into your life.  Are you covetous?  Does that covetousness make decisions for you?  If the answer is yes, then confess that sin of idolatry to Jesus and ask Him to help you discover and live the secret of contentment.