Better Than The Lottery

“Better is little with the fear of the LORD than great treasure and trouble therewith.”  Proverbs 15:16

Fearing the LORD, that is, acknowledging His power and sovereignty, giving Him the honor and respect due Him, and knowing that His judgments are righteous even when you don’t understand His ways, doesn’t mean one must live in poverty.  However, if possession of great treasure leads one to depend on their wealth rather than on the LORD, then he or she would have been better off to never have been the possessor of riches.

There have been many stories about people who have won huge amounts of money in a lottery and then ended up miserable and sometimes broke.  You say, “Well, I’d like to try my hand at having all that money.  I’d certainly be a better manager of a windfall like that.  I could do so much with that to help other people”.  Don’t we all feel that way?  I don’t know anyone who has won a big lottery and neither have I won “ga-zillions”, especially since I don’t buy lottery tickets, thus no one I know or myself have been tested in that arena so none of us really knows how we would handle the temptation of having such wealth all of a sudden.  I have known a couple of families whose businesses made them affluent.  One family stayed the same, friendly, down to earth people that they had always been, while the other family really changed.  They flaunted their affluency, buying expensive items, and looking down their noses at the rest of us.  The funny thing is, though, they both lost most of their incomes for different reasons.  Easy come, easy go, some say.

While it is good to have ambition in order to improve one’s family economic status, it is not good to do so at the expense of our relationship with the One who died to save us.  Jesus said that we couldn’t serve two masters because we would come to hate one and cling to the other (Matthew 6:24) basically meaning that if we attempt to serve God and money, one of these will have to win out over the other.  We have to make a choice.  When we choose the LORD, then we have Him for all eternity.  If we choose money, we lose it all.

If we really think about it, money can make demands on us that God would never require.  Money is certainly helpful and necessary when used in the proper way, but can be a curse when it harms our relationship with God and with others.