In spite of all this, they kept on sinning; in spite of his wonders, they did not believe. – Psalm 78:32

Today’s Scripture Reading (May 27, 2016): Psalm 78

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said that “one act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons.” He would have known, he was the preacher of a lot of sermons. But he also never left the sermon in the pulpit. When he stepped down from that holy place, he lived out the words that he had spoken. But then again, the purpose of the sermon is not always to inform us of what it is that we do not know. Oh, sometimes what is spoken is new, but often we already contain the knowledge. What the sermon tries to do is to spur us on from simple knowledge and belief toward obedience of the things we already know.

Currently, my sermons are all about money. And I have no doubt that most of what I have to say is known by those who dare to listen. We are in control of our own financial futures. The secret to being rich is not all that complicated. Spend less than you make. Live within your own means. The rich understand this. It is why there are many super-rich driving used cars. Long ago, when they were making much less, they learned the secret of living within their means and they have never left that practice. Sometimes they have even put artificial limits in place. Because in life, there should be decisions, and there should be things that we simply cannot afford. It is almost a laughable image. The very rich living on much less than they have, and the poor living on much more. But we need to understand that the rich are rich not because they have had all of the great opportunities, but because at some point they learned to live beneath what they had. And the money that built up gave them the opportunity that they could use to get rich. They knew and they were obedient to what they knew.

I am not sure that the Psalmist got this right. Whether it is now or in the days of the Psalmist, the trouble is seldom that we do not believe. The real problem is that we want to find the excuses so that we don’t have to obey – whatever it is that we know. If we obeyed even just to the extent of our knowledge, our lives would be transformed. But, in the end, it is easier to just find excuses not to obey. Not obeying is always the easier path and the reason why preachers have to continue to speak to encourage us to be obedient to the things that we already know.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Psalm 80