Watch Out and Guard Your Riches!

     When you live on a horse ranch, there is a long list of things that you need and you needed them yesterday. If only we had a second tractor, if only we had a bigger barn, if only we had a covered arena, then we would what? Be able to keep the horses healthier or safer. We'd be able to have more rideable hours, more convenient feeding schedules, or expend less effort catching the horses. Maybe if we had a new tractor, bigger barn, and a covered arena we'd be as nice a barn as the barn up the street.
     One lesson I have learned living on the ranch is that
you are never done making your wish list. Time to stop wishing and just be satisfied. Time to stop asking, "What could we do if...?" and start asking, "What can we do with what we have?" "What if we made what we had the best it can be?"
      The same concept applies to your home and all your many possessions. Sometimes when I look back at my life when I had little possessions, just a dorm room and a suitcase of belongings, I long for the simplicity and freedom that life gave me. If only I had known at the time what Rev. Clinger taught us this Sunday, "You have value and worth because of God's love, not because of the stuff you have accumulated." If I would have known, I would have embraced my life for all the value and worth that it possessed and would have known how truly rich I was.
     Luke 12:15  "life does not consist in the abundance of possessions."
     This is a powerful scripture. Not only does it talk about the dangers of equating the value and worth of our life with  the abundance of our  possessions but I believe it is warning us about losing the gift of life itself in the abundance of possessions. We give away our joy of life when we haven't got an abundance of possessions because we are not satisfied with what we do have. We begin to worry that others are doing something better than us because they have more. We think because they have more they are happier than we are and worth more than we are. We may even begin to value them more than others who have less.    
     When we have an abundance of possessions we can lose our joy because of the stress caused by an abundance of possessions including the chaos caused by clutter, the fear of becoming targets of thieves, and the time and cost of maintaining these possessions. Both instances can adversely impact our lives as we trade the joy of our relationships in the pursuit of possessions and then, in turn, struggle to guard them once we have them.
      In addition to the negative impact of possessions on our relationships is the negative impact they can have on our inner peace. Without them we worry we need them to be happy, with them we worry they will be taken away or damaged. Maybe with too many possessions we worry that we are only loved for our possessions or our wealth and not for who we are.
    "Guard yourselves and keep free from all covetousness (the immoderate desire for wealth, the greedy longing to have more); for a man’s life does not consist in and is not derived from possessing overflowing abundance or that which is over and above his needs." Luke 12:15 AMP
     Worth repeating:
"Watch out and guard yourselves from every kind of greed; because your true life is not made up of the things you own, no matter how rich you may be." Luke 12:14 GNT
       So look around and know where your true joy comes from. Be satisfied with what you have right now. Do not hold too tightly to your possessions. Monitor the worth you put on your possessions and the possessions of others so that you will not value the things more than the people in your life. Do not let others let you lose the peace you have being satisfied with what you have. This can readily happen through venues such as facebook where people tend to show off their riches and wealth. Don't get trapped into that. Consider the way you update your status; not only to watch how you project your value to your facebook friends but also to guard your own heart. The way you hold yourself out to others reflects the state of your inner heart. Are you still considering your value and worth by the possessions you have or do you know how much value and worth you have because of  God's love for you?