Yesterday at Gateway in Austin, Bruce Gilson spoke at the McNeil campus, and I spoke at the South Campus. Here are some of the thoughts we shared:
“Ever struggled with greed? Maybe you don’t struggle with greed because you aren’t even fighting it at all! At different times in our lives, greed pops up in the form of buying more than we can afford, wanting a relationship that isn’t ours to have, or eating more than we should. Greed seeks to fill a void in our hearts with things that cannot ever do so.
In week one of our series we talked about creating healthy community – that we have received grace so we need to extend grace. Last week we talked about becoming part of a new family that lives differently, acts with humility, loves sincerely, and seeks revenge sweetly (in other words responds kindly). We talked about healing relationships by choosing to resolve conflicts in a healthy way.
In our culture greed is still considered good! Our appetite for consumption of oods and services will never be satisfied if we are expecting the goods and services to fill a void it can never fill.
Advertisements pull on every heart string to increase market share, they use bears to sell toilet paper or babies to sell tires. Here is a more recent example of ‘Finding Your Soul Paint’:
If only we chose the right shade of purple, then we’d never be lonely again!
Advertisements can create a sickness within us that causes us act in ways that aren’t consistent with who we want to be. Having an unquenchable desire for consumption can affect other areas of our life that we never could have imagined.
Just consider the life of King David who had everything and still wanted more – including a woman who was not his wife – Bathsheba.
We are all wired for relationships but often instead of doing the hard work necessary for good relationships we default into destructive patterns that we thought would satisfy us.
Everything was good during the story of creation except the isolation of Adam which God then solved with the creation of Eve.
God’s desire is not that we just love Him and push away people or that we try to be good and loving towards people but ignore Him. Instead we must love God and be in relationship with Him through his Son and love each other.
God wants us to go to him admitting your fears, admitting you don’t know what to do and in that interaction he will calm your fears and lead you towards fulfillment (see Isaiah 41:10).
Consumerism is when we crave relationships but we fill the void with stuff. Christ came to fulfill our needs and taught us to live in relationships with each other.”
To watch or listen to the entire message Bruce shared, go to www.gatewaychurch.com/podcast.
