To Campers, Individuals, and Churches

 

             The night before printing this newsletter, I woke up in the middle of the night and could not seem to go back to sleep.  I prayed to God and asked if there was something that He was wanting to reveal to me.  A little while later I went back to sleep and had a very unpleasant dream.  I dreamed that I had personally received an inheritance check for a huge sum of money that I did not expect, and I was overwhelmed with excitement.  Sounds good, huh?  Here’s the bad part.  I immediately began shutting people out of my financial affairs and made plans to live off the funds for the rest of my life.  I was not going to have to work again.

           I know that several of you would say that my dream all sounded good, but doesn’t it sound very much like the story in Luke 12:16-21?  Read it for yourselves.  In an article in Today’s Turning Point, David Jeremiah explained the following:

           “Andrew Carnegie took his first job in 1848 at age thirteen as a bobbin-boy in a cotton mill:  twelve hours-per-day, six days-per-week, $1.25 per week in wages.  By the time he died in 1919, Carnegie had given away nearly $351 million ($4.3 billion adjusted

to the year 2005) and bequeathed his remaining $30 million through his will.  He is best known for building three thousand public libraries in cities around the world.  He wrote at age thirty-three, ‘No idol is more debasing than worship of money!’  He also wrote that the man who dies rich dies ‘disgraced’. 

           As a confessing non-Christian, Carnegie certainly had a view of money that parallels that of Scripture:  Money is a tool to be used, not an end in itself.  The question in life is not how much money we have, but what kind of blessing our money becomes.”

           God forgive us and help us if our hearts are like that of the rich fool.

 

                      Love in Christ, Daniel Osborne