Proverbs on Wealth 
Part 3: Enjoying It

Baxter T. Exum (#1744)
Four Lakes Church of Christ
Madison, Wisconsin
July 7, 2024









It is an awesome blessing to be together with God’s people this morning! If you are visiting this morning or joining us online or on the phone, welcome! We are especially glad to have you with us, and we’d like to ask that you fill out a visitor card – online if you can, or if you are here in person, you can use one of the cards from the pew in front of you and give that to me on your way out this morning. We would love to hear from you, and we invite you to pass along any questions or prayer concerns.

We are here this morning to worship and to thank God for saving us. He loves us so much that he sent his Son to save us. Jesus died on the cross, he was buried, but he was raised up on the first day of the week. This is the good news, and we obey this good news through faith, repentance, and baptism (an immersion in water for the forgiveness of sins). And this morning we are sharing some good news from somewhere in Mississippi, I believe. David Conley preaches in Dennis, Mississippi, and he posted a few days ago and he says, “Look what God just did! He added a couple of folks to the church! So grateful to Cynthia-Robert Lambert and Randy Hickox for teaching them about the Gospel of Jesus Christ!” These two are clearly in a jail or prison of some kind, they’ve been baptized in a cattle trough (similar to the one we’ve used in our back yard a few times), and that’s about all we know, but we are thankful, this week, to have a new brother and sister down in Mississippi. We share these pictures as part of our invitation to you: If you would like to do what these two have done, or if you would like to learn more, let us know. We invite you to get in touch using the contact information on the wall up here, or if you are joining us on the phone, you can send a text or give me a call at 608-224-0274.

This morning, we are headed back to the book of Proverbs! In the big picture, we are on the 30-year plan through Proverbs, and we are covering the book very sporadically (to say the least), and as of this moment we have now covered 363 of the 915 Proverbs, or right at 40%. The first nine chapters had some sense of context, so we covered those on a chunk-by-chunk basis over a period of several years, and we are now working our way through the rest of the book by TOPIC. And in this series within a series, we are now looking at everything King Solomon says about WEALTH. So, I have scoured the book for any references to wealth or money or riches or treasure, and there have been so many that I’ve been arranging these by sub-topic. Several weeks ago, we started with Solomon’s advice on GETTING wealth. Then we moved along by taking a look at how to LOSE your wealth (and some of the pitfalls of being wealthy). We had a song and scripture service last week (on the a fifth Sunday). Today and next week we look at the idea of ENJOYING OUR WEALTH. I’ll need to take a time out to head to Hawaii for my mother-in-law’s memorial service. And if the Lord wills, we’ll take a look at the value of GIVING our wealth to others (on the first Sunday in August), and we will close this series with some bonus verses on LAZINESS on August 11. So, this is where we’ve been, where we are, and where we are heading.

Today, though, we start to look at some of the Proverbs that outline some of King Solomon’s inspired advice concerning how to ENJOY our wealth. And you might have noticed that I had to adjust our schedule a bit this week, because King Solomon had so much to say about enjoying our wealth. We’ll actually be spending two weeks on this. We are dividing these Proverbs into three categories – we’ll start with a warning and a reminder today, and hopefully come back next week to focus in on the CONTENTMENT aspect of this.

    I. We’ll start today, though, with a warning concerning the DANGER OF GREED.

And we’re staring with a warning, because if we are distracted by greed, if we’re always focused on getting more and more, we may miss the pleasure of enjoying what we have right here and now. As Jesus says in Luke 12:15, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Or in other words, there is more to life that stuff!

    A. So, we start this morning with King Solomon’s warning in Proverbs 28:20 that, “A faithful man will abound with blessings, but he who makes haste to be rich will not go unpunished.”

I hope we see the danger here. On one hand, a faithful man abounds with blessings, but on the other hand, there are consequences for the one who “makes haste to be rich.” The first man works hard and gets it done. The second man, though, is always out there looking for a way to “get rich quick.” The second man is always eager, energetic, and in a hurry to make more and more. And this greed has a way of distracting from enjoying from what he has at the moment. This greed leads to punishment, and often, this punishment may involve losing the wealth he already has.

Maybe you have been burned financially in the past. Sometimes that comes as a result of being in a hurry, failing to do the research. When we’re in a hurry, we may be tempted to cut corners, and it’s so easy to get caught up in a fraudulent scheme, leading to trouble and loss. Or, we may think of something like the lottery, where the state always wins. If the state didn’t always win, they wouldn’t have a lottery! Some have described the lottery as a “stupid tax” – not just a tax that is stupid, but it’s literally a tax on people who are bad at math. And the poor are often the most likely to fall for it. Ticket sales always seem to be highest in poor neighborhoods. They may not have properties or incomes to tax, but the lottery is a tax on those who don’t know better. And I wouldn’t make a blanket statement that playing the lottery is a sin. However, we do have several principles to consider. We have the addiction aspect of it. Then, in my view, the worst part of it is something that hit me as I thought about it earlier in my life: If I play the lottery, I am essentially praying for millions of people to be losers! Have we thought about it that way? If I’m hoping for that billion dollar payout, I am essentially hoping that millions of people lose money. Not quite the Golden Rule; in fact, quite the opposite.

But the principle we find here in Proverbs 28:20 is that there is danger in being wrapped up in this idea of wanting to get rich quick. There is danger in always looking for a shortcut. We might say the same for casinos. And I don’t think Solomon is condemning all casinos, but I do think Solomon would at least raise a red flag here. The casino always wins. If not, they would go out of business. But as it is, they are in the business of looping people in. In my search for good fry bread out in the Pacific Northwest, my brother-in-law found a source between their place and the ferry to Seattle on my way home. Great fry bread to go from the bar at the casino on my way out of town, but what a depressing place! A huge room full of old people, and no windows! It’s a huge dark room full of old people losing money, and they are fed from the huge buffet so they never have to leave! Now, if you budget $100 and it gives you pleasure, there are definitely worse ways of spending $100, so you have no judgment from me, but the math says that you will almost certainly be going home without that $100. So, this is just a word of caution from King Solomon. It’s easy to get caught up in trying to get rich by taking a shortcut, but there is a danger in it. As Paul will go on to say in 1 Timothy 6:9-10, “But those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a snare and many foolish and harmful desires which plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”

    B. The second warning in this category comes to us just a few verses later, in Proverbs 28:22, where King Solomon says, “A man with an evil eye hastens after wealth and does not know that want will come upon him.”

This one is similar to the first, but it starts with the warning about having an “evil eye” that “hastens after wealth.” To me, the “evil eye” is really the “envy” part of this. The warning here is about a man who sees what other people have, and he’s always going after it. Greed has a way of distorting our vision, and if we are always looking for more, everything we see turns into an opportunity to make money – to use people to our advantage, to see every relationship as an opportunity to get something, to always be squeezing more and more money out of every transaction. Solomon, though, warns that this man “does not know that want will come upon him.” So, be careful, Solomon says. He’s warning his sons that there is great danger always wanting what we don’t have. It leads to punishment and want. So, when it comes to enjoying what we have, we’re starting this morning with a warning: One way to NOT enjoy what we’ve been given is to always be looking at what we do not have.

    II. The second major concept to consider when it comes to enjoying our wealth is King Solomon’s encouragement to SPEND CONSERVATIVELY, which allows us even to SAVE SOME OF WHAT WE’VE BEEN GIVEN – and I think we are about to learn that we are more likely to enjoy what we have if we aren’t spending every single penny we make.

When I think of saving, I think of what my parents did for me and my sister as we were growing up. We always got an allowance, but even when that allowance was a quarter, dad would never give us a quarter, but he would split it up with nickles and dimes and pennies, to help us learn not just how to spend, but also how to save and how to give (or how to share). We’ll get to the sharing part of this on the first Sunday in August, but in terms of saving, my parents made an agreement with us that they would match anything we put in a savings account for college. And the deal was: If it came out of that account for anything other than college, we would have to match it back to them on the way out! Needless to say, we never spent those accounts for anything but college! But it was motivational, and we did the same thing for our kids. There is a value to spending conservatively, which allows us to save.

    A. We’ll just look at these in the order they appear in proverbs, starting with Proverbs 12:9, where Solomon says, “Better is he who is lightly esteemed and has a servant, than he who honors himself and lacks bread.”

So we have a contrast between two men. On one hand, we have a man who’s pretty much unknown. As far as we know, this first guy is just a regular, hard-working man. All we know is that he has enough income to have a servant of some kind, which I’m thinking would be kind of nice! I mean, who doesn’t want to have a servant! The second man, though, “honors himself and lacks bread.” Now, as I see this, the second man spends his income inappropriately. The second man spends everything trying to look good on the outside. In my mind, this is the guy who’s in debt up to his eyeballs with the $80,000 pickup truck. He looks great rolling into the casino (or whatever), but this guy has honored himself to the point that he “lacks bread.” Do we see the picture King Solomon is painting for us? He’s warning his sons: If you want to truly enjoy your wealth, don't spend it all trying to look good! If you have to choose, it’s better to be able to afford hiring some help at home as opposed to looking wealthy, even to the point that that outward show keeps you from affording the basic necessities. You can starve to death in that $80,000 truck while your neighbor drives around in a rust bucket but has enough to hire somebody to help him fix the food he can still afford. One guy is comfortable, and the other guy is miserable. One guy is enjoying his wealth, while the other guy wastes what he has and lives in hunger. Reputation isn’t everything.

I remember my grandfather telling me about buying a new car back in the early 40’s when air conditioning was just becoming a thing. They lived in Miami, Florida, at the time, and as I remember him telling it, they got a new car but either couldn’t afford or chose not to afford getting one with air conditioning. However, he wanted the neighbors to THINK they got a car with air-conditioning, so when they came home from the dealer, they drove back home with their windows up. This is south Florida in the summer in what was most likely a black car. I’m sure they looked really good that day, but they were completely miserable! And I remember him laughing about that. But this can happen in a serious way, when we try to impress others, but we end up truly miserable – broke and hungry. Maybe you’ve heard the saying from out west, “It’s better to have cattle and no hat than to have the hat and no cattle.” Or, “It’s better to have the steak and no sizzle than to have the sizzle and no steak.” King Solomon would most certainly agree. Reputation can be important, but reputation is not everything. As I was doing the research for today’s lesson, I ran across one author who asked, “Would you rather be wise and thought to be a fool, or would you rather be a fool and thought to be wise?” Or, “Would you rather be a just man who was thought to be a racist, or a racist who was only thought to be just?” Obviously, we’d rather have our good reputation match reality, but there are some people who bankrupt themselves trying to look wealthy, and that is the warning in Proverbs 12:9.

    B. This next one (in Proverbs 13:7) is quite similar, as King Solomon continues by saying that, “There is one who pretends to be rich, but has nothing; another pretends to be poor, but has great wealth.”

The issue here isn’t hypocrisy, but the issue here is living as if you are rich as opposed to living as if you are poor. As a wise and wealthy king, King Solomon has observed that some people live as if they are rich when they really have nothing, and there are other people who live as if they are poor but have great wealth. Personally, I think of men like Sam Walton and Warren Buffet. I believe Sam Walton, of Wal-mart fame, was known for driving an old pickup truck, when he truly could have driven any car in the world. And Warren Buffet, I looked him up again yesterday, and he’s still driving a 2014 Cadillac XTS that he purchased with hail damage. Here he is the sixth wealthiest person in the world right now, and this man is driving a ten-year old car with hail damage. King Solomon would approve of that decision!

But here’s the lesson: The poor man with a nicer car than Warren Buffet is probably really stressing over a car payment right now, and Warren Buffet himself? Not so much! If Warren Buffet gets a scratch on his car, I doubt that he’ll lose too much sleep over that. So, there is a blessing, Solomon explains in living beneath your means. Spend conservatively.

The world, though, tries to get us to spend everything we have and more. I’ve told you before about moving to Madison and looking for a house. We set a limit, and both the Realtor and the bank kept saying, “But you can afford more than that.” And we had to constantly explain, “But we are choosing to spend less than the absolute maximum.” They didn’t understand the concept. We looked at about a dozen houses within walking distance of Elvehjem Elementary School (where the church was meeting at the time), and they were all right at the upper limit of our limit, and they all needed new roofs, and furnaces, and water heaters. So, we chose to build for about $10,000 less over on the southwest side – the smallest house on the smallest lot available – and so far, we have not regretted that decision. Of course, now our house has been needing the furnace, and water heater, and roof, but we have had 24 years to get ready for it. Solomon’s underlying advice here, though, is to enjoy your wealth by spending conservatively. You will be happier in the long run.

    C. We have some more advice encouraging conservative spending in Proverbs 13:22, where King Solomon says,“A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children, and the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous.” 

To do this, a good man will need to spend conservatively. But a good man will improve his family’s finances over multiple generations, by saving and investing and by teaching through example. And if a man refuses to plan for the future, his wealth is turned over to the righteous. Either he loses it himself or he passes it on to his financially stupid kids who lose it, but the money will eventually make its way to somebody who knows how to handle it. We might think of King Saul who disobeyed the Lord, and his family inheritance was effectively given to King David (a much wiser man).

Now obviously, children may be called upon to help their parents in their old age, but normally, good parents will plan ahead (spending conservatively) and will be able to pass something along to their children and grandchildren. It doesn’t always work this way (this is a proverb), but this is something that Solomon has observed. Maybe you’ve seen the bumper sticker on a massive RV that says, “We are spending our children’s inheritance.” And we may laugh at that, they obviously have every right to do it, I would much rather my parents take care of themselves than leave me something, but Solomon does have some wisdom to share here.

Years ago, we went up to Marshfield, Wisconsin, where a professor from the school of business at Freed-Hardeman University was speaking on finances all week, and I remember him suggesting that parents not wait until they die but that they help out their kids when they are starting their families (in their 20’s and 30’s). And being in my 20’s with two kids at that time, I thought, “That is a great idea!” And his point was: If you can afford it, help future generations where you can, and don’t necessarily wait to leave it in a will, but pass along that wealth whenever possible.

It takes discipline to do that, though. It takes spending less than we’re bringing in. It’s like planting a tree we’ll never eat from. It requires looking forward, into the future, and this is what Solomon recommends.

    D. And speaking of leaving an inheritance, we now come to Proverbs 20:21, where King Solomon says, “An inheritance gained hurriedly at the beginning will not be blessed in the end.”

And I’ve put this in the category of “spending conservatively,” because when somebody gets a huge inheritance all at once, that person often does not “spend conservatively.” And that’s the danger here. We think back to Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son, who takes his part of the inheritance and spends it all so quickly. Easy come, easy go. That young man didn’t work for it, so he had no appreciation for it, and he lost it. He was not “blessed in the end.” The same goes for those who win the lottery. Often, they end up bankrupt and miserable as that huge windfall turns into a curse, not a blessing. A wise father, then, will teach his children the value of money, that money is a reward for hard work, and that money is a blessing from God.


    E. The last proverb in this category comes to us in Proverbs 21:20, where King Solomon says that, “There is precious treasure and oil in the dwelling of the wise, but a foolish man swallows it up.”

Let’s notice that both the wise and the foolish have access to treasure and oil. The wise man holds some back, but the foolish man swallows his up. The wise man saves. The wise man restrains himself. The foolish man gets some treasure and oil, and there’s a giant gulp and it’s gone. The wise man puts some aside for a rainy day. Because rainy days will come. We think of Joseph in Egypt and how he had the nation save and stockpile food for seven years during a time of plenty, preparing them for seven years of famine. God’s wisdom at work right there! And it made the nation of Egypt rich beyond imagination, all while saving the entire middle east from famine.

I think of my grandmother on my mom’s side. I would occasionally go to their home in Nashville to do laundry when I was in college, and one time I was putting a load in the washing machine (right off the kitchen), and my grandmother comes flying around the corner with a giant stock pot full of old dishwater from the kitchen sink, and as I’m putting the soap in, before I can do anything about it, she dumps that load of old dishwater in on top of my clothes. “Granny, what are you doing?” And her response was, “There’s still bubbles in that water. It’s still good.” There were chunks of debris in that water, but there were still bubbles, so that water was not to be wasted. She and my grandfather spent conservatively. That’s an understatement. But being conservative in their spending allowed them to leave something for future generations. The wise, then, hold something back, while the foolish consume everything.

The lesson? Spend less than we take in. That difference has a way of accumulating. And instead of being stressed, we can breathe a bit and truly enjoy what God has given to us. This is true for both the rich and the poor. The rich can save; the rich can spend everything. So also, the poor can save, and the poor can spend everything. More income simply allows the rich to waste more money even faster.

And speaking of wasting money faster, there is a sense in which this applies to nations as well. Have you guys ever checked out USDEBTCLOCK.ORG? I have looked at it a few times through the years, but when it comes to spending everything (and beyond), we are pretty good at this, aren’t we? I took a screen recording yesterday afternoon, and the national debt (what we owe our creditors) is quickly approaching $35 trillion. I would encourage you to go to USDEBTCLOCK.ORG on your own and poke around a little bit. If you are a taxpayer, your part of this (as of yesterday afternoon) is approaching $267,000. Among those who have credit card debt, the average is around $8,300. All of these numbers are constantly changing, and most of them are not good. I’m imagining that King Solomon might have something to say about this. This is beyond foolish on an epic scale.

But the same thing can happen personally, and that is our focus today,“There is precious treasure and oil in the dwelling of the wise, but a foolish man swallows it up.” The wise will live modestly. I’m not saying we have to use our old dishwater in the laundry at this point, but we do need to spend less than we bring in, allowing us to save some for the future and allowing us to truly enjoy what God has given to us.

Conclusion:

So, this morning we have started to look at King Solomon’s advice on ENJOYING WEALTH. We started with a warning about the DANGER OF GREED. If we are always looking for more, we may miss out on enjoying what we have right now. And secondly, we’ve looked at the importance of SPENDING CONSERVATIVELY (spending less than we make, allowing us to save).
Next week, we hope to continue this idea of ENJOYING WEALTH by focusing in on the importance of being CONTENT with what God has given to us.

As we close our study this morning, let’s go to God in prayer:

Our Father in Heaven,

You are the God of all wealth, and you have given us everything we have. This morning, we are thankful for the good words from King Solomon, and today we pray for wisdom as we manage our finances. We pray that we will use our wealth wisely, not selfishly, but in a way that honors you in every way possible.

We are thankful for Oliver’s safe arrival into this world, and we pray for Josh and Olivia as they bring up this young man in the discipline and instruction of the Lord and as they introduce him to the love that you have for us. We ask a special blessing this morning on Jane as she continues to recover. We pray for Patsy and Juanita as well, and we know there are others. We pray for our Christian friends and family in Texas, with the storm coming in later today. We pray for abundant resources, and we pray that you will give your people the wisdom and strength to help, as we know that they will.

Above all, we pray that all of us would know you and that we would truly appreciate what you have done and continue to do in our lives. We pray for strength to make good decisions, that we would live each day this week in a way that we can look back with no regrets. Forgive us, Father, when we fall short.

We come to you this morning in Jesus’ name. AMEN.



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