Listings and prosperity

Sorry for the lack of posting the last couple of weeks. There were two reasons for this. 1) I was preaching at church last week (which still takes me like 300 hours to get some coherent thoughts together. . . .but as a reader of this blog, you knew that :) ) 2) We're putting our house on the market to sell. So, that's taken alot of cleaning and organization.

But, there are no excuses. . I'll post more. :)


Putting the house on the market is an interesting thing for us to do. . .theologically speaking. We've really felt like it would glorify God more, financially, if we would downsize a bit on the mortgage payment/housing expenses/etc. . . . and give ourselves more freedom to give to God's work, help others, and serve the poor. We also don't want to always be the people who are asking for financial help, but we'd like to be the "helpers" at times. Basically, we're paying our bills fine,. . but its just not healthy to always be at the end of things each week, and not being able to save to healthy degree.


So, we feel like we have some good reasons and promptings from God that we should sell the house. So, naturally, you start to feel like the house WILL sell because we have good reasons to sell it, and because we feel like God wants us to sell it.

This veers over into "prosperity theology" thinking if we're not careful. Like "If God really loves us, or if we really have faith, the house will sell" and "If the house doesn't sell, than we're doing something wrong." Basically we make God our genie, and we confine Him into acting in certain ways.

Well, I've got a pretty low tolerance for confining God in ways like this.
(we all, even un-knowingly, confine God at times in our life. So, at risk of being a hypocrite, I will continue under the banner of "ways like this" :) )

So, we have to watch our hearts during this time. God could have lessons for us to learn that have nothing to do with the house actually selling. He may actually want us to "fail" in that regard so that we learn other things and rely on him in different ways.

Far from the "God wants me to be successful" theology. God actually wants us to be "holy" and so he will do whatever it takes to that end. Sometimes, he will bless our plans for his Glory, other times he will allow us to fail or be unsuccessful as well so that we go a different direction, or we seek Him. Remember, in Psalm 23 God "makes us lie down in green pastures". Sometimes, we'll need a rest, and he'll make sure we get it :)

That doesn't mean we don't pray for our desires or seek God on things. But, we do all of that under the banner of Daniel 4:35 that "God does what pleases Him".


So, you can pray with us for the sale of our house, for God's Glory. And, if it doesn't sell, you can pray for some good plan "B's" for us financially as we seek to be better stewards in that area.

Thanks!
Aaron