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Loving Jesus and Hating Mammon: A Beginner’s Guide

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By Jason Comerford

If you’re at all familiar with Jesus’s teachings in the Gospels, you’re likely familiar with the fact that much of it centers around money. Jesus has a lot of opinions about how the people of God should handle wealth. One of the more famous sections is found in Matthew 6, wherein Jesus says the following: “No one can serve two masters, for he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money” Matthew 6:24.

Now, interesting thing about most English translations, they use the word wealth or money” in place of what it actually says, “mammon,” which seems to be a name. This is a small quibble: the meaning does just amount to money, but it’s interesting to me that the text and the name both personify wealth—they act as though it’s a person.

A person you can serve.

The main conflict set up here between God and Mammon is that they make competing claims about themselves. Both God and Mammon will tell you that they are trustworthy, that they are providers, and that they are worth of your admiration and worship. That you need them, because only they can provide for you.

And you can only believe one of them.

While overt worship of Jesus is important (think prayer, songs of praise, communion, etc.), what we do with our money demonstrates the truth of who we really worship in new and clarifying ways. So, I would like to propose some practical ways that we can honor our Lord Jesus and handle the money we have.

  1. Trust in Jesus: Give until it changes your lifestyle. Have you ever given so much that it changed your vacation plans? Delayed the purchase of a new car or a new home? Or even something as simple and small as forcing you to skip a lunch out one day? The one story that the Gospels record of Jesus being truly impressed with someone’s generosity was when a little old lady gave a fraction of a penny while others around her gave huge, significant sums. The difference was that she gave the only money she had to live on, while the others gave out of their excess. Their lifestyles were not changed by their gifts; hers was.

    And friends, don’t miss this. It delights our Lord when we sacrifice for the good of others.

  2. Trust in Jesus: Give immediately. Have you ever run into someone who would really be helped by an extra $500 in their bank account? While money isn’t our savior and provider, by giving it away, we can really help lift the burdens of our neighbors. A new set of tires is no big deal until it’s the thing standing between you and providing for your family. Don’t just limit your giving to the weekly collection at church or your World Vision sponsorship. Find the people around you that need help, listen to that small voice inside you, and help lift a burden right then and there.

  3. Trust in Jesus: Give indiscriminately. How often have you talked yourself out of giving money to someone? “They’ll just spend it on drugs,” we assure ourselves. Or “Maybe they’re not really homeless.” There are many excuses, but it amounts to this: precious Mammon is too valuable to risk on this person.

    While wisdom with our money can be good, I would like to propose that we demonstrate what our God is like when we imitate the God who “makes it rain on the righteous and unrighteous,” the God who instructs us to “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” into our homes to feast. The people who cannot pay us back, who might not use our money the way we want—indeed, the people who hate us—are fitting recipients of kindness and generosity in God’s kingdom.

  4. Trust in Jesus: Give until it turns to joy. Here’s the heart of the matter. Our hearts are naturally geared to believe that money gives us power and protection. We’re not naturally going to trust in Jesus to provide for us—we’re going to turn to money for that. Giving up wealth feels like embracing weakness, embracing risk, and embracing death. But what if we so trust Jesus to care for us, to do as He promises, that money loses this terrible psychological grip on us? What if generosity became a free and happy thing, knowing that the God of Heaven cares for us? I Believe one of Christ’s goals in our generosity is that we would, ultimately, delight in it. That His gladness would become our gladness and it would overflow in glad, sacrificial generosity.

Some last things to make clear: Giving money doesn’t earn more of God’s love for us or cause Him to favor us with good finances. It is because God loves us that He calls us to love and generosity. It is because God already loves us that we’re called to become more and more like His Son, Jesus Christ, who laid down his life for unworthy sinners because He loves them.

There’s great joy and peace ahead for us friends—and it’s not in hoarding wealth in a world where it can rot and get stolen. It’s in loving our neighbors so well that we come to find we’ve been storing up treasure in Heaven all along.

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Virtue Takes Practice

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By Jason Comerford

What were you forced to practice as a child?

Did you learn an instrument? Or maybe your parents signed you up for a martial art? Maybe, like me, you spent time with mom and dad flipping through multiplication table flash cards.

Do you remember what it felt like at the time? Boring, time-consuming, and probably tiny bits of unnoticed progress here and there. Practice is rarely fun. That is, until you’re able to produce beautiful music, skillfully win a sparring match, or ace that dreaded math test you have on Tuesday.

In short, we practice to form habits.

You might be surprised that the same is often true in the Christian life. We don’t often use the words virtue and vice anymore, so I think one dimension of their meaning has fallen out of use. Virtue and vice aren’t just referring to the good or bad things we do; they refer to acquired habits of character.

You practice the instrument, or you don’t. The result is either a skilled musician or a poor and inconsistent one.

You practice financial generosity to the people around you, or you don’t. The result is someone who is habituallygenerous or someone who is habitually selfish.

Do you see what I mean?

When Paul says “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18), surely this is a piece of what he’s referring to. As the Lord renews the inner heart, the outward evidence is not merely one-time acts of kindness and love, but habits of kindness and love.

Now, here’s the challenging part. If we want to become people who practice kindness, mercy, and generosity, we have to purposefully seek out times and places to do it. Many of Jesus’s teachings emphasize the need for perserverence, and I think one of the ways we persevere is by seeking opportunities to put Jesus’s teachings into practice.

How often do you walk around your neighborhood looking to talk to neighbors? Do you talk to them? Get to know them? Set aside time to spend with them? What about the homeless and poor in your neighborhood? Do you speak with them? Are you generous with your money? Or what about those politically different from you? Do you engage them and treat them with kindness and dignity, seeking their well-being? Caring for the things they care for?

It’s easy for us to avoid people who make us uncomfortable, who ask us for our time or our money. But if we want to be Christ’s disciples, those are the very people we need to embrace and love generously. Instead of excusing ourselves from engaging our neighbors, what if we made every effort to connect with them?

Elim, there are ample opportunities all around us to practice our generosity, to develop our kindness, or to fine-tune our mercy. But if this is something we really want, we’re going to need to leave our homes, spend our time, and give our money.

It might not be easy at first, but don’t worry—practice makes perfect.

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The Family Name: Who Are We?

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By Jason Comerford

Here at Elim, we’ve been asking ourselves some big questions over the last two years. As we embarked on the pastoral search process and prepared to enter a new season, we tried to discern who we were, our gifts, and how God had made us as a church. It was a time of serious introspection, getting at the heart of who we are underneath all our familiar traditions and practices.

There were some common answers. Elim is a warm and welcoming place. We pride ourselves on our hospitality to the new and old alike. We care about families and children. And of course, like any good church rooted in the Protestant tradition, we value the Bible. As one of the oldest churches in Washington State, we have a long and significant legacy.

Honestly, I’m happy to call Elim my home. And I know the same is true for others. But though I’m happy to be surrounded by such a wonderful spiritual family, I’ve remembered something sobering in recent weeks.

It would be really easy to look at Elim in the last 10–15 years, including our hospitality and other traditions, and take this on as my identity as a Christian. “This is who I am,” I might say. “I go to Elim, and we’re good at hospitality. We care about families, and we value the Bible.”

And that would be a mistake.

Aside from not everyone experiencing Elim the way I’ve described, it’s also not actually at the center of who we really are.

We’re marked not by Elim and its history, but by the work and purpose our Lord Jesus (Galatians 2:20) We are not merely a hospitable church; we are servants extending our Lord’s hospitable kindness (Luke 9:11). We are not merely a people who care about families, but we are a new spiritual family with Christ at the center of it (Matthew 12:46–50). We’re not just a people who love studying the Bible; we are a people who know our Lord personally (John 15:15) and seek to trust and obey Him (John 15:7–8).

So why does that matter?

Because the things we have in the past loved most about Elim as a community have come from earnest hearts seeking to serve the Lord, to trust His guidance, and to obey Him. And as this next season presents us with new and uncomfortable challenges, I think we’ll be helped in remembering where all the best parts of Elim have really come from—in loving, trusting, and obeying Jesus wherever He leads us.

Hang in there, friends. The Lord is, as always, doing a new thing.

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Love, Pride, and Creativity

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By Jason Comerford

I was recently reading up on the life of French artist Henri Matisse, and came across these quotes from an article he wrote: 

Creation is the artist’s true function; where there is no creation there is no art. But it would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power to an inborn talent. In art, the genuine creator is not just a gifted being, but a man who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end a complex of activities, of which the work of art is the outcome. 

[…] Great love is needed to achieve this effect, a love capable of inspiring and sustaining that patient striving towards truth, that glowing warmth and that analytic profundity that accompany the birth of any work of art. But is not love the origin of all creation? (“Is Not Love the Origin of All Creation?”)

For an artist who was cryptic about his religious beliefs, I think that’s a shockingly insightful take on where true creativity comes from: love is not only important, but at the center of it all. 

Paul says something strikingly similar that you might be familiar with: 

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. […] 8Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (2 Corinthians 13:1-3, 8-13) 

Paul goes a bit further than to simply say that love is at the center of all things, but he draws out the clear implication. Anything without love is useless and very likely harmful.  

It’s something I experienced in my early days as a photographer, and I suspect the experience is common to many beginning artists: the desire to be excellent and attain mastery instantly kills creative effort because it’s typically born out of an insecure need to be someone great and to be admired by others as great. It’s not born of any love or interest in the subject and art itself; it’s born of a paradoxically proud and insecure love for only oneself. I’ve found it to be one of the greatest roadblocks in growing as an artist, and even now I wrestle with it as I try to learn and grow in new ways.  

Pride kills creativity because pride is the opposite of love. 
  

As Elim continues towards its next season, I think it’s important for all of us to seriously pray and think about our reasons for existing as a church. Why are we here? Why are we involved? As we learn alongside a new pastor, forge new ministries, and preach the gospel in Puyallup, why are we doing these things? Do we build because we love? Or do we build to be seen? Is the good of our community our great delight? Or do we seek to prove ourselves against others? Is it our glad honor to be part of spreading the good news of our Lord’s kingdom? Or do we just want a kingdom of comfort here and now, for ourselves? 

These are crucial questions because in no small part, hard days are probably ahead. Some ministries will fail, and other efforts will take much longer to bear fruit than we’d like. If our motivations really are an insecure need to prove ourselves or a selfish need for comfort here and now, we’ll have no tolerance for trying new things, for repenting when we’re wrong, and for growing slowly into the church we would like to be.  

But if love is at the center of it all? We will continue to sacrifice, continue to love our neighbor, and continue to do good even when it’s hard. 

Pray with me, Elim. Pray that our Lord would make us more and more a people of deep, compassionate, generous, longsuffering love. Other matters of discipline and ministry style are certainly important—but none so much as us actually loving our God and actually loving our neighbors. 

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Lights in the Darkness

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By Jason Comerford

This week’s Last Word is best appreciated through its video, where you’ll find Jason reading the text along with a peek at Elim’s Christmas decorations. Click here to watch.

One of the most enduring memories of my childhood is staring at Christmas lights in the dark: lit-up trees, colorful houses, twinkling landscapes seen from the hills of Whittier. There’s always been something captivating and magical, not merely about Christmas lights, but about lights seen in the dark.

Light in the midst of darkness is one of the Bible’s many metaphors for God, or more specifically, for Jesus. In one of his many Messianic prophesies, Isaiah says, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone” (Isaiah 9:2). You can even see it in the words of Jesus Himself, when he says, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (John 9:5). The biblical tradition is rich with these kinds of illustrations.

Much can be gleaned from those phrases and the contexts in which they’re used, but my hope today is to get you to see something a bit simpler.

How easy is it to just gloss over these phrases? In our modern western culture, we’re very big on systematic approaches to theology. We unwrap metaphors and euphemisms for the meaning inside and toss them away as useless wrappers. We tend not to stop, appreciate, and feel the implications of the illustrative and vivid symbols that Scripture works with.

There’s a reason that Scripture isn’t really written as a theological dissertation. God wants us to gain something more from His word than just simple summary statements.

When we read that our God is the Light of the World, that His coming to us is a great light dawning in the dark, we’re meant to feel something visceral.

Consider this Christmas season sitting in the dark and looking at some lights. Find some beautiful tree or one of the area’s many beautiful lighting displays and sit and look. Sit in the dark and feel the warmth of the lights and look at how they radiate in a world that’s utterly dark around them. Sit quiet and still, and watch.

Scripture is rife with examples of how creation is designed to proclaim the glory of God, to pour forth speech and tell us about Him (Psalm 19). Know then that these lovely displays, ultimately, are shining not for their own sake, but that we may know just a little bit better the God of our rescue, the Light of the World Himself.

Merry Christmas, friends.

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Dust, Ashes, and Joy

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By Jason Comerford

Have you ever noticed any patterns to when you experience joy? Does it come after a Sunday-morning service? Or after singing a timely worship song? Maybe it’s after an evening with your community group studying the Bible, or perhaps in praying with a close friend.

Well, after being a Christian for 13 years, I’ve really started to notice one peculiar pattern for when I experience joy: it’s when I discover clearly that I’m wrong about something. Usually, something significant.

The first time I can remember this happening to me was when I got saved. I was reading a book about how God as Father deals with His sons. The picture was of such a loving, good, kind, and faithful parent that, in a moment, it struck me how my view of God had been horribly twisted my entire life. The cruel, overbearing bully in my head gave way to an incredibly patient, good, tender, and loving friend. I literally got to my knees and wept in apology to my Heavenly Father, confessing how wrongly I had been thinking of Him.

And that’s what really struck me: my wrongness about what God is like. And I felt awful about it—all the ways I had resented God, hated Him, delayed in obeying Him. He deserved none of that! In prayer, I apologized and apologized again and again.

I felt so awful.

And yet, I also felt really happy.

Sure, I had discovered how terribly I had lived and behaved. But the sorrow of such behavior only struck me because I discovered how GOOD God is. Guilt and shame had never produced any kind of faith or obedience in me. But discovering how good God is? That did it. Let me tell you, discovering for the first time how wonderful God is? That’s a very happy moment.

But don’t miss this. My first real taste of joy came through a tiny death. A lifetime of religious learning and the accompanying ego were struck down to bring me this newfound happiness.

 In our culture, we feel ashamed to admit we’re wrong. We spend hours on social media trying to prove to others that we are the right ones. We will fight and argue for the right to be right.

But when we recognize we’re wrong about God, He doesn’t shame us. He shows us He is so great that we can’t fully know Him. And He’s so good, even when we thought otherwise, so much better than we can fully understand.

Job spent most of his book defending his righteousness, and he technically was righteous. He never cursed God, even when his children, wealth, and health were torn from him. But even in the midst of his uprightness, the Lord enters into the conversation and shows him that he does not even begin to understand his God. God speaks to him for several chapters, revealing how little Job actually knows. And Job’s response?

I know that you can do all things,
    and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
“Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?”
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
    things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
“Hear, and I will speak;
    I will question you, and you make it known to me.”
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
    but now my eye sees you;
therefore I despise myself,
    and repent in dust and ashes. (Job 42:1–6)

And God responds by blessing him. He defends Job against his unloving friends. He restores Job’s wealth and family even beyond what he’d originally enjoyed. (Job 42:7–17)

I’m not saying that when you realize you’re wrong, God will give you material riches. But I am saying that God means good for us when He shows us we’re wrong about Him. He means to bring us joy, not shame.

 But we have to recognize we’re wrong before we can find joy in knowing God better.

I challenge you to ask God to expose the ways that you’re wrong about Him. Ask Him how you’ve misrepresented Him and how you’ve misunderstood Him. Be willing to be wrong, that you might find joy in believing what is right.

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