Taking off from Psalm 24:1 — the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof — and inspired by Tony Evans, we landed together at the cautionary reminder: Don’t confuse the resource for the source.
When we regard our resources — bank accounts, work ethic, ingenuity, financial planning — as our source, than that resource comes to own us. The results of that are never good.
In contrast, when we recognize that God is the source of all of it — raw materials, talent, perseverance, everything involved in making us money — then we are free to live more abundantly.
Along the way, we talked about what phenomenal things the human race has done with raw materials: we’ve built skyscrapers, bridges, rockets, and dams.
But do you know the one thing we haven’t done? We’ve never made dirt, the ultimate raw material.
We may be masters with raw materials, but we are not masters of raw materials. That belongs to God and God alone.
To reinforce our notion of God as source and “divine dirt maker” we invited the people of Good Shepherd to come forward at the conclusion of the service and pick up a small card with Psalm 24:1 inscribed on it.
Except the cards were all places in large containers full of . . . dirt. The people of the church had to stick their hands in dirt as a reminder of the One who made that dirt in the first place.
It all makes me think of David Crowder’s Wholly Yours, one of my favorite of the new generation of Christian pop songs. We’ve done this one before in church but it didn’t exactly fit yesterday’s service flow.
So I give it to you here, and I pray you’ll appreciation the lyrical insights & innovation as much as I do.