By G.D. Watson
Sin perverts every legitimate faculty of the soul. It also poisons and perverts every species of earthly treasure and activity. Just as divine grace can save and purify the worst of human beings, so grace can, through human beings, lift money from being a curse into making for us everlasting friendships in heaven. Many persons inquire what our Lord could mean by commanding us "to make to ourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that when we fail, these friends may receive us into everlasting habitations." Luke 16: 9.
Satan and Jesus are both bidding for the use of our money. Satan holds out to us earthly pleasure, fashion, fine raiment, luxurious ease, and transitory amusements; and money used for such purposes, and worse than wasted on tobacco and sinful indulgences, or miserly hoarded, will be turned into an infinite curse. Every dollar so wasted, the eagle stamped on the dollar, will turn into a fiend whose talons will claw the heart in the future world. Jesus offers us the privilege of
helping him save the world, of relieving the poor and needy, of investing in the spread of holiness, of putting our means into salvation agencies, and every dollar so used will be eternally saved in heaven; and the eagle stamped on every such dollar will be turned into a bird of Paradise, and the Goddess of Liberty will be as an angel of love to welcome us to portals of bliss.
It is thus that money represents character. In itself a gross piece of materialism, yet by the use it is put to, it becomes the incarnation of moral quality. It is invested with the attributes of either sin or saintliness, industry or idleness, prayer or prodigality. The liberal use of money for the Lord is one of the great needs of Christian training. The selfishness and stinginess of professed Christians is absolutely appalling. There are thousands and thousands of men and women in the churches, with from twenty-five to one hundred thousand dollars, who do not give fifty dollars a year to God. There are even some rich preachers who are notorious beggars, but who seldom give a dollar. Is not such penuriousness just as great a crime in the sight of God as what is commonly termed gross immorality? The most appalling thing about stinginess is, that it seems so respectable; instead of being looked upon as a positive, disreputable sin, it is quietly winked at as a mere weakness.
In order to make friends out of money, it should be used as much as possible for direct results in soul saving. It seems to me this is always the teaching of Jesus. Instead of endowing great establishments, and piling up millions in some institution, to bless far off generations, if more money could be used in the immediate work of carrying on revivals, conducting soul-saving conventions, opening up missions, both abroad and for the non-church goers at home, God would be more glorified. How this thought will impress us, when we look at the great cathedrals in Europe, in which hundreds of millions of wealth is entombed, which can never have a resurrection. Enormous piles of grandeur in which only a debased or very shallow form of religion is taught. There is coming in the American churches the same craze to entomb great fortunes in cold stone, where neither God nor man will get more than a bare pittance out of it for direct soul saving. I know many will disagree with me, but it is just this popular drift of the mind which I affirm is contrary to Christ. Men that can be induced to put tens of thousands into some cold, formal monument, would not give a hundred dollars to carry on a great revival where hundreds of souls could be saved.
The financial columbiads are loaded with greenbacks, and fired off at long range, to bless unborn generations; when tile same ammunition fired at short range, could mow down the enemies of the Lord, and capture multitudes for Jesus in the living present. Another way to make heavenly friendships out of the use of money is to administer on our own estates before we die. There seems a terrible blunder in the settling up of the estates of dead people. Why should Christian men and women, who have wealth, feel bound to leave it all to their children .9 Why should not God come in for a share? The Bible begins with, "In the beginning God," but the lives of most professed Christians read, "At the last God." How many fortunes, even among church members, are utterly squandered and wrecked. What quarreling among heirs, what smashing of wills, what a carnival among tricky lawyers, to help such things along! How many thousands, hardly earned and saved by industrious and plain Christians, are worse than squandered by godless children, or smoking and whisky-drinking sons-in-law. Oh! how Christian men and women will wish in eternity they had settled up their own estates, and given God his portion before they died. What we give to the Lord we save. The only treasure we can lay up in heaven, is what we send on ahead of us; and this is the thought suggested by our Saviour. He does not represent us as welcoming our money to heaven, but oil the other hand represents our money as having gone on ahead of us, and transformed into immortal friends, standing at the crystal port of light, to welcome us to everlasting habitations. God help us whether we are rich or poor, to give wisely, willingly, regularly, gladly, according to our several ability.
