Ron Hutchcraft Ministries - Frozen Assets - #4212

Tuesday, March 4, 2003

Our friend Mary Ann was just driving down the road recently when her precocious five-year old piped up from the back seat. It was one of "those" moments. He said, "Mommy, didn't you say that Jesus was building a beautiful home for us in heaven?" She assured him that's exactly what Jesus is doing. "Well, Mommy, we've got our house here and then we've got the mountain house. That seems like too many houses. Shouldn't we give one of them away?" I'm not sure how you answer a question like that.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Frozen Assets."

That's the problem Jesus has with many of us. He's entrusted some of His assets to us - everything we have is from Him. He expects that we'll be investing His assets in the interests of His kingdom. Unfortunately, His assets are frozen - and we froze them. Some of us have most of Christ's resources all tied up in our own kingdom. It's that kind of thing that caused God to ask in Malachi 3:8 , "Will a man rob God?" Well, unfortunately, yes.

We're living in a turbulent, unpredictable, maybe even apocalyptic world. It's time to take the kind of inventory that five-year-old boy was suggesting - and see if we're hanging onto anything that Jesus wants to use in the work He died for.

The economics of Jesus are pretty much summed up in Matthew 6:19-21 , our word for today from the Word of God. "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal." In other words, what the world calls "security" is all so "loseable." Then Jesus says, "But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal." In other words, what you give is all you'll really be able to keep. Then Jesus' sobering bottom line: "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." He didn't say your treasure will go where your heart is. He said your heart will go where your treasure is.

The great missionary leader Hudson Taylor really convicted me with his reflections on Jesus coming back. He said: "The effect of this blessed hope was a thoroughly practical one. It led me to look carefully through my little library to see if there were any books there that were not needed or likely to be of further service, and to examine my small wardrobe to be quite sure that it contained nothing that I should be sorry to give an account of should the Master come at once. I have never gone through my house," he said, "from basement to attic, with this object in view, without receiving a great accession of spiritual joy and blessing."

"...I believe," Hudson Taylor said, "we are all in danger of accumulating ... things which would be useful to others, while not needed by ourselves and the retention of which entails loss of blessing. If the whole resources of the Church of God were well utilized, how much more might be accomplished! How many poor might be fed and naked clothed, and to how many of those yet unreached the Gospel might be carried."

You know, I think it's time that all of us take a walk through our stuff and through our bank accounts and look at it all through heaven's eyes. He gave it to us to give away, and something's very wrong when His work has such deficits while some of us have such surpluses. There's nothing more exciting than releasing what you have to help finish the work Jesus came to do. There's nothing more unsettling than to imagine Jesus returning, looking at all you have, and asking, "What are you doing sitting on all of that?"