It's time to fear God.  What does it mean to fear God?  It means to not put your trust in any of those temporal or worldly institutions or the fruit that they’re producing.  Daniel is very clear:  the Antichrist will come in that very last day and destroy them by their prosperity. We are here in Loudoun County, Virginia, and who would have ever thought that we would have the highest median income in the United States?  We live almost three times higher than the rest of the state of Virginia.  Are we susceptible to seduction?  If it was not possible for believers to get their eyes off trusting things and money, the Holy Ghost wouldn’t have said, “Don’t trust in riches”; amen?  Understand one thing, beloved, these things can take wings and, in a day, fly away.

Our fear needs to be in Him who can sustain us, whatever the circumstances are.  Begin to stand in awe and majesty and thanksgiving, and give praise to Him who can sustain us whatever the circumstances are; amen?  There are still ravens to feed His prophets.  Heaven has not run out of manna, praise God!  I hope you have a good pair of shoes on today.  They might have to last 40 years, praise God!  Can you imagine?  We just don’t believe that anymore.  Oh, we have an intellectual knowledge of it, but the fears and the course of our lives are set by lust and covetousness, by fear of the loss of certain things.  Beloved, put your trust in the Lord; amen?  And “lean not unto thine own understanding.”

God wants us to be blessed, but He is to be the source of our blessing.  It’s the Lord that “maketh rich and he addeth no sorrow with it” (Proverbs 10:22), praise God!  He’s given us abundance, the Scripture says.  He’s made us rich that we might “establish his covenant” on the earth (Deuteronomy 8:18).  Our wealth is not to be completely used on ourselves.  It’s to be used to promote the gospel.  It’s to be used to sustain and minister to the needs within the kingdom of God.  When He talks to those among us and He says you need to work or you shouldn’t eat, His admonition is, “I want you to work.  I want you to have gain so that you might have to give to those that lack”; amen?  It’s not to increase a portfolio or buy the new whatever-it-might-be.  None of those things in and of themselves are wrong, but who’s the source?  Who do we recognize as the source?  Let me ask you another thing:  who do we go to for wisdom as to how to use these benefits—the world or the Lord?

We’re going to start a course on Friday nights for a couple of weeks.  We were talking about it, and it will be something we provide across the course of the different age groups.  Some of these things we deal with our students in discipleship training, but we want to be able to help us, in this hour, to see what the biblical wisdom of God is as to how to use our resources.  We have people in our midst right now that are battling different areas, people in our midst with tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt.  Some of us have come to the place and been walking by faith and now we’ve reached retirement age and there is nothing there.  We need the wisdom of God and I don’t want to get off on that class.  I’m definitely going to have people that are here in our midst that know a whole lot more about finance than I do, and we’ll be hearing from that practical side in these things.