editor's note: in no way am i trying to trivialize the loss of a home or property or any loss at all as a result of the present fires. the prayers and concern of the saints are with you. this is simply a reminder that the things that are worth anything in eternity do not burn nor rust. take heart. God is with you.

ash heap lives (part 1)
francis schaeffer

The world is afire. Not only do we face strenuous days now, but, if my projections are right, we can expect our times to become even more difficult. I think it is probable that God's people are about to enter a struggle unlike anything they have experienced for many generations. The next two to five decades will make the last few years look like child's play. We Christians should be asking ourselves, "What must we do to speak effectively to such a world?" I believe with all my heart that in order to speak to this generation we must act like a Bible-believing people. We can emphasize a message faithful to the Bible and the purity of the visible church, but if we do not practice this truth we cannot expect anyone to listen to us.

Yet we must go on even deeper than this; we must go on to a Bible-centered spirituality. In the last chapter of Death in the City, I point out that each person sits in one of two chairs - either the naturalist chair or the supernaturalist chair - and he perceives everything in the universe from the perspective of that chair. When an individual is born again, he moves from the former chair to the latter. The tragedy is that even after a Christian has affirmed the supernatural it is perfectly possible for him, in practice, to move back to the naturalist chair and spend most of the rest of his life there, seeing things from the same perspective as the world and living on the same basis. If a man does not believe the promises of God for salvation, we say he is in unbelief. The position of a Christian who sits in the naturalist chair is what I call unfaith. Many Christians live much of their lives there. I wish to speak to this problem, not by stressing the positive aspects of spiritual things (I have done this in True Spirituality, The Mark of the Christian and at the end of Death in the City), but by dealing with the negative - the danger of materialism in a Christian's life.

Practical Materialism

Materialism can be understood in several ways. Those who are philosophically oriented will think of philosophic materialism. This perspective, which dominates our educational system today, is antithetical to Christianity. It says that man is only the energy particle more complex and that religion is no more than a psychological or sociological tool. So Christians reject this; they cannot be this sort of materialist.

Some people will think of the materialism represented by the communist philosophy and communist nations - dialectical materialism. And because it is horrible that these states limit the perspective of millions of people (especially the children) to an entirely materialistic explanation of life, as well as subordinate the individual to the state, Christians cry out, "Down with dialectical materialism!"

But even Christians can reject both of these materialisms and yet not escape from a third kind - what I call practical materialism. Tragically, all too many of us live out this antithesis of true spirituality. We all tend to live "ash heap lives"; we spend most of our time and money for things that will end up in the city dump.

Practical materialism is difficult to escape in any age, but it is especially hard today because we all tend to be influenced by the spirit around us, and in the United States and the Western world most people have only two values - personal peace and affluence. Many young people have rejected their parents' style of materialism only to come round in a big circle to their own kind. As long as they have enough money to pay for their life-style, they care about nothing else.

Are Christians ever like this? I remember our first years on the mission field" (1948-49). We came to a Europe filled with poverty-stricken people. In this setting, were material possessions automatically an asset in missionary work? There were not many automobiles in Rome (perhaps happily, when we think of Rome today), but a missionary invited me into a big American car and drove me through the streets. How wrong he was to think that the impressive automobile, shipped over on a boat at great expense, landed on a dock at Genoa and driven to Rome, would automatically increase his effectiveness. It did not; it diminished it. His abuse of possessions was both unspiritual and insensitive. I left Rome thinking, "Here is real materialism."

Spain, too, was bitterly poor. With the exception of a very few wealthy, most people's lives were dreadful. Yet I was invited to a missionary's apartment which was overwhelmingly luxurious - not, perhaps, in comparison to what this same man would have had as a pastor in America, but exceedingly affluent by Spanish standards then. He said to me, "I don't understand it, but we seem separated from the people. There seems to be a wall between us and them." What do you think happened when he invited the poor people into his luxurious home to a Bible study? The effort was useless.

In Europe today, of course, this is not true. But there are still countries in the world where the Christians' use of money creates a "we-they" dichotomy. Such a situation cannot possibly lead people to believe that Christians are serious about trusting their Father in Heaven and about sharing with their fellow men.

Do we understand that material possessions are not necessarily good in themselves even in this life? Let me give two illustrations from our early days in Switzerland. When we first came to the villages of Switzerland, most of the women washed their clothes at the village pumps. This was not just something staged for a tourist postcard. When I saw them walking down to the village fountain, putting their hands in the cold water, and standing outside even in bad weather, my typical American reaction was, "Isn't this a shame? Wouldn't it be wonderful if these people had washing machines."

Gradually a different idea dawned on me - working at the fountain took up a lot of the woman's day, but she spent the time talking with other village women, doing a necessary job; she existed in a very human setting. Was that worse than a woman in the United States or a woman in Europe today who has a great number of labor-saving devices - who pops her dirty clothes into a washer and leaves them - but who spends all her time being morose and lonely? The question is, What does she do with the time she saves? If she spends all her time just doing nothing or destroying herself and her family, wouldn't she be better off washing at the village pump?

Also, when I first came to Europe, many women worked in the field because farm machinery was scarce. Even on the larger farms, most jobs had to be done by hand, and this was certainly true on the small Swiss farms. In those days, the work was hard. Now all the Swiss have lovely little tractors, made especially for the mountainsides. But then cutting the hay meant working the scythe by hand and loading the wagon. And I saw women out laboring with their husbands, sometimes doing the hard work of pitching the hay. I thought of all the American women who did not have to do this: "My, wouldn't it be wonderful if the Swiss women could be saved from this hard physical work?" But I have changed my mind. The women who worked with their husbands shoulder to shoulder during the day and then slept with them at night had one of the greatest riches in the world. Is anything worse than our modern affluent situation where the wife has no share in the real life of her husband?

Is it really true, then, that having increased material possessions is automatically good, even in this life? No. Of all people, Christians should know this because God's Word teaches it. We must not get caught up in practical materialism.

Laying Up Treasure

In seeing beyond the present life, a Christian’s perspective is supposed to be different. We must never live in the perspective of this life alone, but should affirm that our present existence has a horizontal extension into a life to come. The Bible tells us that a cause-and-effect relationship exists between what happens now and what happens in eternity. We are often told, “You can’t take it with you.” But this is not true. You can take it with you — if you are a Christian. The question is, Will we? Jesus Himself taught this:

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. Matt. 6:19-20

This statement is to be taken literally. Jesus never uttered mere “god words.” Liberal theologians with the concept of realized eschatology consider this only a way of stirring up motivation for the present life, but this is not the Bible’s perspective. Jesus was not merely making a psychological adjustment inside a man’s head. He was telling us that in actual fact we can lay up our treasure in one of two places. In one place, it will assuredly rot away; in the other, it will never decay. We can lay up money in land or investments, but we can lay it up just as realistically and objectively in Heaven. It is as though Jesus had mentioned the First National Bank in New York as opposed to the Banque Suisse and said that you can choose to make your investments in either America or Switzerland. The perspective of our lives should be that we can lay up treasure in one of two places — earth or Heaven.

Jesus emphasized this in a parable:

And he said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.” Luke 12:15-21

These are strong words: a man is a fool to put money in a bank that is not going to last when he can deposit it in a bank that will. Often this is used as an evangelistic text to point out that anyone is foolish who builds for this life while forgetting that one day he will have to stand before God in judgment. Undoubtedly this truth is involved here, but there is more. Jesus is not only speaking to the man who spends all of his time, as so many do, accumulating wealth with no thought of God. He is also addressing Christians. If we are acting like this, then either we do not really believe in the future life, or we are fools for laying up all our money in a bank that can be plundered. Death will strip us of all the material possessions we leave upon this earth. Death is a thief. Five minutes after we die, our most treasured possessions which are invested in this life are absolutely robbed from us. It is a terrible thing that many Christians read this passage year in, year out, and they never see that it applies to them.

Jesus summed all this up in yet another statement: “Sell what ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth” (Luke 12:33). Imagine a man who has to carry $5,000 over the Alps and who has a choice of two bags. One is made of cheesecloth, and he knows that if he uses it the money will soon begin dribbling out. So he chooses the other — a heavy leather bag. When he arrives at his destination the money is safe. Jesus is just as explicit: when we lay up our treasures in this life, we have chosen a worthless bag. We are going someplace, you know, and when we arrive we do not want to find we have left everything upon the way. Notice that Jesus introduces the statement about bags with a practical implication: “Sell what ye have, and give alms.” The Scripture makes no distinction between giving to the needy and giving to missionary work. Often to the evangelical mind, money given to missions is the only money given to the Lord. Now, I am not minimizing contributing to missionary work. Christians do not do this enough. In fact, Christians in countries like the United States and Britain will have to answer to God for investing such a small amount in missions. But there is also a practical humanitarianism in the Scripture. Christians have the important job of meeting men’s material needs as well as their personal and spiritual needs. The book of James is strong on just that point. If the church had practiced and preached this truth during and after the Industrial Revolution, we probably would not be in our current mess. Today we in the evangelical church in the affluent countries must understand and believe that we can lay up treasures in Heaven both through our missionary giving and through other uses of our money to care for people and especially our fellow-Christians. There is a peculiar kind of right of private property in the Bible — a private property, an acquired property, an accumulated property that cares for people. And this we have forgotten. Our choice is not between an accumulated property, which is hard, cold and unloving (characterized by people who care for nobody but themselves as they amass great fortunes) and a socialism in which the state owns everything. The Christian has a third option — property acquired and used with compassion.

part 2

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