Daily Lesson for March 1, 2022

 Today's Daily Lesson comes from Proverbs chapter 30 verses 8 and 9:

8 Remove far from me falsehood and lying;

give me neither poverty nor riches;

feed me with the food that I need,

9 or I shall be full, and deny you,

and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’

or I shall be poor, and steal,

and profane the name of my God.

Today is the day before Ash Wednesday, also known as "Fat Tuesday" because so many feast on the day before the Lenten fast.

I'll be having pancakes with the church staff in about an hour.

But even as we feast for a day, it is good to remember that a lifetime must include the discipline of limitation.

The writer of Proverbs understand this. He had the audacity to pray for enough, but not too much. For too much, he saw, is just as dangerous and deadly to the soul as too little is to the body.

Throughout the centuries the traditional teaching of the church has been that the rich place themselves in mortal jeopardy with their wealth. It is so easy to become spiritually empty when physically full. As the Russian theologian Berdaev said, "When bread is found God becomes a harsh and inescapable reality, rather than an escape from hard reality."

When our bellies are too full God becomes too much -- especially a God that asks us to share plenty.

It is good to remember that the church teaches the dangers of wealth and overaccumulation. Seeing this teaching as the consistent voice throughout the centuries makes it less personal. This is a very spiritual reality for us all, everywhere; to have too much is to steal it from others. But nobody wants to be called a thief.

Today we will feast -- a little. But we will also remember that its our daily bread that we pray for, our daily bread that we really need, and that much more too often will make us large of body and thin of soul.

Ryon Price is Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.