Title: Bad Investments and a Spiritual Return (14)
Series: Hosea
Author: Robert Dawson
Text: Hosea 12
In the early 1900s, a man named Charles Ponzi promised people incredible financial returns. He claimed he could buy international postal coupons at lower prices overseas and redeem them for a profit in the U.S providing his investors a 50% return in just 45 days. Investors poured money into his plan convinced they had discovered an easy and quick path to prosperity.
Ponzi, however, never profited from the postal coupons. He used the money from new investors to pay off earlier investors. His scheme was successful as long as new investors kept coming. Eventually new investors stopped coming and when they did, funds dried up and he couldn't pay old investors, and the pyramid collapsed. It left countless people in financial ruin.
We shake our heads at such foolishness, but are we so different? Have we ever tried a short cut to success and in the process been taken for a fool?
Instant and easy wealth is almost always an illusion. Overnight success stories are more the stuff of dreams than reality.
Israel, like those investors, built its life on illusions. They relied on wealth, deceit, and political maneuvering rather than God. They built their lives, invested the future of their nation, on an unsustainable system, one that yields success for a moment, only to eventually have it crash down on them in the end.
Israel's self-reliance was doomed to fail. The same is true of us. If we trust in anything other than God for salvation, for meaning and purpose, satisfaction and peace, it means we have bought into the world's false advertising and invested our very lives in spiritual Ponzi scheme that will leave us broken and spiritually bankrupt.
Worse than being taken for a fool financially is to be taken for a fool spiritually. Worse than investing hard earned money in an illusory Ponzi scheme is investing our hearts and on the false promises ...
Series: Hosea
Author: Robert Dawson
Text: Hosea 12
In the early 1900s, a man named Charles Ponzi promised people incredible financial returns. He claimed he could buy international postal coupons at lower prices overseas and redeem them for a profit in the U.S providing his investors a 50% return in just 45 days. Investors poured money into his plan convinced they had discovered an easy and quick path to prosperity.
Ponzi, however, never profited from the postal coupons. He used the money from new investors to pay off earlier investors. His scheme was successful as long as new investors kept coming. Eventually new investors stopped coming and when they did, funds dried up and he couldn't pay old investors, and the pyramid collapsed. It left countless people in financial ruin.
We shake our heads at such foolishness, but are we so different? Have we ever tried a short cut to success and in the process been taken for a fool?
Instant and easy wealth is almost always an illusion. Overnight success stories are more the stuff of dreams than reality.
Israel, like those investors, built its life on illusions. They relied on wealth, deceit, and political maneuvering rather than God. They built their lives, invested the future of their nation, on an unsustainable system, one that yields success for a moment, only to eventually have it crash down on them in the end.
Israel's self-reliance was doomed to fail. The same is true of us. If we trust in anything other than God for salvation, for meaning and purpose, satisfaction and peace, it means we have bought into the world's false advertising and invested our very lives in spiritual Ponzi scheme that will leave us broken and spiritually bankrupt.
Worse than being taken for a fool financially is to be taken for a fool spiritually. Worse than investing hard earned money in an illusory Ponzi scheme is investing our hearts and on the false promises ...
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