“Let us pass through your country. We will stay on the main road; we will not turn aside to the right or to the left. Sell us food to eat and water to drink for their price in silver. Only let us pass through on foot – as the descendants of Esau, who live in Seir, and the Moabites, who live in Ar, did for us – until we cross the Jordan into the land the Lord our God is giving us.”
Deuteronomy 2:27–29
This is all that I have learned: God made us plain and simple, but we have made ourselves very complicated.
Ecclesiastes 7:29, Good News Bible
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.”
Matthew 6:19–21, 24–26
And he said: ”Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Matthew 18:3
In our sorrows, we always have reason to rejoice: poor ourselves, we bring wealth to many: penniless, we own the world.
2 Corinthians 6:10, New English Bible
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love for the Father is not in them.
1 John 2:15
Nobody progresses far on any spiritual path without keeping a discipline of
simplicity. The more stuff we have to defend, maintain, and organize, and the more harassed we are by complex finances and cluttered schedules, the less room we have for reality. Either our prayer life and passion for the gospel gradually push out our involvement with cruising the internet, hanging out in the mall, or obsessing over the housework, or vice versa. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “You cannot serve God and Mammon” (Matthew 6:24). Mammon is not just money and the love of money; it’s the creeping worldliness that gets its claws into our whole lives
until it takes us over completely.
The practice of simplicity is a matter of watching our boundaries to see that
our lives are protected for God (Leviticus 20:26) – we are not to let the Temple turn into a high street.
In a high-tech world of mass production and growth economics, where multitasking is admired and everyone you know has a diagnosis of stress or depression, maintaining a discipline of simplicity is foreign territory, but without it no one can follow Jesus.
O God of life and hope and freedom, give us the wisdom, courage, and vision to hold fast to a discipline of simplicity, so that we may make and keep space for the abundant life you promised would be ours in Jesus, in whose holy name we pray; Amen.
