Jon Ehrlichman posted on Twitter on August 8th. 2020 a quote from a Bloomberg video interview with Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, hailed as one of the most successful investors in the world.
"If there was anything left on my bucket list, I would have done it. Money has no utility to me. Time has utility to me."
~ Warren Buffett
You can watch the video here.
With a net worth of over US$85.6 billion as of December 2020, Warren Buffett is the world's fourth-wealthiest person, but when the numbers get that big, it seems to get easier to acknowledge that it really doesn't matter.
What matters is not money but time
Time to go on being comfortable.
Time to enjoy the benefit of feeling secure in sufficiency.
Time ... and eternity.
Jesus Christ picked up on the essence of what actually satisfies, and He pioneered another route to get there ... one that wasn't aggressive, exploitative or harmful either to the planet or to people (ourselves or others!)
He highlighted the problem with the opposite approach like this:
Money has a time-dependent value
The problem with money is that it is a commodity with a time-dependent value (simplistically, what the pound in your pocket is worth today it probably won't be worth tomorrow to you or to anyone else).
This makes it a very unstable source of satisfaction, because what it will get you varies such a lot over time.
But there's worse ...
Money has a time limited value
In addition to that, money doesn't last you for ever.
In the words of my great-grandmother (quite a woman!) ... 'you can't take it with you when you're gone'.
In all of this, money begins to look like a poor investment!
But my granny's little heart warming aphorism points up the weakness in time as an investment vehicle too.
(Don't panic yet, though ... there's a positive thought on that horizon!)
Time can be made a 'mend-able' commodity
Of course, the utility of time to Mr. Buffett is as limited as the value of money, and oddly that accounts for the value he puts on it.
But there's an investment adviser Who has a solution that anyone in Mr. Buffett's position (and that's all of us however poor we are) might be well advised to put in a call to.
Talk to the Proprietor of Time!
The thing about God is that He is the author and the proprietor of time, and He makes its' satisfactions available ... on set universal conditions that apply to everyone ... for investors in Glory's eternity.
Easter is the answer to money's unreliability
We're engaged just now in the run up to Easter ... and the events of the first Easter hold the key to trusting your life to money's poor investment strategy.
Easter is what removed the straight-jacket of mortality when Jesus Christ defeated the death that fixes our time-based constraints, and did so in a way that fixes the problem we have with limited time.
You can check just some of the evidence the resurrection happened on this link here.
Eternity investment impacts the life of here and now
So in the passage around our verse today Jesus brings that prospect of eternity back inside the straight jacket of mortality and loosens the straps around it that bind us tight:
No more worrying about
- your life
- food
- drink
- clothing
If God takes care of His people's most fundamental need ... time to exist and to be ... then He'll take care of satisfying the necessities that time requires for us to get through it (says Jesus)!
This is Jesus Christ's foundation manifesto
Now, this Verse for the Day today isn't peripheral to the Christian faith.
It sits right at the centre of Christ's fundamental manifesto, half way through His Sermon on the Mount. And what this passage sets out really thoroughly for us is just how bad a master the love of money really is.
If we relate to it well, there are times when money makes a good servant, bringing things that gives us daily essentials and temporary satisfaction.
But as a master it is really unreliable. It's value goes up and down in the short term, and in the longer term it's going 'out of fashion' for us all REALLY fast!
The Point
It's the brokenness of time and everything within time that makes Mr. Buffett place such a value on it.
But Christ has fixed time for us ... pretty dramatically ... and He's done it by opening eternity (through resurrection) to those who follow Him.
The Takeaway
We hanker after a lot of 'stuff' for security and temporary satisfaction in this life.
It's a bad investment to put everything we can into that.
So doesn't turning from these other 'servants' that become 'masters' to follow Christ into eternity begin to look like a better investment by far?
Tell us what you think or
raise any questions you might have
in the contact box just below here ...
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