Simplify Your Possessions: Week of June 6
What?
Purposefully choose some of your possessions to give away.
Why?
Busyness and clutter plague our culture, distracting our attention and confusing our desires. Taken by the lie that the quantity and quality of our possessions reveal our worth, we have become a fragmented people with unclear purpose, fragile identity, and countless anxieties. A practice of external simplicity resists this tendency in our culture and allows us, by the power of the Spirit, to train towards the kind of internal simplicity that characterized Jesus — that single-minded intention to glorify God with one’s whole life.
How?
Plenty of blogs can teach you how to declutter your life. For advice on evaluating your possessions, distinguishing what is essential from what is extra, and making necessary cuts, you should do a Google search and see what you find. But as believers in Jesus Christ, our purpose in practicing simplicity runs deeper: We want to utilize external disciplines to cultivate our spiritual life so that at our core we look more and more like Jesus. That means supplementing the blogs’ advice with spiritual insights.
To that end, prayer ought to accompany this practice in several important ways:
In prayer, we must confess that we are creatures, not the Creator, although we often pretend to be. We do not own or possess anything in the ultimate sense as he does but are, at most, stewards of his good gifts.
In prayer, we must ask for the discernment to identify that which we truly need from that which we simply want. We take Proverbs 30:8-9 as our prayer: “Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, ‘Who is the LORD?’ or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.”
In prayer, we must lay aside our anxieties that come with a mentality of scarcity — the mentality that believes the world’s resources are scarce and must be gobbled up and held onto at all costs. Instead, we pray for a mentality of abundance, trusting that the Lord is bountiful in his provision.
Finally, in prayer, we must seek first the Kingdom of God and allow the Kingdom to reorient the way we view our things.
As one practical guide, try giving away not just what you might consider to be “extra” but something that is valuable, meaningful, or necessary. This is one way you can train yourself to have an open hand with your possessions, realizing that you are a steward, not an owner.
