The Bible says this,
mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth,
fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection,
evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry.
So when you begin to covet and become a covetous person,
you are really committing idolatry
because you're starting to want other things
besides the Lord.
You're starting to, you know, your eyes are not on Jesus,
your eyes are on the things of other peoples,
your eyes are on the things that you want to covet.
And how do we covet with our eyes?
We look at things and we want them.
We look at things that don't belong to us and we want them.
And God said that we're supposed to mortify
our members that are on the earth.
Well, eyes are members, they're part of our body, right?
And so we're supposed to not, you know,
we're supposed to not covet things.
You know, covetousness is a thing
that could get you kicked out of church.
And the signs of people, you know, being covetous
are people that start talking about money a lot.
You know, that's a telltale sign
of how you want to buy this car or that car
because it's real tight, bro, or whatever.
You just want this sweet car.
You know, you want to spend an inordinate amount of money
to try to get some car, look, just,
you know what I drive?
What do I drive, brother Eli?
A Kia Soul.
A Kia Soul, okay?
It doesn't say God's man on the back of it either.
It's just a regular little car, you're like,
Pastor Thompson, how do you fit in that Kia Soul?
Very carefully, okay?
So, but yeah, I mean, I don't,
would it be nice to have a Mustang?
Sure, it'd be nice to have a Mustang.
But am I gonna go into debt up to my eyeballs
so I can get a Mustang?
No.
Now if somebody wants to give me a Mustang,
I would just be like, yeah, okay, that's nice.
You know, but I'm not gonna go out of my way
to buy some super expensive vehicle.
Why, because I don't need it.
I just need a car that gets me from A to B.
And I don't need to have some hot rod.
I don't need to have some muscle car.
Now if you have some kind of cool car that,
you know, I'm not a communist here, okay?
It's okay to have a nice car.
I'm just saying that when that's all you think about,
when that's all you're driven by,
is how you want to get this next car,
you're like the trade up person.
You're always going to the car lot
trying to trade your car in.
That's a sign that you're covetous.
And that's something that you should avoid as a Christian.
Turn to Acts 17, verse 16.
The other thing that can trip people up,
and Christians can fall to this too,
it's called the love of money.
The Bible says the love of money is the root of all evil.
So it is the root of all evil.
There's a lot of oil money out here, isn't there?
That's one thing I noticed that there's,
you know, when I drove in from Katy also,
is that I saw the BP buildings,
and you know, I know BP's not as powerful as they were
because they're paying off all the oil slicks
that they cause or whatever,
and I don't know a lot about the oil industry.
My cousins work down here in Texas.
I'm not sure exactly where they work,
but there's a lot of money to be made in the oil industry.
And as a Christian, you can get involved in stuff like that
and you're just working your way up
and wanting to make more money, but you know what?
From what I've heard, the oil industry
isn't a very church friendly organization.
You're probably gonna be working a lot of Sundays.
You're probably gonna be working a lot of Thursday nights
and Wednesday nights and things like that.
And I don't know if anybody works for an oil company here,
okay, I'm not just picking on an oil company.
It's not a bad thing to work for an oil company.
I'm just saying that you can get covetous.
You can start wanting more than what you have,
and sometimes God needs to keep us poor
so that we can stay humble.
Because if we had all kinds, you know, why are we,
I don't think anybody in this room is rich monetarily.
Maybe you are and I don't know.
Maybe you're an oil tycoon and I just don't know.
Because I'm not from this place.
I don't know very many people here.
I've met a few of you, but you know,
we just, we shouldn't be covetous after these things.
We shouldn't want to have more than what we got.
Why?
Because God's keeping us at a normal level for a reason.
Because we couldn't handle it if we were rich.