All Forum Posts by: Account Closed

@Bob B.

You're right, Bob. After all, we well know that Jesus had a long and successful career in the trades before decided on an alternative retirement investment strategy. That's when he picked up his first few turnkeys on the hill of Calvary and upgraded them with high-flow shower towers and Japanese toilets into luxury airBnB's, started insisting on being referred to as THE Christ, and sent His disciples out with their first bandit signs...

@Roger S.

I certainly have no grief to dish out to people who don't serve up smarmy Landlords-for-Jesus hypocrisies and call them manna from Heaven.

@Kevin C.

This is...well...surreal is not to strong a word. Next up, I suspect I'll be told that the people of Israel were the most affluent people of the Mediterranean Basin in the first century AD, obsessed with wealth management, and Christ came among them advocating for the accumulation of massive riches. God sent his only begotten Son through the miracle of a virgin birth to teach us to make the big bucks.

The OP's friend laments that the OP makes money by buying a property and summarily kicking the people who live in it out just to improve his cashflow. The residence is a "product," in your understanding of the thing, and tossing these people out of the place they call home is "naturally" a good idea.

Can you and @Austin Fruechting just maybe try for half a second to imagine that a man who was born in a stable, lived in a tiny village for most of his life learning a simple trade, wandered jobless all over the land with his followers living on the charity of others, and died penniless on a cross to be buried at the expense of a friend perhaps, just perhaps, did not particularly care about crushing it in multifamilies?

@Austin Fruechting

You really do seem to believe that the wealthy deserve to be accounted higher and better in the eyes of God than the poor and the meek, with a casuist's proviso that the wealthy should choose to do something with their wealth that many of their peers agree betters their society at the time.

"Just a janitor?" What should one make of a statement like that? I know what I make of it, as I've met quite a few janitors I would call better, finer, more upright men and women who do more good in the world than quite a few people with quite a lot more "financial freedom."

Really, there's something shameful and low about being a janitor? Maybe there's something shameful and low about being a carpenter, too?

Seriously read the New Testament.

@Austin Fruechting

"You can make a ton of money and not be storing up treasures on earth."
An argument like this is the dictionary definition of casuistry.

@Austin Fruechting

You do realize you're trying to convince yourself that Jesus was big on evictions, right?

@Dan Weissman

I suspect your hopes of amity and equity are misplaced, and your relationship with these people is about to be ruined. Cecilia Giménez, the 90-some year old lady who took it upon herself to "restore" a 19th-century fresco in a Spanish church and thereby gave the world "Potato Jesus," still insists she did a good thing.

@Bob B.

I am suggesting that Jesus Christ is recorded to have said something with remarkable clarity in all three synoptic Gospels, and nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus Christ speak approvingly of "financial freedom."

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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.

Matthew 16:19-20

@Erik Haugen

Here's my take on being a wealthy Christian: Matthew, Mark, and Luke largely agree on what Jesus said about being rich and going to Heaven.

These are the verses I'm focusing on in the New International Version translation:

Matthew 19:24 "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Mark 10:25 "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Luke 18:25 "Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

These are the very words of our Lord and Savior.

You can call it "financially free" and not call it rich, but in the context that a 1st century building laborer turned itinerant preacher from the miserably poor Galilean hamlet of Nazareth would obviously mean the term "rich" in speaking to his fellows, you and I and practically everyone living in the developed world today qualify as RICH.

So if you're doing this to heap on AN EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES, I think the Message is clear.

Should you plan for a financially secure future? Does Christ ask that of us? The answer is again, obviously, a full-bodied NO.

In Luke 12:22-33, Jesus says the following:

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?"

 “Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! And do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it. For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them But seek his kingdom and these things will be given to you as well."

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

I don't think landlording is for you unless you intend to set your face against the clear teachings of Scripture, even the Words of Christ.

I hope you pray on this carefully.