From a very young age, we each try to figure out our place in the world, where we fit in the scheme of things, as we should. But there’s one aspect of that to which we far too readily grant supremacy, to our own peril.

Have you ever met someone and thought, “Gee, they’re successful. I wonder what they earn. Look at the car they drive, the house they live in. They’ve done a lot better than me.”

I even heard someone say recently, after reading of the incredible success of one of their old school friends, “The first thing I thought was, I am such a failure.”

In truth, we use outward measures – particularly wealth – as our gauge of success. I used to, too, and I can tell you, the undue supremacy we grant to our aspiration for wealth and the way we consequently compare ourselves to others completely ruins our life.

Contrast that with this reality:

Matthew 4:2-4 After fasting forty days and forty nights, [Jesus] was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”  ESV

So for Jesus, not even the basic necessity of food to nourish His starving body took primacy over His commitment to obey God. That casts our desire for affluence in a very different light, doesn’t it?

As C.S. Lewis writes in his book, The Screwtape Letters, “Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels as though he’s finding his place in it, when really, it is finding its place in him.”

Don’t allow prosperity to lead you astray.

That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.