In the book of Matthew (22:36) the Pharisees asked Jesus which is the greatest commandment in the Law?  His reply in Matthew 22:37- 40 (1) was, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it:  love your neighbor as yourself.  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

 

You can see from what Jesus said that first and foremost we need to get right with God.    Think of it like a pyramid and God is at the top.  Once we get right with Him, everything else falls into place.  God knows this, we don’t, and that is why this is the first commandment.  He is our God and he wants us to worship him only.

 

Not only did God create the universe and everything in it, but he created time itself.  Since God always was and always will be then where did time come from?  God created that too.  He is outside the dimension of time, that is how great and infinite he is.  So then, why would God want us to worship anything other than him?  And on the other hand, why would we want to worship anything other than God?

 

I feel seeking God is a natural feeling for man.  Jesus told us in Matthew 6:33 (1), “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”  Since we were created in the image of God (4), it only seems natural that something inside of us is always looking for him.  Something is always there trying to find God, to reconnect with our maker even though we are human. 

 

Now early man was headed in the right direction when it came to seeking God, but one of their mistakes was they put an “s” on the end of word god.  They had a sun god, moon god, rain god, you name it god and they had it god.  Many of their gods were predictable; the sun does rise each day, and the moon rises each night.  So they worshipped these gods and they appeared.  In the spring it would rain, so if the rainy season was a few weeks late they would pray to the rain god and in time it would rain.  All these predictable acts of nature reinforced their belief in their many different gods. 

 

So man continued to pray to these false gods and they would answer his prayers (or so it appeared).  As time went on man created more gods in the hopes the new gods would be as responsive as the first ones.  To early man this was really a neat trick.  You want something, you create a god to give it to you, and then eventually you get it.  Man created his own god to do his bidding, which reinforced his belief in many gods.

 

As a Christian I have had a very hard time finding my false gods because I look at all the gods of early man and laugh at their concept.  I have accepted there is only one God, the living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and no others.  So for many years I felt I had this commandment covered.

 

One day in church the Pastor (5) was talking about “false gods”.  He said they are what you think about all day long during idle moments in your life.  That afternoon I decided to take a closer look at Gary’s statement.  So I got on my bike and started to ride down the bike path and prayed to God to show me my false gods, because I had not found any in myself. 

 

It didn’t take me long to realize I spend 15% of my time thinking about my wife.  When I look at my wife I see this beautiful woman.  It my eyes she rivals any woman in the Victoria Secrets catalog (which she receives in the mail).  She walks across the room and I just stop and look at her and think how beautiful she is; that is my Victoria Secrets model, my wife.  She is the desire of my life and since she is my wife I feel justified in feeling this way towards her.

 

I realized that in a way she was someone I worshipped.  She was this goddess that I worshipped and I looked to her to give me this incredible thrill which I could not obtain on my own.  Another problem with this was she did not sign on for this.  This is what I was looking for in her, not what she was looking to be to me.  In a way she disappointed me, but I disappointed myself by making her something in my life that she was not meant to be.  I also realized that it is true that people will always disappoint us, but God will always be there for us. 

 

So I continued riding down the bike path feeling pretty good about myself, because I had found one of my false gods.  But that one only takes up about 15% of my spare time so where was I spending the rest of my time?  It only took a second to realize I spend the rest of my time thinking about money. 

 

The difference between being self employed and working for corporate America is that in a large company there is momentum.  Just because the sales department had a slow week does not change the fact you came to work every day, did your job, and you are getting a pay check on Friday.  You did your job and will be paid for it regardless of how well other people in the company did their jobs. When you are self employed this rule is not in effect.  There is no direct correlation between work and a pay check.  When you are self employed if you do not close the sale you do not get paid for your efforts.

 

I started my own company in 1992 after my boss closed the company I was working for.  At Dugan Data we sell fiber optic & copper cables, communications and networking equipment.  So many times someone will call up and want a solution for part of their network.  They have no idea what they want or need, they just know what they want the end result to be.  So I go and find the equipment which will work in their application.  They then turn in a request to their purchasing department, purchasing realizes who makes the equipment, goes shopping on the Internet and buys everything for less from someone else.  Working in a world like this, you can see why I spend so much of my time thinking about money.  Half the time I wind up working for free in hopes of winning the business on the solution I give the customer.

 

God has helped me with my business though, and to be honest I have not given him much credit for it.  I was thinking how my company would have greater sales if I had a GSA Contact with the U.S. Government.  I thought once I had that contract my sales would just sky rocket, since all my government customers told me to, “Get a GSA Contract.” 

 

A GSA Contract is a contract you enter into with the U.S. Government.  You submit a list of products or services you are willing to sell to the government at a set fixed price for the next five years.  The government in turn checks to see if your prices are fair and reasonable compared to other vendors selling the same products.  If they are, they grant you a GSA Contact number.  The whole concept is the price negotiations take place up front which will save the government time and money over the next five years as they buy your products.  Then you go and market your products to the government end users.  If they need your product, they buy it at the price you agreed to sell it to them for in your contract.

 

The GSA Contract has not produced the fruits I thought it would, and I am a bit disappointed with its financial short comings.  So I asked God why he has not helped me out in this area.  Then I remembered; when I was applying for the GSA Contract I prayed to God to help me get the contract and he did.  It has not increased my sales as hoped for, but the fact of the matter is God did not sign on to be the Vice President of Marketing for Dugan Data and it was not God who told me to get the GSA Contract.

 

I continued riding my bike with the wind at my back, pumping those pedals as hard as I could as I flew down the bike path.  All I was thinking about was me and my false gods and then I looked God straight in the eye and said, “You know God, you are great in some many ways.  You have given me my health and happiness, you have filled my life with joy and blessed it in so many ways, but you can’t write a check for the rent.” 

 

I realized in a blink of an eye, I should have been struck dead by the Lord.  I had insulted him and slapped his face.  God All Mighty, maker of heaven and earth, and I told him he couldn’t write a check!  Here I was, a mere mortal exerting all the physical strength I had in my body (to only go 18 mph on my bicycle), telling God where he is lacking in my life.

 

And do you want to know what God did?  He reached down and wrapped his arms around me, gave me a hug and said, “There’s your second false god Michael.”  Instead of striking me down, he picked me up, and showed me my sin.  A sin I could not find on my own, a sin I asked him to find for me and in my arrogance I insulted him and all he did was say, there you are my son, and there is your false god.

 

What a great God we have.  When I could not find my sin, he found it for me.  And then when I confessed my sin to him, he forgave me.  What a load God took from me, because I truly wanted to find those false gods.  I went out that day to find them, I asked God to help me find them because I could not find them on my own.  God answered my prayer and showed me my false gods and instead of punishing me for having them he took them from me and lightened my load in life.

 

When I was in my twenties I went into the construction business with a friend I had met about two years earlier.  We sold and installed air conditioning systems for large commercial and industrial buildings.  When he recruited me the game plan sounded pretty simple.  There were only three parts to completing the contract.  First you buy the equipment and have it shipped directly to the site.  Second you hire a crane company to put the air conditioners on the roof.  Third you hire a crew to put in all the air conditioning ducts and hook up the equipment.  It seemed very simple, since everything was contracted out to meet the specs of the job.  On top of that he had done this about five years ago and had done quite well at it.

 

I was a bit worried, because I did not know the contracting or air conditioning business, but he told me not to worry.  All I had to do was order the equipment for the jobs.  Then once it arrived drive to the sites in my new Porsche (which was on the top of the must buy list once we turned a positive cash flow) and make sure the subcontractors were on schedule hanging the air conditioning ducts and schedule with the crane company when to put the air conditioning units on the roof and have the subcontractors hook them up.

 

I thought this over for about 10 minutes and jumped in hook, line and sinker.  This was going to be great, I was going to get rich, I was going to own part of a booming business, I was going to get my Porsche at 25 and be the coolest guy in Newport Beach, CA.  Since I have never been afraid of hard work this was a dream come true for me.  I was going to work hard, make this a success, get all the money I ever dreamed of and buy all the neat things I had always wanted.  Money was a huge motivator and all I saw were the dollar signs.

 

There was only one flaw to his business plan.  In the five years since he had done this the amount of commercial and industrial building in the LA area had doubled.  Every air conditioning contractor in the area had more work than they could handle and none of them could take on more work.  We could not find subcontractors to do the labor portion of our contracts.  Oops, all our air conditioning equipment was at the site, the air ducts were at the site, but there was no one there to install them. 

 

It didn’t take the general contractors long to realize we were under manned and patience was not one of their virtues.  Construction sites start at 7:00am and by 7:10am every morning the phone would ring and I would start my day with, “hey you little blank blank.”  My dream job turned into my living nightmare in less than a month.

I told myself that if I worked hard enough and long enough everything would turn around and I would get the Porsche and all the money we had spoken about.  So here I was working 12 hours a day, six days a week and at the end of the week, I was deeper in trouble with the general contractors, more tired, and more depressed then the week before.  It was so bad we could not fire the union laborers we had to hire, because we did not have two weeks worth of payroll in the bank.  The union rule was, “you lay off, you pay off.”  You know how all employers hold a week’s pay in order to give them time to process the payroll?  Well we didn’t have two week’s worth of payroll in the bank, so we could not fire the employees who were not doing their jobs.

 

I would go to the general contractor’s office to get paid for the jobs every month.  They would tell me to bring all the bills for all the equipment that was delivered to the job site.  They would go through all my invoices, and then they would go through all their packing slips and write checks directly to the vendors who sold us the equipment.  So when I was through with them, instead of getting a check for $26,000.00, I would get a check for $1,400.00 and copies of all the bills they paid for me.

 

The office was about 4 miles up the freeway from where I was living.  I remember driving to work one day and watching the road in front of me and thinking how great it would be if the office was 300 miles down the road, so when I got there, I could just turn around and go home and never face all the problems which were waiting for me.

 

One Saturday during this time my girlfriend said to me, “Let’s go out to dinner and get drunk.  Why don’t you just forget about work for the night and let’s go have some fun.”  Now I was young, single and I loved my girlfriend.  We had been dating for a few years so going out with her would be a lot of fun; what a nice break it would be to be with her and forget about the pounding I was getting every day at work.  So you know what I said to her?  “No, I just want to stay home and be depressed.”  Really, I passed up a fun date with my girlfriend, to be alone with my misery.

 

Now if that was not a false god what is?  I was so focused on making money and being a success, that the vehicle which was going to bring me these things had totally consumed me.  Unlike God, mine was not kind, not understanding, not alive, not forgiving, it was nothing but a taskmaster that was driving me crazy, making me miserable and driving me away from the people who loved me.  The more I gave it, the more it took and the less it gave back.  Since I was not going to church and did not practice any religion, I did not see the false god I was worshipping and therefore could not get away from it. 

 

Finally one morning I woke up and a voice inside of me said it is time to go to Europe.   I went to a travel agent and bought a round trip ticket for Germany.  I bought a Eurail Pass, a nap sack, a sleeping bag, a youth hostel card and was gone in three weeks.  I think God finally jumped in and saved me with that little voice, because he knew without him I was never going to find my way out.  I also learned an incredible lesson over there.  I found what I think is one of the secrets of happiness. 

 

I spent a lot of time in Switzerland and I started to look at the people there.  I remember riding on the train one day and seeing this little old man going up to one of the mountain villages for the day to go hiking.  He had to be 80, he moved like it, but I looked into his eyes and they were as clear as a bell.  He had the eyes of a five year old, and they jumped and sparkled with that same joy you see in a child.  This old man was not an oddity; he was typical of the Swiss people.

 

They are happy, healthy people, who seem to enjoy life.  So I started to look around to see what they shared that made them this way.  They didn’t seem rich, but they did not seem to be lacking anything.  They all appeared happy, but weren’t adorned with physical objects which are supposed to bring us happiness.  They all seemed healthy, but I did not see many health clubs, they just walked, hiked and took the trains everywhere.  I realized what made them happy were the simple things in life -- good clean living.

 

Three months after my double by-pass surgery, I decided to take my life back.  It is funny, but the doctors told me the younger you are the harder it is to recover from a heart by-pass.  The younger you are, the better shape you are in, and the more your body feels the invasion of having a doctor cut through all your nerves and muscles, rip open your chest and start cutting and pasting the arteries of your heart back together.

 

I remember my wife dropped me off at the airport and it was the first time in three months I had been out of the house.  The nice thing about being self employed is you can pick the territories you want to work.  I have a lot of customers in Hawaii and I was going out for a week to see them all.  I remember going to bed the first night in the hotel and being scared to death.  I felt lost, so weak and scared as I lay in that strange bed. 

 

Earlier that day I had walked down to the beach to go for a swim in the warm Pacific Ocean.  Before my surgery I swam a mile every Monday, Wednesday and Friday in our association pool, but now I was going out into the limitless ocean to try to do something I had not done for a long time.  I stood in three feet of water for about two minutes before I got the courage to push off and start to swim.  On my first swim, I could only put my hands out about five inches in front of my head and I only lasted five minutes.  But I did it.

 

After traveling alone, having a scary day at the beach and a scary night of being alone I was happy to wake up in the morning and thanked God for giving me this new day.  I started thinking about all the gifts God had given me and how I would not trade him one gift he has given me for one gift I have asked for. 

 

He has given me things I never dreamed of and I know they are God given gifts because I never asked him for them.  He has given me health, happiness, true joy, the ability to love someone, things, feelings and sensations that just came into my life.  But as usual, I asked him, “Why haven’t you blessed my business the same way you have blessed my life?”  As usual, I was laying there being the ungrateful child, wanting more than all the gifts I received, which were way better than anything I could have thought of asking for myself.

 

I surprised myself with my answer to my own question.  I felt good inside because it was from my heart to my Lord and showed me how far I had come with dealing with money as my false god.  I told the Lord, “I know I can be ungrateful to you at times, but I would never trade you one of the gifts you have given me for one of the gifts I still ask for.”  I affirmed the fact that God is better at giving than I am at asking, and my life is so much better because of his love for me, and I thanked him for that.

 

I guess you are wondering, after all this, is money still one of my gods?  Well I had another soul searching episode with this and much to my disappointment I found it is still pretty much number one on my list.  Every now and then the pastors at church will speak about, where your thoughts are so is your heart.  What you constantly think about is what you are most concerned with, that is what you worship.

 

I day dream a lot in church so I have started doing something new to help me stay focused on the lesson.  I write on the program, “focus” or “pay attention”.  Then every time I find myself day dreaming I put a mark there to keep track of how many times I drift off and this reminds me to pay attention to the lesson.  This really works well in getting me back to listening to the lesson.  I also found that every time I put a mark on the program I was thinking about money.  If my idle thoughts are about money and when I am going to church to learn about God my thoughts are about money then I have to admit money is still my false god.

 

I have two classic lines that I use to describe my life.  The first one is, “if God blessed my business the way he has blessed my life, I would be a millionaire many times over.”  This tells you I am pretty much a very happy person.  If you could put a dollar amount on a unit of happiness (whatever one unit of happiness is) then I would be a millionaire many times over.  I also know that it is God who has blessed my life and made me happy. 

 

My second line is, “I am more afraid of being broke than dying.”  This tells you I am not afraid of death, because I know it is only by the grace of God we get to heaven so I am not afraid to meet him.  But, life is a gift from God, and when I say this, I am saying I fear the loss of money more than I fear losing a gift God has given me.  That is not a good outlook on life.  That is not good at all, and I decided it was time to once again get after this false god of mine.

 

There are three things in life I wish for, and I am sure I am not alone here -- health, wealth and happiness.  I asked myself how do I approach them, how do I see them working out in my life.  Is there a common bond that keeps them in the state they are in?  I came up with one word that defined my state of being in each case, control.  Who controls it?  Do I control it, do I try to control it, or have I given control to God? 

 

When it comes to my health, I have given total control to God.  Six times I prayed to God to hold open my arteries and get me to Hoag Hospital (Newport Beach, CA), before I had a heart attack.  In a 10 month period I made six trips to Hoag Hospital, four of which were overnights, only to lose the battle and have a heart bypass.  I count myself as one of the lucky ones, because I never had a heart attack so my heart was never damaged.  There is no doubt in my mind, it was God who held my arteries open until my wife could get to Hoag and have them medically fixed.

 

When it comes to my happiness, I have given total control to God.  I wake up every morning and pray to him and read my Bible.  At night I prepare for Sunday school by reading the lesson book and the Bible stories that go along with it.  I ask God to fill me with his Holy Spirit, bestow his Grace upon me and pour his blessing upon me.  I ask him to bless my business, protect me and let me ride in his hand.  They say your youth should be when you experience the happiest times in your life.  Well my twenties were wild, fun and exciting, but I never experienced the happiness I do now in my fifties.  The difference being, now I am living my life with God in it.

 

When it comes to my wealth, I have tossed that at God, but I am still holding on tightly.  I want to run the show and I want him to bless my works and make me rich.  I have not surrendered control to God.  Since I am the one who goes to work, since I am part of the formula for making money, then I should be the boss and God can help me out.  In all the other aspects of my life, I have surrendered total control to God and my health and happiness are doing just fine.  Money is killing me, money is my false god.

 

So I asked myself a simple question.  If you trust God with your health completely why do you not trust him with your money?  I see the health part as truly a supernatural, only God could do it, type situation.  How many times do you hear about a man in his 40s or 50s in great shape having a heart attack and falling over dead?  You hear it all the time and I should have been one of those men.

 

I had stents put in my heart.  Two months later they put two more stents in my heart.  Two months after that I was back at Hoag Hospital with severe chest pain and was probably due for more, but I beat the nuclear treadmill test.  They have a 30% chance of a false positive, so it would make sense I beat it, when I really needed more help.

 

Six months after that, I went in for another nuclear treadmill because I was “due for one,” not because I felt any pain.  At 11 minutes and 45 seconds my chest went poof and there was no question in my mind, I was in trouble.  Five days latter I was in Hoag lying on the table in the catheterization lab and my cardiologist put his hand on my arm and sadly said, “You are not going home today Michael, you are going upstairs and we are going to give you a bypass.”  Only God could have held those arteries open for so long, so I have no problem surrendering total control of my health to him.

 

So I decided to compare a supernatural event which took place over a ten month period of time to me going to work.  If I surrendered control of my health to God and put my trust in him every day, then why shouldn’t I do it when it comes to money?  God wants us to come to him every day for all our needs and trust in him to provide for us.  Think about the Jews in the desert with Moses for 40 years.  Every day, God gave them manna.  Every day he provided for them. 

 

Well, their manna is our money so why shouldn’t I trust God to provide for me every day?  Well, because I am impatient, I want it now, and I don’t want to have to worry about it during the day.  I remember years ago my friend was thinking about selling his business.   He said to me, “I don’t know if I want to sell to them or not, because then I will have to report to them.  It has been nice, owning my own business and not answering to anyone.”  I agreed with him on that point but brought up the fact he would never have to worry about money again in his life.  Regardless, if he had a good day at work or a bad one, he would be able to go home to his family every night and know that his life style would never change for the rest of his life. 

 

When I talk about my happiness and money with my wife, I tell her how happy I am and how great it would be if we won the lottery.  If we only won $2,500,000.00 I would be the happiest man in the world.  I would take the $500,000.00 and pay off all our loans, put the rest in the bank at 4% interest and live off that.  How great would that be; the thought of never having to worry about money again in your life?

 

I told God about my idea on finances.  I thanked him for my job, and the money it brought in, but I don’t want to worry about it.  I would like all the money I will make over the next 15 years now and be able to put it in the bank.  So he popped this question into my mind.  If you had your two million in the bank, then who would you trust in, your money or me?  I thought for a second and realized if I had the money then I would be trusting in the banking system.

 

As I write this it is April, 2009.  Why do you think the U. S. Government had been bailing out the banks and the Wall Street firms for the last six months?  The answer is, because if one bank falls, they all fall.  All banks rely on each other.  They all loan money to each other and as long as everyone pays their debt on time, they all prosper.  Once one bank defaults, then the next bank defaults on their loans and the dominos start to fall.  Had our government not bailed out the banks and Wall Street, you would have witnessed a world wide economic collapse as all the banks in the world failed.  So if my wish was granted, and the banks failed (as they almost did) then I would be broke!

 

This is what God is telling me, he is there for me every day, I have a job, I have money in my checking account and my bills are paid.  Our world wide banking system was hours from falling apart and it would not be there except for the billions and billions of dollars our government put into the banks to hold them up.  So who should we trust in?

 

I am really not a quick learner so once I have a break through like this I bring it up each morning when I pray to God until he resolves this issue for me.  I continue to bring it up until I understand how God is taking care of this issue; how he is going to take this burden from me, not how I am going to fix things for myself.  As I pray to God, I sometimes try to imagine how a conversation with him would go.  How that meeting would take place.  What I imagine is not a vision from God.  I am not one of his prophets from the bible and this is not a vision I saw from him, I am just a human being with an active imagination.

 

As I lay there on my couch praying I saw myself on the bike path I normally ride on.  I was standing on the path holding this box with a chain and lock around it.  I was on the path holding on to one side of the box and God was holding on to the other side of the box.  I was trying to pull it from him.  I kept on tugging and he kept on saying, “let me carry this burden for you.”  Finally he let go and let me carry the box.  It was too heavy for me to hold by myself and God just hovered off the ground across from me.  I thought about this image and realized that is how God is.  If you ask him for help, he is there for you; if you choose not to take his help, he will let go and grant your wish.  He did not cast that load upon me; I chose to carry it myself.  I exercised my free will, and he allows all of us to do that.  I in turn have to carry the load, since I took it from him and told him to go away. 

 

The next morning I was excited about going back to this place.  This issue of a false god was hot on my mind and I wanted to revisit it again.  Once again, I was on the bike path holding on to one side of the box and God was holding on to the other side of the box.  I was trying to pull it from him.  I kept on tugging and he kept on saying, “let me carry this burden for you.”  Finally he let go and let me carry the box.  It was too heavy for me to hold by myself and God just hovered off the ground across from me.  Once again, I would not let go and God let me have it.  I realized that this is how money is with me.  It is a burden that is crushing me.  I have asked God to help me, and then I don’t let him.  I hold on to it myself instead of letting God take over the burden and letting him carry that load.

 

Since this was an open issue with me, and driving my crazy, the next morning I once again went back to the box, God and me.  Once again we were tugging to take control of the box and God just let it go.  It was so heavy it fell and broke open, and all these gold coins spilled out all over the bike path.  I just looked at the gold coins all over the ground, and God was standing across from me, looking at me.  I realized that the load is too heavy for me; this false god of money is killing me.

 

At this point I realized the burdens I am not giving to God are too much for me to carry, and the burdens I have given to God, I don’t even think about anymore.  Remember, I don’t worry about my health, even though I had a heart bypass at 54, and I don’t worry about my happiness, because I am happy due to the grace of God, so why don’t I give this one up to God too, so I am not burdened with it?

 

The next morning I came back to the box.  This time I was on the path and God was holding the box.  Since I trust in God, I know that he will take care of my needs.  I now can look at money and see it as a gift from God.  Every pay check I get, every order my wife gets from Dugan Data is a gift from God.  It is now a gift from God, because I gave that burden to him.  I gave my false god to him.  I told him, I can’t carry it anymore.  Take it from me and make money a gift from you and not a false god I go out and try to appease every day of my life. 

 

To tell you the truth I am so tired of finding all these faults in myself.  I am tired of my false gods (and I am sure when I go looking again, I will find more).  I am tired of not being perfect.  I am tired of seeing all of my sinful ways.  I noticed that God does not get tired of me and all my faults.  He does not get tired of helping me.  He does not get tired of carrying my burdens.  He does not get tired of listening to me.  He does not get tired of my whining and complaining and at times my ungratefulness.  He does not get tired of forgiving me for my sins, when I confess them to him.  God never gets tired of hearing from me and he will never get tired of hearing from you.  Just call him!

 

So if you think you have some false gods maybe it is time to go look for them.  Maybe it is time to find out what you are carrying around in your box.  One way is to take the advice I got at church and see what you think about all day.  See what keeps you awake at night.  If you still don’t find them ask God to help you.  He helped me, and I am sure he would love to help you too.  He will show you your false gods, expose your sin to you, and then hopefully you will confess your sin to him.  That way he can forgive you and take that burden from you so that it will no longer be a wedge between you and God. 

 

His first commandment states that he is our God.  He wants us to come to him with every part of our life; all of our needs, our wants, our dreams, our fears, our darkest thoughts, our darkest sins, our thanks, our praise, our worship and our prayers.  He wants them all!  God wants all of your life to be focused on him, so call out to him and let him help you find your way into his loving arms.

 

 

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