$167 million lottery winner arrested for fourth time

James Farthing of Georgetown, Kentucky, won the $167.3 million Powerball jackpot in April. It was the largest in his state’s history. Since then, he has been arrested four times.

Days after his win, he allegedly kicked a police officer attempting to break up an altercation between Farthing and another person and then resisted arrest. He was arrested on July 26 on charges of first-degree strangulation, domestic violence-related, and fourth-degree assault, domestic violence, causing minor injury. At this writing, he is being held in Smith County Jail.

Farthing is just one of many stories of lottery winners who lost what they won and more:

• Lara and Roger Griffiths won a $2.76 million lottery jackpot in 2005, but a fire later gutted their house, and the couple divorced.
• Bud Post won $16.2 million in 1988, but he was $1 million in debt within a year and said, “I wish it never happened. It was totally a nightmare.”
• Evelyn Adams won the lottery in 1985 and again in 1986, but gambled away her winnings in Atlantic City.
• Gerald Muswagon won a $10 million jackpot in 1998 but spent all his money and reportedly hanged himself in his parents’ garage in 2005.

Such stories remind us that our net worth is not our real worth and that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils” (1 Timothy 6:10). As Jesus noted, “You cannot serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24). But we can use money to serve God, which is the path from success to significance and from the temporal to the eternal.

How does this work in practical terms?

“It’s all going to turn out all right”

In one of his earliest letters, Paul assured the Thessalonians that “the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God” (1 Thessalonians 4:16a). On that day, “the dead in Christ will rise first” (v. 16b) and those who are alive “will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air” (v. 17).

As Billy Graham noted, “I’ve read the last page of the Bible. It’s all going to turn out all right.”

In the meantime, however, the apostle urged his readers not to relax and simply wait for the Lord but “to walk and to please God” and to “do so more and more” (v. 1). He was adamant: “This is the will of God, your sanctification” (v. 3a), which means abstaining from sexual immorality, controlling our body “in holiness and honor,” and refusing to wrong others (vv. 3b–6).

Paul then summarized: “For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness” (v. 7).

The phrase that caught my eye was the apostle’s admonition that the Thessalonians should please God “more and more.” There is no room for complacency in Christ. We are like bike riders on a hill: if we are not ascending, we are descending. We are not finished with our journey until we are home.

You and I are one day closer to eternity than ever before. I cannot tell you that you will meet the Lord today, but I cannot tell you that you will not.

Serving like Martha while sitting like Mary

How, then, are we to live for heaven on earth?

Lazarus and his sisters, Mary and Martha, are remembered on liturgical calendars on July 29. Accordingly, I read a comment by St. Augustine on a liturgical site today, referencing the time when Jesus was in Bethany and “Martha welcomed him into her house.” Mary then “sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching,” while “Martha was distracted with much serving” (Luke 10:38–40). 

Augustine observed:

You, Martha, if I may say so, are blessed for your good service, and for your labors you seek the reward of peace. Now you are much occupied in nourishing the body, admittedly a holy one. But when you come to the heavenly homeland, will you find a traveler to welcome, someone hungry to feed or thirsty to whom you may give drink, someone ill whom you could visit, or quarreling whom you could reconcile, or dead whom you could bury?

No, there will be none of these tasks there. What you will find there is what Mary chose. There we shall not feed others, we ourselves shall be fed. Thus what Mary chose in this life will be realized there in all its fullness; she was gathering fragments from that rich banquet, the Word of God.

Neither Augustine nor I would advise us to stop preparing meals and doing other things necessary to life in this world. But I agree with the great theologian that our greatest focus should be on doing on earth what we will do in heaven: worship, pray, hear God’s word, share God’s truth, and so on.

Paul would agree with us, which is why he further counseled the Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing” and “give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:17–18). He did not mean to go through life with our eyes closed and our hands folded or to say nothing except words of gratitude every moment of every day.

He meant to live this life in a spirit of prayer and thanksgiving, to practice the presence of Jesus in every circumstance of life. We can do what Martha did in the spirit of what Mary did, sitting at Jesus’ “feet” no matter where we sit and what we do.

“To live as if we’re dying can set us free”

Such contemplative spirituality is so urgent that our enemy will do all he can to discourage it. Thus, we should not be surprised that our lost culture separates Sunday from Monday and the “spiritual” from the “secular,” compartmentalizing religion from the “real world” to the detriment of both.

But what Satan discourages, God encourages. When you “submit yourselves therefore to God,” you are able to “resist the devil,” knowing that he will “flee from you” (James 4:7). But only then.

So, let’s begin every day by surrendering that day to God’s Spirit, asking him to help us walk with the living Lord Jesus and to love our Lord and our neighbor in all we do (Ephesians 5:18; Matthew 22:37–39). And let’s live each day as if it were our last, knowing that one day, we’ll be right.

Anne Lamott testified: “My deepest belief is that to live as if we’re dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things.” George MacDonald was therefore right: “You will be dead, so long as you refuse to die.”

Conversely, when we are “crucified with Christ,” we no longer live, but Christ lives “in” us (Galatians 2:20). DL Moody believed that we should give our lives to God because he can do more with them than we can.

Do you agree?