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“Create More Than You Consume”
Categories: Bulletin Articles, M. W. Bassford
In Ecclesiastes 12:11, the Teacher notes that all proverbs are given by one Shepherd. I don’t think this means that every wise saying from every society is literally inspired. Rather, the point is that the more wisdom a proverb contains, the closer it comes to the Source of all wisdom and to His revealed word.
This is certainly the case with an epigram I first saw attributed to Jeff Bezos a year or two ago, though I would guess that somebody else came up with it first and he merely popularized it. Regardless, the world’s richest man wants us to know that the secret to success in business and indeed in life is this: Create more than you consume.
It certainly has the counter-intuitive quality that we associate with Scripture, doesn’t it? The world wants us to believe that the secret to life success is, simply: Consume. Put yourself first. Take what you want. If somebody else comes out on the short end of the deal, how tragic and sad. They should have paid better attention.
By contrast, worldly wisdom declares the creator (as opposed to the self-indulgent taker) to be a chump. He works hard churning out all this stuff for others, but he never gets back what he put into it. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be creating more than he consumed. He is the natural prey of the consumer. What a tool!
And yet. Jeff Bezos didn’t get eleventy hundred billion dollars by thinking about what he wanted. He made all that money by figuring out what others wanted and creating a way to get it to them. By contrast, the guy who is focused on what he wants is sitting at home on the couch watching The Price Is Right because he walked out on his job at the Kwik Mart (after having worked there for three whole weeks) when the manager got on his case.
“Create more than you consume” matters if you want unimportant stuff like money. It matters a whole lot if you want eternal life. We usually don’t describe God as the Consumer, but we call Him the Creator all the time. That’s probably a hint about which direction both of those words are aimed.
So too, Paul says of Jesus in 2 Corinthians 8:9, “Though He was rich, for your sake He became poor, so that by His poverty you might become rich.” Is the Lord a creator or a consumer?
We must ask the same question about ourselves. It’s easy for us to be consumers, even as Christians, to do nothing but take in our churches, families, and friendships. However, if we are primarily parasites, the relationships that we feed off of will sicken and die. Paradoxically, though, when we seek to give more than we take, we nourish them, and they in turn nourish us. To say things another way, the one who seeks to save his life will lose it, but the one who loses his life for the sake of the Lord and the gospel will find it.
Create. Give. Lose. The world will think you’re an idiot, but God won’t.
