We ended yesterday’s blog with the pastor’s observation that

Stewardship decisions are not made in church; they’re made in the real estate office and on the showroom floor.

Stewardship decisions are also made in the everyday decisions to buy or not buy whatever category of goods that tends to suck you in. For Jason Gay, the brilliant, humorous sports columnist for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), it’s sports gear. In the kind of article you don’t usually see in the WSJ, Jason explains How I Stopped Buying Silly Sports Stuff I Didn’t Need. He opens:

There was a period of my life, not long ago, when I could waste an easy hour and a half looking at cycling shoes on the Internet. Maybe more than an hour and a half. I would consider cheap cycling shoes and expensive shoes, white ones and black ones, blue ones and hi-visibility pinkalicious ones, custom shoes and shoes I could specifically contour to my foot by baking them briefly in the oven.

At the time I believed that every one of these pairs of shoes would make me better at riding my bike, or at least make me look cooler while riding my bike. Every once in a while, I would pull the trigger and buy a pair of new shoes…which, of course, did the exact same thing as the pair of perfectly fine cycling shoes I already had at home.

This is a condition known as sports gearaholism, and I will come right out and admit I am a slowly recovering sports gearaholic. I have been an addict for cycling paraphernalia, for golf stuff, tennis nonsense, fishing tackle, fitness equipment…

Sports gearaholics buy new sports gear because they think it’s going to make them better. I bought a new driver and three other specialty clubs a couple of years ago to improve my golf game. Guess what? They didn’t. And Jason explains why:

We’re deft online, clicking page after page of golf clubs, golf balls, golf gloves, each whispering a promise to raise performance and golf happiness. All of this is a lie. The only thing standing between us and golf happiness is golf itself, a cruel game created for the purpose of making contented people miserable.

It took me years to realize that I was the technology that mattered, and my tech is flawed. I’m an aging, deskbound non-athlete who, if I really want to elevate my performance, should lay off the peanut butter pretzels. (Emphasis mine. In the comments section after the article, readers pointed out that no one owns just one guitar. They buy new ones to sound like their guitarist hero, but, again, the limiting factor is the player, not the instrument.)

It’s the same advertising lie that Mike Metzger wrote about. Such lies may suck in the rest of the culture, but they shouldn’t suck us in. To apply Jesus’ words to this situation:

Don’t let people do that to you! (Matthew 23.8, MSG)

Paul was clear:

But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints. (Ephesians 5.3, ESV, emphasis mine)

Let’s encourage each other in this battle:

You must warn each other every day, while it is still “today,” so that none of you will be deceived by sin and hardened against God. (Hebrews 3.13, NLT)