The Bondage of Gangnam Style Ecclesiastes 5:8-20 What’s the Point!?! Sermon 08 Gangnam Style! That’s a hit song by South Korean musician, Psy and the first YouTube video to hit a billion views making it YouTube’s most watched video ever. We were trying to decide who had the most Gangnam Style on staff. What do you think? (Carson’s head on Psy’s body). Or? (Sarah Leafblad’s head on Psy’s body). But hands down, I thought this was best Grace Church Gangnam Style (Aiden Leafblad’s head on Psy’s body). What you may now know is that Gangnam Style is much more than a song. It refers to a lifestyle associated with the Gangnam district of Seoul. Gangnam is a 15-square-mile neighborhood that’s one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the world. It has no equivalent in the U.S. The closest approximation would be Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Beverly Hills, Manhattan's Upper East Side, and Miami Beach all rolled into one. South Korea's richest and most influential companies are headquartered there. It’s wealthiest people and superclans live there, families who run companies like Samsung and Hyundai. 41% of attendees to the prestigious Seoul University come from Gangnam. Imagine if 41% of Harvard’s undergrads came from one neighborhood. Psy, the son of a wealthy Korean family, has seen "Gangnam Style" from the inside. He’s ridiculing the emptiness of Gangnam Style. Yet, the truth is, most people long for some level of Gangnam Style, failing to realize there’s a dark side, The Bondage of Gangnam Style. Most of us would love to live in Gangnam. We want more money and more of what money can buy. Yet, we miss The Bondage of Gangnam Style. Money is a very controversial issue in our culture. There’s this rigorous, cantankerous debate between the rich and the poor. This is, in part, how we got two political parties, Democrat and Republican. Some argue that rich people are rich because they’re smart and work hard, and poor people are poor because they’re dumb and spend all their money on video games, fast food, and lottery tickets. So there’s this debate between rich and poor. Others think, “No, actually, the rich are the evil, bad guys. They steal everybody’s money. And the poor, they’re virtuous.” So the debate is between rich and poor, who gets the black hat and who gets the white one? Who’s the good guy? Who’s the bad guy? Did you know that the Bible’s focus is not on rich or poor? The focus of the Bible is on righteous and unrighteous. In the Bible there are people that are very wealthy and righteous and there are people that are very poor and righteous. There are also people who are very rich and unrighteous, and people who are very poor and unrighteous. With God it’s really not about rich or poor, it’s about righteous and unrighteous. It’s the condition of your heart. In the Church we need to grow past this categorizing of rich and poor. It’s not God’s yardstick. It’s about being righteous or unrighteous. Gangnam Style though is a reflection of today’s economy. It’s not about money; it’s what you do with your money. Most have little knowledge of economies but it’s very important to know if we’re going to have a biblical worldview of money. If you want to be righteous, you need to answer two questions: How am I going to make my money? How am I going to spend my money? And how you answer those two questions will determine whether you have a righteous or unrighteous view of money. Our day is the most complicated economic period in history. A couple of hundred years ago, the economy was driven by commodities. Most of us would have been farmers. If you wanted something, you’d have to grow it, kill it, or chop it down. It’s how you got things. It transitioned from a commodities’ based economy to a goods economy. For example, if I want a cup of coffee, I’d have to grow coffee beans. Grind the coffee beans. Boil the water. I’ve got a lot of work to do. But then a goods economy came along and someone else would grow the coffee beans and you buy them. They might even grind them for you. Rather than having to go chop down a tree, you could buy lumber. Rather than having to get a cow, you could buy milk. So we went from a commodities based to a goods economy. Then, we moved to a service based economy. Now, all of a sudden, someone will do all the work for you. You don’t have to grow your own coffee beans or grind them. You can go to a restaurant. Somebody else makes the coffee. Somebody else delivers it to you and it’s a service. After that, we went from a service based economy to an information based economy, primarily with the advent of the printing press and then the second reformation, which was in the area of technology. With the Internet, the amount of information on planet earth is doubling every two years. We’re in an information based economy. Some of you don’t deal with commodities or goods, you don’t deal with services. You dispense information. You work in the tech industry. You’re a teacher. You’re a lawyer, a CPA. You’re a counselor. You specialize in distribution of information. But the economy we live in today is being dominated more and more by experiences. Enter Gangnam Style. So you and I spend lots of money, but we don’t get a commodity. We don’t get a tree or a cow. We don’t get a good. We don’t get ground coffee beans or a cup of milk. We don’t get a service. Nobody comes over and rubs our back or mows our lawn. We don’t even get an information distribution where we learn a new fact. But we give a lot of our money for an experience. We go to concerts, watch movies. We go skydiving or bungee jumping. We go on cruises or hunting trips. We go to theme parks like Disneyworld or Six Flags. We go to a 3D movie. So you go there and you say, “What do you get?” And for the first time in our economy, you don’t get something. What you take away is a memory, not a tangible good. Fifty years ago, that would have been a completely bizarre notion. “Okay, I gave you all this money. What do I get?” You get a memory.” “No, I want a cow. I want something I can touch.” And as this transition in economies works its way out, the way you get your money is more complicated than at any other time in history. In a commodities based culture there were less things to buy and less ways to spend your money. With all of these different economies we have today, there are an infinite number of ways that you can blow your money. And the deeper down the chain you go, the more it costs you. If you want to grow coffee beans, you can have a cup of coffee for a couple of cents. In a goods economy, if you want a cup of coffee, you can have it for a couple of nickels. In a service based economy, you go to a restaurant and you can get it for a buck. In an information based economy, they try to sell you on all their philanthropy and how they grow whole beans and protect the rain forest and all the workers are really happy. But in an experience based economy, you go to the coffee shop and you pay, not for the coffee, you pay for the experience. They have carpet, lighting, soft chairs…ambiance. You get the smells of fresh beans roasting. Some of you go to IKEA. That’s not a furniture store. They’re selling the IKEA experience. If you go to American Girl, you’re not buying a doll; you’re buying the American Girl experience. At Starbucks, what you’re buying is not just a cup of coffee; you’re buying the Starbucks experience. I’d submit to you that for many of us, the way we spend our money, and for some of us, the way we earn our money, has a lot to do with the experiences surrounding it, which ratchets up the cost. So the way we make money and the way we spend money is very, very complicated. The question comes back to this: Are you going to be righteous or unrighteous with your money? How you get it; how you dispense it? Because the bottom line is that the Bible teaches emphatically that all wealth, money and possessions belong to God. He’s given a portion to you and you’re a manager of His money, not a consumer of your own money. The key question is: Are you going to be righteous or unrighteous with the money that He has entrusted to you? What economy are you going to invest in? Solomon, the author of Ecclesiastes is the wisest man who ever lived. He’s also loaded. He’s forgotten more about money than most will ever know.