When you want the money, the fame, and the fortune; when you care about numbers more than people, when you care more about status and profit than the people, this is not the same as working hard at something to advance your skills, growing more and more until one day you are the supervisor, the manager, the owner, the teacher.

Do not confuse wealth and power with greed. John Rockefeller was one of the richest men in human history. He drove the same car, and lived in the same house, almost his entire life. He poured his heart out to charity’s, the church, education for children, saving the environment. Rockefeller Foundation distributed more foreign aid than the entire U.S. government, Rockefeller lived to be 97 years old. This is a man who worked hard to let his light shine, and did great things with the wealth he acquired due to his hard work.

Was this man greedy? No. He earned his living and his fame. Fame was not his goal, it’s something that happened along the way to his own personal achievements and desires.

Surely the poor and the rich alike judged him because of his wealth.

The poor people judging Rockefeller never built a series of Universities for children or gave millions of dollars to help end slavery in a time when helping black people was almost a dangerous crime.

When you are all about the money and the title and the fame, when those things mean more to you than the work you are making happen, that is when you become what Jesus calls a ‘hypocrite’, which means ‘pretender’. When a first-class plane ticket and the status it gives you are your deciding factors for a first-class ticket, that is what Jesus is talking about here.

Good people who do great work are rewarded, and there is no crime or sin in doing great things for others and being rewarded for it.

Finding something you love to do, and being rewarded for your achievements and production, that is what God is looking for that is what God is proud of.

When you are in it just because “it’s good profit”, that is not what God is really looking for.

Being poor does NOT make you a humble person.

The poor and the rich both exalt themselves. There are poor people who are proud of how poor they are, they use it as a crutch to make themselves feel better whilst judging those that have more than them. And there are rich people who also exalt themselves, who live barely within their means just to have that higher seat at the stadium, or that first-class ticket, so that they may be seen of others as a better person.

Being humble is something you have in your soul, not something that comes out of your mouth, or is a resemblance of how rich or how poor you are. Being humble is what you do when no one is looking, it is a character trait, not a symbol of status for having wealth and possessions or having nothing at all.