Sermon Transcript

0:00:14.0

I want you to picture in your mind two roads that are parallel in nature, two parallel roads.  And traffic on both of these roads in traveling in the same direction.  And you’re traveling on both of these roads.  The first one we’ll just call Financial Freeway, and the other one we’ll call Faith Highway.  Again, you and I are traveling both of these roads.  And I say they are parallel roads because most all of us were born and raised in the west.  Now, I’m not talking like west as in California versus east, like the east coast.  I’m talking about in western civilization, where we in the west tend to compartmentalize our lives.  Now, people in the east, in the Far East, see a whole holistic view of life.  They see the intermingling of different things.  We in the west, we’re good compartmentalizers.  And we tend to compartmentalize at least these two areas of our life- our financial life and our spiritual life.  I mean, we’re really good at that.  And even if we are people of faith traveling on Faith Highway and we might have some sense that, you know, there is a relationship between our spiritual life and our financial life, we kind of like this parallel universe that we live in.  Because as long as we can keep our faith life and our spiritual life separate from our financial life, then neither God nor anybody else can “mess with my money and my finances.”  Now, what I’ve discovered over the years is that every once in a while these two freeways intersect.  They come together.  And usually when they do, it’s when a financial crisis takes place.  Anybody here experiencing a financial crisis as we begin the New Year?  Maybe you’ve discovered you have more month than you have money.  Maybe you’ve discovered that there is financial stress in your life, and you're struggling with that right now.  Your bills are piling up.  You’ve got debt higher than a Montana sky.  The bill collectors and the creditors are starting to call and annoy you every day and in every possible way- text messages, emails, phone calls in the day or night.  And it’s not only causing stress in your life individually, but it’s causing stress in your marriage as well.  Did you know that still the number one cause of divorce today is money problems?  Still the number one.  And maybe you're experiencing some stress there in your life.  But you’ve come to that place where you’re willing to cry out to God because you’ve tried everything else to get your finances in order and to get this stress burden off of you.  But you’ve come to that place where you’re willing to say, “God, is there something You want to say to me here?”

0:03:28.1

Now, what I’ve discovered over the years is that while it’s a crisis that often brings these two parallel universes together in our lives, once the crisis subsides, if it does, sometimes these two roads return.  They just crisscross and they return to their…I’m not a very good artist, am I…but they return to their parallel universe.  And we continue down the road in our western way of thinking, seeing no relationship between our financial life and our spiritual life.  Or what happens is at the time of crisis we learn some new things.  And what comes out of this is a brand new, multilane superhighway on which we begin to travel, where those who travel on this superhighway put their old way of thinking about money behind them in the rearview mirror.  And now open to them is this wide new vista where they get to enjoy and experience true spiritual and financial freedom at the same time, which is God’s desire for us.  This is my goal, is that we all begin to merge our financial life and our spiritual life and we begin traveling on the highway God wants for us and that the defenses come down.  Because, again, I’ve spoken on this subject many years as a pastor and over the years.  And I understand all the suspicions and all the defenses that go up.  But what you need to understand is God doesn’t want something from you, He wants something for you.  He wants you and me to experience true spiritual and financial freedom.  And you can’t be in financial bondage and spiritually free at the same time.  It just doesn't work that way.

0:05:15.9

So today I’m beginning this four-part series of messages titled “His Money, Your Faith”.  And I really want us to just dive into what the Bible has to say about money and our finances.  Somebody once counted up years ago that the Bible contains somewhat around 2000, maybe 2100 verses of scripture on money, wealth and finances and material possessions.  That’s a lot.  That’s a lot of editorial space in the Bible that God has dedicated to this subject.  Compare that to about 500 verses on prayer and 500 verses on faith, and you get some sense that this is a really, really important subject.  Jesus told a lot of stories.  We call them parables.  And I think the last count I made there were 38 parables in the Gospels.  And 16 of the 38 parables have a money or stewardship theme to them, because Jesus understood that one of the greatest threats to the lordship of Jesus Christ and His leadership in our lives is this thing called money.  And that’s why He said…on the Sermon on the Mount He says you can’t serve God and money.  You can’t serve God and mammon. Either one is leading and the lord of your life, or the other is.  But you can’t serve both.

0:06:31.3

Now, my passion for this subject goes way, way back to my college days when I earned an undergraduate degree in financial planning.  I never really worked in the industry, but that’s where the seeds of my understanding and just becoming a personally financially-planned person started.  And it also goes back to my childhood days when my grandfather on my mother’s side was a very financially-planned person.  He grew up during the Depression.  And it was a very hard time financially for a lot of people in our country.  But later in life as he came out of that, he also became an accountant, which means that’s kind of a double whammy of financial conservatism, you know, and dotting his I’s, crossing his T’s, debits and credits and all that kind of stuff.  Now, my mother couldn’t rub two nickels together and keep them for very long before she’d either spend it or give it away.  And my dad had some financial issues in his businesses over the years.  So I really didn’t learn but negative patterns from my parents.  But my grandfather provided a good example.  And I learned some things in school.  And that began my journey just to being, hopefully, a personally financially-planned person.

0:07:51.0

But like a lot of people, I graduated from college, got my first job.  And that moved me from Fort Wayne, Indiana, which was my hometown, to New York City.  How about that?  And I was like a hayseed in New York looking around at all these tall buildings, lost as a goose.  But the company I worked for, their corporate headquarters were in New York on Park Avenue.  And I was there for four or five, six months of training before they placed me at a regional office in Charlotte, North Carolina.  And it was the first time I made real money.  You know, up to that time, you know, hourly wages and working this odd job.  My brother and I, we painted houses when we were in late high school and college. And, you know, just made a little money here, a little money there.  But this is the first time I got a real paycheck.  And I knew enough from my schooling and from my grandfather’s influence that I needed to budget my money and watch my money.  But you know how life goes, especially when, “woo hoo”, I got a paycheck!  And I was making a whopping, I don’t know, $21,000, $22,000 a year.  Okay.  And it came time to buy a car.  Now, everybody needs transportation.  Nothing wrong with buying a car.  But I went out on on my $21,000, $22,000 salary, and I bought me a BMW, okay.  I was a financial planning major, and here was the financial plan I was on.  I call it the “fake it ‘til you make it” plan, all right.  I was spending money I didn’t have to buy things I couldn’t afford to impress people who, come on, they really don’t care.  But I looked good in that BMW.  And my friends would look at me and go, “Wow!  Ron must be doing pretty good.”  Now, my boss, he gave me a different look, because he knew who much money was making or not making.  And he knew I was in way over my head.  And he knew that this wasn’t gonna work out very well.

0:09:53.1

And a little bit later I came to a financial crisis in my life, and here is how it came down.  I got up to go to work one day.  And I was in the corporate world at the time, you know, suits, ties, all that.  And I walk into my closet and I realize that my suit that I was gonna wear and my shirts and all that, they were at the cleaners and I forgot to pick them up the night before.  So I get in my car and I drive down to the cleaners and pick them up.  And I’m coming out of the parking lot, and I have to turn across, you know, two lanes of traffic to merge into two lanes this way turning left.  And I, you know, checked right and checked left.  I checked again.  Started merging out into traffic.  Next thing I hear is the sounds of screeching tires.  It was 6:30, 7:00 in the morning, rush hour traffic.  I look this way out the driver’s side window, and I see an SUV barreling down at me.  And I must have just been moving forward enough and turning into the lane left that, rather than T-boning me on the driver’s side, he just took off the back end of my BMW, okay.  Which, by that time in my life, stood for “Broke My Wallet”, but this was really gonna send me in a different direction.  Fortunately, nobody was hurt.  There were a lot of very upset motorists that morning in commuter traffic, you know, wondering who was the idiot who didn’t know how to turn left, you know.  And I remember, you know, I had an auto insurance policy as we all do.  And it was, you know, fully covered and all that, the damage to the car and damage to the other person’s car.  But there’s this funny little thing in those policies called a deductible, all right.  And my deductible was, I think, $500. But remember, I was on the “fake it ‘til you make it” plan.  And I didn’t have $500 in my bank account to pay the deductible.  By the way, did you know that 41% of Americans today do not have $500 in their bank account for such emergencies?  And that’s based on incomes that are above the federal poverty level.  Five hundred dollars.  I didn’t have it.  I was “fake it ‘til you make it”.  So I called my dad, who hadn’t advised me to buy the car in the first place.  You understand that, don’t you?  I mean, my dad loves to buy cars.  And he’s the only guy I know who can buy a used car, and two years later sell it for more than he bought it.  I mean, it’s just amazing.  It’s a depreciating asset, is it not?  Well, not to my dad.  He’s got an amazing way of finding deals out there.  And I explained the situation to my dad and asked for some help.  And he says, “Sure, I’ll help you, son.”  He says, “I’ll loan you the money.”  Well, I wasn’t looking for a loan, but I was in no position to negotiate.  And it turned out to be one of the best financial lessons I learned as I painfully paid off my dad that $500 loan.

0:12:52.5

But it wasn’t the only financial lesson that I learned, because God used this crisis in my life to set me on a different journey.  To bring me to some important questions, which is the question I want to ask to day.  And that is, whose money is it, anyway?  It was this experience, you know, more than 20 years ago that took me into a deeper study and deeper understanding of what we might call biblical financial stewardship, a journey that always, always, always begins with the question, whose money is it, anyway?  And that’s what I want to talk to you about this morning from the pages of God’s Word.

0:13:37.3

Before we get into some specifics there, every one of us a financial worldview.  You do know you have thoughts and ideas and perceptions about money.  Some of that may be shaped by Wall Street.  It may be shaped by a book that you read or a financial guru that you listen to or a financial journalist that you listen to on cable television.  You might have parents or grandparents who positively or negatively shaped your understanding of money.  You might have gone to college like I did, and you had a finance professor that taught you about money.  Or maybe you learned your understanding of money through the school of hard knocks.  However you learned it, because it’s something we all interact with every day, consciously or unconsciously, we all have a financial worldview.  And the tragedy is today is that financial literacy is at an all-time low.  Most Americans don’t know how to balance their own checkbook.  And that’s why 41% of Americans, quite frankly, don’t have $500 in their bank account to deal with emergencies that come.  And really, that’s not enough to have for the emergency that’s probably coming your way in the next six weeks or six months.  But we all have a financial worldview.  And over the years I’ve summarized the different worldviews that I’ve come in contact with into four statements that I’d like for us to talk about this morning real briefly.  And in your notes there you can check the box next to the statement that best describes your financial worldview.

0:15:07.1

The first one says, “What’s mine is mine, and I’m going to keep it.”  “What’s mine is mine, and I’m going to keep it.”  This is somebody who has an ownership worldview.  “I work hard for my money.  Get your grubby paws off it.  It’s mine.  It’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine.  And I’m gonna keep it.  I’m gonna make what I can, can all I get, and sit on the lid.”  That’s the idea here.  “What’s mine is mine, and I’m gonna keep it.”

0:15:40.0

The second worldview says, “What’s yours in mine, and I’m gonna take it.”  Now, that could be a thief.  It could be a highly competitive business person who sees the money in your pocket or my pocket as theirs.  They just need to make the sale.  It could be socialist government who wants to take your money and redistribute it.  “What’s yours in mine,” the idea here, “and I’m going to take it.”

0:16:12.4

The third worldview says, “What’s mine is God’s, and I’m going to share it.”  Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.  Now we’re moving from an ownership mentality to a biblical stewardship mentality.  Not “what’s mine is mine, and I’m going to keep it,” but, “what’s mine is God’s, and I’m going to share it.”  Or let’s go to the fourth one, and this is more intentionally inside a marriage relationship.  We’ll change the personal pronouns here.  “What’s ours is God’s, and we’re going to share it.”  That fourth statement is what Cathryn and I call “financial soul mates”.  Hey, husbands and wives, are you financial soul mates?  Are you one flesh and one financially at the same time?  Do you have the same financial worldview?  And is it informed by the pages of scripture, such as you see yourself not as owners but as managers and stewards of a sacred trust that God has given to you, this thing called money.

0:17:26.4

Sam Houston, General Sam Houston was a Texas American hero.  And you would know that if you lived in the state of Texas of you were traveling on I-45 north of the city of Houston.  I lived in Houston on and off for about 14 years.  And as you travel north out of the city, about 45 minutes to an hour you’ll come to Sam Houston State University near Huntsville, Texas.  And you can’t miss it because there is a statue of General Sam Houston that towers 67 feet into the sky.  It’s kind of white limestone.  And on a sunny Texas day it glistens.  You can see it for miles and miles and miles.  It’s billed as the largest statue of an American hero, General Sam Houston, Texas hero.  Well, General Sam Houston became a follower of Jesus Christ late in his life.  And he asked to be baptized.  And his pastor obliged.  And they went down to a small country creek one day to baptize General Houston.  And as they were going there the pastor turned to General Houston and says, “General, you might want to take your glasses off because, you know, I’m gonna baptize you and immerse you under the water.”  And so the general took his glasses off.  And they were walking a little bit further.  And the pastor noticed that General Houston had some papers in his front pocket.  And he says, “General, you might want to take those papers out of your front pocket.  I don’t know if those are important papers or not.”  So the general grabbed his papers, took them out.  And as they were entering the water, the pastor also noticed that the general had his (0:19:00.1) wallet in his back pocket.  And he said one more time, he says, “You know, General Houston, you might want to take your wallet out of your back pocket.”  And that’s when the general looked at the pastor and says, “Pastor, if there is any area of my life that needs to be baptized, it’s my money.”  And General Houston was baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit that day, wallet and all.

0:19:22.9

Some of you are here today and you need your money baptized.  And I’m gonna offer to do that this morning.  In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, I want to baptize your thoughts, your mind, your heart.  Baptize them by immersing them in the principles of biblical financial stewardship, starting with the question, whose money is it, anyway?  And I want to share with you just three (0:20:00.0) simple principles that are a starting point.  That were a starting point in my journey many years ago when I came to this point of crisis.  And if I hadn’t learned these basic principles, yeah, these two roads would have, you, crisscrossed and returned to their parallel state.  But God built a superhighway here upon which I’ve been traveling for all these years and that impacted even Cathryn and I’s marriage when we got married.  And we’ve been traveling on this highway in this journey together for more than 20 years.

0:20:32.4

Here is the first principle.  God owns everything.  He owns everything.  Let’s look at a few verses of scripture here.  Psalm 24:1, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, the world and all who live in it.”  Everything.  Circle that word.  Everything.  “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.”  Everything belongs to Him, “and all who live in it.”  Everything belongs to Him, and every Who in Whoville belongs to Him too, all right.  I mean, it’s pretty simple, isn’t it?  1 Corinthians 10:26, “For the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.”  Haggai 2:8, I love this, “‘The silver and gold are mine,’ declares the Lord Almighty.”  How about from the Old Testament again, Exodus 19:5 the Lord says to His chosen people Israel, “Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”  And do you remember the book of Job, you know, God’s wisdom on pain and suffering in life.  And do you remember that conversation that Job and his friends had for about, I don’t know, 36 chapters just wax eloquently about what Job was going through?  God was silent for all that time until in chapter 38 He breaks the silence.  And one of the things He said a chapter or two later, chapter 41 and verse 11, “Who has a claim that I must pay?  Everything under heaven belongs to me.”  So these are just some simple places in the scripture where God declares His ownership.  He claims title deed to the earth and everything in it.  God owns everything.  Now, this is a difficult principle for a lot of us to grasp.  Not just intellectually but just in practice because we’re proud Americans.  We’re self-starter kind of people.  We earn our money through toil and sweat.  And, “It’s mine.  What’s mine is mine, and I’m gonna keep it.  Get your dirty paws off it,” right?  That’s the attitude a lot of us have.  And so to come in and have the preacher tell you, “No, it all belongs to God.”  “Oh, I get it, Preacher.  Now you’re gonna tell me to put it all in the offering plate.”  All right, let your defenses down.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  But traveling on this journey toward spiritual and financial freedom begins with an understanding of the answer to this question, whose money is it, anyway?

0:23:18.0

Our resistance to this kind of reminds me of a toddler.  You ever heard the Toddler’s Creed?  I love little kids and toddlers.  Our kids are now grown a little bit and in college.  But I love little kids and toddlers.  But I came across this years ago, and it’s so true.  It’s called the Toddler’s Creed.  “If I want it, it’s mine.  If I give it to you and change my mind later, it’s mine.  If I can take it away from you, it’s mine.  If it’s mine, it will never belong to anybody else no matter what.  If we are building something together on the floor, all the pieces are mine.  If it looks just like mine, it’s mine.”  Sounds just like a toddler, doesn’t it?  But a lot of us as adults, we don’t grow out of the toddler years when it comes to our money.  Because we say, “What’s mine is mine, and I’m gonna keep it.  It’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine.”  Okay.  So making this transition from an ownership mentality to a stewardship mentality, again, it’s a challenging one.

0:24:21.0

Martin Luther, who was the man that God used to spark the Protestant Reformation back in the 1600s, says there are three conversions necessary in a person’s life- the conversion of the heart, the conversion of the mind, and the conversion of the purse or the wallet.  The reason these are parallel highways and universes is because that third conversion hasn’t happened in a lot of so-called Christians’ lives.  W.H. Greever said, “Stewardship is what you do after you say, ‘I believe.’”  So years ago when I was kind of wrestling with these principles and trying to get, you know, my heart and my mind around it, I decided to write a letter to my money.  Kind of a “Dear John” letter.  We needed to redefine the relationship a little bit.  It had become too possessive on either side.  And so here is what I penned.  “Dear money, breaking up is hard to do, but I need to tell you I’ve met someone else.  You’ve promised to secure my future and make my happy.  I felt safe with you believed we could grow together.  But not long ago you sprout wings like an eagle and flew away from me.  I guess our relationship changed, or maybe I changed.  Maybe you changed me.  I’m not sure if I’m more possessive of you or vice versa.  Can’t live with you, can’t live without you.  I feel like a slave serving a master.  I want my freedom back.  So goodbye, money.  I loved you once, but let’s just be friends.  Okay?”  And that was just kind of my way of redefining my relationship with money and things and possessions.

0:26:04.6

Now, at this point in our conversation you might be thinking to yourself, well, you know, you really think, Pastor, that money is an evil thing.  No, I don’t.  There’s nothing evil about money, and I want to clarify that before we go any further.  The Bible does not say money is the root of all evil.  I don’t know where you ever heard that, but there is nowhere in scripture that it says money is the root of all evil.  It says the love of money is the root of all evil.  You have an unhealthy affection for money and the things that money can buy, and there are warnings all over scripture.  It threatens the lordship of Jesus Christ in our lives.  This is why Jesus said in His Sermon on the Mount you can’t serve God and money at the same time.  You have to make a choice.  Either one will be the lord of your life, or the other.

0:27:02.9

Money is neutral though.  Money is a currency.  It’s a medium of exchange.  And there is nothing evil about money.  1 Timothy 6:9 is where we get that phrase that we stumble over and misunderstand a bit.  But the apostle Paul was writing to a young protégé in the ministry when he said, “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.  It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.”  When I wandered away from the faith and made an ill-advised financial decision that was based on a “fake it ‘til you make it” financial plan and based upon a financial worldview that says, “I worked hard for this money.  It’s mine, It’s mine, it’s mine,” and I went out and made a dumb car-buying decision, I felt the pang of that.  It took a lot of years to dig myself out of that debt.  I could barely make the car payments.  Well, it’s just a long story there.  It takes about two seconds to get into debt.  It takes years to get out.

0:28:15.4

He says the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.  Back up to verse 9 there.  “But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation.”  Not the rich.  There’s nothing wrong with being rich.  If God has blessed you with financial means and wealth, you don’t have to feel guilty about that.  It just means that you have a greater stewardship, a greater trust.  “To whom much has been given much is required,” Jesus said.  But you don’t have to feel guilty about having more.  And, by the way, by the time you think you have a lot, somebody else has more than you.  That’s just, you know, how materialism works.  Materialism is always relative to the next, you know, step on the ladder that we’re trying to climb, right?  Somebody always has less, and somebody always has more.  But if God has blessed you, you don’t have to feel guilty about that, as long as you put the Lord first in your finances.  “But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare,” the Bible says, “into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.”  I lived out some of that ruin and destruction, some of the financial bondage that I found myself in.  A slave to the decisions that I made back then that put me in a debt position that…well, it just wasn’t a good situation.  But money itself is not evil.  The principle is simply this.  God owns everything.

0:29:39.4

The second principle is similar to it, but it’s broader.  Your life is not your own.  It’s not just about money, this transition from an ownership mentality to a stewardship mentality.  But there is something more holistic here that we want to keep in mind.  Jeremiah 10:23, the prophet Jeremiah said, “I know, O Lord, that a man’s life is not his own.  It is not for a man to direct his steps.”  Here the ancient prophet of God had come to a settled conclusion in his life that even the very life that God had given to him, he didn’t own it.  If you own it, you can do whatever you want with it.  But when you come to that settled conclusion that “neither my money nor my life belongs to me...even the direction of my life…”  “It is not for a man to direct his own steps.”  Why?  Because your life doesn’t belong to you.  It is a trust given to you and given to me.  And the questions about the direction of our life and all of that must always come back to, “Lord, what would You have me to do?  Where would You have me to invest my life, and what would You have me to do with it?”

0:30:53.6

I was trying to wrap my puny brain around these thoughts years ago.  And I sketched out something called “The Whole Life Stewardship Model”.  It was for me as much as anybody who might find some encouragement from it.  And this model, if we can put it up on the screen here, was built around three ideas- the resources, relationships, and responsibilities that we all have in life.  And you can just think about, you know, what resources God has given to you, what relationships He has entrusted to you, what responsibilities He has given to you in life.  And then I subdivided that into what I call the “seven sacred trusts of life”.  They include time, money, the body that God has given to you, your family, your vocation, the earth, the ministry He’s entrusted to you.  And what I concluded in my life through this little sketch that I made was that this was all about God’s ownership and my stewardship, my management of what He had entrusted to me.  I also concluded that life is both a test and a trust.  These were sacred trusts.  And because of that, one day I would have to give an account to God, not only how I managed the money He entrusted to me but also how I managed in a holistic kind of way all these areas of life.

0:32:17.9

I mentioned earlier that Jesus told a lot of stories.  We call them parables in the Bible.  You’ll find them all over the Gospels.  And one of them is found in Luke 16.  It’s called the parable of the unjust steward or manager.  And it’s kind of a shot across the bow, a little bit of warning.  A reminder to us that, yes, God owns it all, and your life is not your own, and one day you’ll have to give an account.  It goes like this in Luke 16:1-2, “Jesus also said to his disciples, ‘There was a rich man who had a manager.  And charges were brought to him that this man was wasting his possessions.  And he called him and said to him, “What is this that I hear about you?  Turn in the account of your manager, for you can no longer be manager.”’”  Jesus told a lot of stories, and they had some variations to them.  But stories about a master who…call them an employer, maybe, who had great possessions, maybe went away on a long journey somewhere, but entrusted those possessions to a manager.  And then he would come back, and the manager would have to give an account of how he managed the master’s or the employer’s business.  In this case, there was a manager who wasted the employer’s possessions, squandered the wealth.  The report came back to the master.  “You’ve got a bad manager over here.”  Now, the implication is we’re all gonna give an account.  One day we will stand before the Lord as believers in Jesus Christ. This is called the judgment seat of Christ.  Not to determine whether you get in heaven or not, but to ask those questions about how well we managed the sacred trust God has given to us.  We will give an account.  And the scripture says this over and over and over again.

0:34:14.3

Brings me to the third and final principle.  And this one really flows out of the first two.  God owns everything.  Your life is not your own.  Therefore, every financial decision is also a spiritual decision.  Every financial decision is a spiritual decision.  It’s a spiritual decision because it doesn’t belong to you or me in the first place.  It’s somebody else’s money.  It’s His money.  And it’s a spiritual decision because we will one day give an account of how well we’ve managed it and whether we’ve managed it to the glory of God, and whether we’ve been faithful.  Not successful, but faithful with what God has given to us.  And the principle in scripture taught through a parables of Jesus is if you’ve been faithful with a little, then He’ll entrust you with more.

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Some of you may be sitting here and saying, you know, “Pastor, this is all great for people who have a lot of money.  But I don’t have a lot of money to manage.  And I’m just trying to rub a couple of nickels together and get by.”  Well, let me put some of this in perspective for you in terms of, again, God owns it all.  Your life is not your own.  Let’s say you work for 40 years of your life, from age 25 to age 65.  And let’s say on average you only make $25,000 a year.  And, by the way, that’s below the federal poverty line.  So, you know, that’s not a great salary, okay.  But on average you made about $25,000 a year, you know, over 40 years.  Just do the math.  One million dollars passed through your hands.  What did you do with that?  How well did you manage that?  And, by the way, if we’re just talking about our earthly portfolio—we’ll talk about our eternal portfolio later—but if we’re just talking about our earthly portfolio, building wealth has nothing to do with how much money you’ve made.  There are plenty of bankrupt billionaires and millionaires.  But it’s about managing well what you’ve been given, living below your means, saving and investing, and putting God first in your finances.  You can’t say He’s first in your life and last in your budget.  It doesn't work that way.  But all of the biblical principles and economic principles that we’ll talk about over the next two or three weeks that are found in the pages of scripture—and there are many—they come to play in our lives when we answer this question.  Whose money is it, anyway?  And we establish the Lord Jesus Christ as the Lord and the leader of our finances.  We put Him first.  “Seek first the kingdom of God,” Jesus said.  And all these other worries you have in life will fall into place if you put Him first.

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So whose money is it, anyway?  Well, maybe you're at a crisis in your life right now, and this is a great time to be asking that question.  What we don’t know yet is when the crisis subsides, if it does, whether you’ll return to two parallel freeways and highways and two parallel universes where your financial life and your spiritual life never interact, or whether God sets you on a brand new journey on a multilane superhighway where followers of Jesus Christ who have adopted a mentality governed by and informed by biblical financial stewardship principles lead their life and lead them into an experience and the enjoyment of true spiritual and financial freedom individually, in your marriage and in a lot of other areas of life.  I hope you’ll join me in this journey.  It’s been an exciting one for my wife and I to travel over these years.  We haven’t always done it perfectly, but God has been faithful to the promises, yes, the financial promises He’s made in the pages of His Word when we make a decision to put Him first in our finances.

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