Biblical Financial Stewardship

Good morning, everyone. That was very nice. We don't clap at Methodist Church, so, uh, I'm a member of the Seani Methodist Church, just to share that. But it's very nice to be here today with you. I'm grateful for the opportunity and for Bill to have, you know, extended his hand, and also so he can be down there and serve the great ministry that Tim has, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with, and all the work that he does. So I'm glad that I'm able to step in here for a minute. We were discussing this a couple of weeks ago, and he thought it might be a good idea for me to come in and speak. I'm a financial adviser in Medeville, Pennsylvania; I own Millennial Money Management, and I'm also a certified financial planner and a certified Kingdom advisor.

The portion of the certified Kingdom advisor is a great program. It was started by Larry C. back in the '80s, and now it trains and certifies over 1,500 certified Kingdom advisers across the country. It's really training to give biblically accurate financial advice as a part of our practice, okay? And it's really been a life-changing experience for me and all the wonderful people that I met. But anyhow, Bill and I were having a meeting, and he thought it would be a good idea, and I said, "Oh, yeah, sure! I'll come in and talk to you folks," thinking it would just be a 10 or 15-minute gig. He'd preach a little bit, I'd come up and say a few things.

So I talked to him last week and said, "Okay, what are we expecting here? You know, how many people is there going to be? How long are we going to go?" He goes, "I usually go for about 45 minutes." I was like, "What?" He says, "I have them conditioned." I said, "Is that true? Yeah?"

Okay, so I'm going to try not to keep you for 45 minutes. I really hope so. But today, I'm going to be talking about biblical financial stewardship, and we're going to start with Psalm 24:1. It's a very basic verse, but it's pretty key to biblical financial stewardship. My translation is a little bit different, so let me get the same translation here that you have.

I'll just read it with you: "The Earth is the Lord's and everything in it, the world and those who dwell in it, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers. Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord, and who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully. He will receive blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation."

But the most important verse there, I think, is the first one: "The Earth is the Lord's, the world and everything in it." I think we believe that as Christians, right? We believe that our soul is God's. We believe that God brought us into the world and that God can take us out of the world. My mother also says that. But we believe that as Christians, right? We believe that he owns the Earth, right? We believe that he owns our bodies, right? Our bodies are our temples for him.

But the implications are that he owns everything, right? And it also means that he owns our money, right? For some people, that's a little bit difficult to grasp. You know, there are technical parts of it, but I'm going to try to keep it simple today. But the point is that if God owns everything and God owns our money, that means that we're called to be stewards of what we have because it's his, right? We don't own it, right? We don't own our wealth. So we're called to be stewards of our money, and because we're called to be stewards of our money, every decision that we make is a stewardship decision, right? With our finances, or with our health, or really everything. But today, I'm talking about finance.

When I have clients come into my office, I usually put them, my financial planning clients at least, through a little bit of an exercise. I say, "All right, come in; it's part of the budgeting process. Bring me three months of your spending, right? Just three months of your bank statements and credit card statements." It's pretty amazing because once you become cognizant of it, someone like myself can look at your bank statements for about three months or whatever and know exactly what's important to you. Right? Think about that! I can, somebody can bring me their bank statements, I can look at them for 15 minutes, and I can know what's important to you. What do you spend your money on, right?

And that's what this is all about, right? What are you spending your money on? Is it a depiction of what's important to you? Right? And is God going to be something that I'm going to, you know, glean from reading through your bank statements? Is it going to be, you know, a life of recreation or, you know, family, whatever it might be? But how we spend our money is indicative of where our heart's at, okay?

And this is the fundamental truth of U Financial stewardship. It seems like the typical way that Christians live our lives is we live a compartmentalized life, right? We have a church life; we come to church on Sunday. We maybe have a Bible study group one day a week. We pray before we go to bed, and then we have our work lives that are separate. We have our family lives that are separate, maybe a little bit intertwined there. And then we have our financial lives, which are completely separate really from our Christianity in most cases. Of course, you know, you go into church, you tithe. You know, tithe means tenth literally. You tithe your 10%. You check the box, okay? My financial integration with my, you know, Christianity is fulfilled. Check the box. Next thing.

But that's not biblical, actually, right? What's biblical is that our lives are supposed to be completely integrated with God, okay? Including our finances. He's supposed to have a say in all of it because, as I said before, God owns it all.

There's a really great book; it's called The Integrated Life. It's by Ken Eldred, and it teaches. It's a good book to learn from, and he talks about this compartmentalized life and ways that you can think about integrating your spirituality across everything that you do: your work, your finances, and so on and so forth. So I think that's important, a way, you know, it's a good place to start thinking about your stewardship and really making God a part of your whole life.

The truth is, as I started getting into the scripture and learning more about biblical financial stewardship, I realized that the Bible speaks really intensely about money, okay? It really does, right? It doesn't mince words about it; it's very serious. And it's serious in several places, but it's also very gracious in many ways. So I want to share that with you today. But I'm going to move to Mark 10:17. You don't have this, but I'm going to go through this scripture kind of piece by piece because this is kind of the pinnacle of, I think, what God wants us to know about managing our money, okay? It's a story of the Rich Young Man; a lot of you might know it.

So I'm in Mark 10:17. Give you guys a second to find it, and I'm reading out of the English Standard Version. I'm not sure what you guys have in front of you, but okay. So I'm going to start in the first part. Jesus, he's with his disciples; he's giving them instruction. All right, and he was setting out, and as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up, knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

And Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not defraud, honor your father and mother." And the man said to him, "Teacher, all of these things I've kept from my youth."

And Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You lack one thing: Go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me." Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.

Okay, most of you know that story. There are a couple of things I want to point out about that first part. One is, here's a man who clearly believes in the Messiah, right? At this time in the world, following the Mosaic laws was very important. He said, "I've kept all of the commandments." He's done everything that he's told that he should do, okay, except one. All right, so he's done everything. God loves him for it, but there's one more thing he has to do, and it is to sell his possessions.

The next line: Jesus turned and looked at his disciples and said, "How difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God." The disciples were amazed at this, and they were amazed because they learned to follow the Mosaic commandments and their tithing structure and things like that. They'd never heard anything about this sacrificial type of giving.

And Jesus said to them, "How difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God! It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God." What he's saying is it's impossible. So think about the implications of that. There's a man who's, you know, been a good person, a good human being. He's done everything he was supposed to do, kept all of the commandments, and yet he won't sell his possessions. And Jesus says, in very plain verbiage here, "It's impossible to get into heaven holding on to your wealth like that; it's impossible." Right? That's the translation when he's saying a camel can't pass through the eye of a needle. Right? It will be impossible. You can keep all the commandments, you can be a great person, he's saying it will be impossible for you to enter the kingdom of God, showing up on his doorstep with all this earthly wealth. Okay? That's the point. So, take that away from this.

Um, you know, he's using an example here where he's trying to have a rich man come follow him, and, you know, he wants him to give everything away. I think people jump to that conclusion, and we're going to talk about that a little more, but it's not about just giving everything away and living impoverished or anything like that. But it's about the idea that this is that serious, right? You can be a perfect Christian in every single way, and that's how much God cares about money. Okay? Because money is really the perfect resource. It's liquid, right? We can send money to Africa right now, and it can be put to work for good things right immediately. We can't spend all of our time flying over there or our, you know, physicality or whatever it might be. There's only a certain amount of things that we can do, but we have wealth and money, and it can be transferred and do work immediately right now in this present age. And that's why God cares so much about it. It's a very liquid thing; it's a very rich thing that he wants you to do good works with. Okay? So, that's the point.

And well, let's keep going here.

So, he said, "And they were astonished." Again, they said, "Jesus looked at them and said, 'With man it's impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.'" Peter began to say to him, "See, we have left everything and followed you." Jesus said, "Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands—can insert the word 'possessions'—for my sake and for the gospel who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time." Okay? There's no one who has given away their family or their friends or their lands or their house or their possessions—enter, you know, answerer, whatever word you want—who will not receive a hundredfold.

Okay, let's stop there. I'm an investment manager; it's what I do. I invest wealth. I can't earn anybody 100x on their money. Okay? It's not possible. Well, it could be possible, maybe, if you… like, we're not going to go into that. But the point is that 100x is very substantial. Listen to that. And then he says this, and this is interesting because Jesus, he's talking to his disciples, and he's not speaking in parables right now. He's speaking very directly to them. You can almost tell his voice is very serious when he says this. He says, "You will receive a hundredfold." And then he says, "Now in this time." Right? That's an amazing little piece right there. He says, "You're going to receive a hundredfold, and you poor humans need so much," like promising because you're so lacking so much faith that I'm going to tell you that you're not going to receive this in terms of eternal life or something like that. You're going to receive it in this life; you're going to receive a hundredfold now.

Okay? Now, all right, that's amazing. And then he goes on to say in the end, "Also in the age to come, eternal life." Right? So, he even goes a step further in telling us, "Now, and then you're going to receive a hundredfold." Now, oh, and by the way, you're also going to get eternal life. Is this enough for you? Right? He can kind of tell he's like reinforcing, "Is this enough?" Right? But this piece of scripture is so important. Right? Those things are what you need to remember as a steward of your money. Right? The implications of how you steward your money are absolutely massive, and it's undeniable; it's very clear in this scripture.

There's a preacher out of Cleveland I tell everybody about because he's amazing. His name is Alistair Begg. Has anybody here heard of Alistair Begg? All right, awesome, awesome. He has a podcast; it's called Truth For Life. If you don't listen to him regularly… All right, I got some people on board here; I love that. But he has a saying, and he says, "The plain things are the main things, and the main things are the plain things." Okay? And I think that's super valuable when you're looking at the scripture, right? You don't need to worry about like every person's circumstance and exactly what he told this young ruler to do. Just realize that the main thing here is that this is a very serious point of emphasis. Okay? God cares very deeply about what we do with our wealth here on Earth, and this is not a zero-sum thing. Right? We're not… We don't have to… He's not saying, "Give your money away, and you're going to have to suffer and be impoverished, but you're going to get eternal life." No, he's saying, "Give your… give, you know, just have an open hand." Let's put it that way. Okay? Have an open hand, and I'm going to give you a hundredfold in this present life.

And obviously, he's not talking about dollar for dollar. Right? If you give away $100,000, he's not going to give you 10 million or something. I mean, he might! He might give you way more than that, but in many types of things—love, confidence, peace of mind, you know, family, companionship, whatever it might be. Right? Things that are really valuable. Right? That's up to him to decide.

But he's going to give us a hundredfold. So, we get to receive this now. We get to use our wealth to help other people so they benefit. We're benefiting, they're benefiting, and then God gets the glory. Right? So, win-win-win situation. Win-win-win. Yeah, I think I said that right—three wins. Okay? So, it's not… I think too often we get trapped in this mindset that, you know, we need to live in an impoverished state, and that's just not true. And we're going to get to some other scripture in the future, and the Bible doesn't say in here that, you know, every person needs to live in… give everything away. Right?

So, the plain things are the main things. This is a win-win-win situation. Okay? It's beneficial in every single type of way, and the point is that in the scripture, all right, that I'm going to get to later, it teaches us how to be good stewards with a lot of wealth. Right? Be good stewards as you're wealthy, or, you know, or if you're, you know, perhaps you're someone that's skilled with increasing money or skilled at savings. Right? I believe God gave me the gift of that.

Um, so I don't think it's practical that every dollar that comes in I give it away. Right? I believe that God has called me to increase my wealth so that I can give more over time. Right? Increase it responsibly. Right? In a Christian way, and give it away over time. Right? Create more abundance. That it might be somebody's calling. He wants you to say, "All right, you know, give x amount now, but I want you to save some, grow it so that I can give away a billion dollars in the future," or something like that. Or maybe he said, "Okay, this person, you have a spending problem; you never save anyhow, so instead of tithing 10%, I want you to be giving away 30%, and that's going to be your covenant with me."

I don't know what it is, but I know that God has something different, probably for all of us, and so it's just important that you kind of have that conversation with him, understand, you know, what kind of gifts that he's giving you, and the best way to steward your money. So, I hope that comes through today, that it's not about… I mean, the importance of sacrificial giving is important. There's absolutely no denying that, but just ask him, pray and ask him what he wants you to do with your wealth. Okay? All right. So, you're going, "All right, Matt, you've harped on this enough. Give me something practical." All right? So, I have a couple practical lessons for us today.

As I went through this Kingdom advisor training program, I was introduced to a new way of thinking about a budgeting structure, which I really like, and I try to implement it whenever I can. It’s based on the fact that there are four uses of money; there are only four things you can do with your money. Okay? You can spend it, you can save it (slash invest it), you can owe it in debt, or you can give it away. Okay? Those are your four things, and I have them succinctly described as "Live, Give, O, and Grow," a little bit of a mnemonic to try to remember: Live, Give, O, and Grow.

Okay, so we'll go through here briefly a little bit more in detail about what the Bible says about each one of these categories of your budget, and you can see it's pictured here, all right? We’re together, as a pie, right? In the middle, it says "God owns it all." So, you remember that God has ownership over everything, right? But the idea here is that, okay, we're on the lifestyle pie.

Okay, let me switch to read this scripture first; I’d like to do that. I'm going to go to Timothy 6 here.

Verse 17: Here's an example of Paul writing to Timothy, talking about how rich people should act. As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, thus storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is truly life.

Okay, great piece of scripture! It's talking about how I should steward my money, maybe if I am wealthy already at this point, right? And he’s not saying to give it all away here, right? He’s saying they should be generous and ready to share; they should store up some treasures as a foundation for the future, so that they can do more Kingdom work with it and take hold of that which is truly life. That’s a beautiful piece of scripture there “that which is truly life.” I love that.

Okay, so this "Live" piece of the pie, this is your spending lifestyle portion of your budget—how much you spend on just your daily wants and needs. Okay? The only way that you can increase, let’s call it the Kingdom portions of the pie, which would be the giving portion and the growing portion, right? If we want to save and do Kingdom work later, is by delaying gratification. Right? I know everybody here knows that. Right? But the only way to increase the other parts of the pie that are probably more important than your lifestyle is delaying gratification.

Another thing that’s so important here is a complete transition of mindset that I see more and more people taking throughout the Christian world as Kingdom advisers is getting a lot of speed. And it’s this idea of not how much can I obtain. Okay? Not how much can I get before retirement, like what’s the maximum amount of money I can squeeze out so I have saved up for retirement enough and I can live as comfortably as possible. But this concept of how much is enough. Right? You sit down and think, “Okay, how much is enough?” You can just, um, you know, maybe after everything, you set a giving goal and a savings goal, an investing goal. What do I need to live on? Okay, say, “Alright, maybe I need, um, you know, $80,000 to live on.” This is after everything else is taken care of. Then after that, everything else is God's, and you can put it to work the way He sees fit. And you say, “This is how much I want to live on; this is enough for me.”

It's a completely different way of thinking about money, especially here in America—about how much is enough for me to be happy. And then what happens is instead of going to work and worrying about increasing and making more money and growing, you come to find yourself in a place of contentment. Right? You say, “Okay, I’ve already decided that this amount of money is going to be enough for me.” So now, when I increase my pie, I’m just doing more Kingdom work. I’m satisfied. Right? I’m satisfied with my lifestyle.

So think about that sometime and reflect on that. I encourage you; it’s a completely different way of thinking. If you're feeling stressed out about money or having financial problems, it’s a great place to change your thinking and see how that changes your heart. Right? Thinking from a position of how much is enough instead of how much do I need or think I need.

Okay, all right, the next piece of the pie.

Give: Giving is so important. Ron Blue, he’s also a part of the Kingdom adviser, has a saying, and he says giving is important because giving breaks the power of money. That’s an amazing way to put that! I think it’s perfect. Giving is important because it breaks the power of money. When you think about the Rich Young Ruler, you can tell that he wanted to follow Christ. He believed in Christ; he followed all the laws. But power—there—money had too much power over him, right? That was the issue. His money, his riches, it had too much power over him.

Giving breaks the power of money. Okay? If you feel like, you know, maybe you’re doing your tithing but you’re still having, you know, a lot of issues with your finances and are very stressed out about it, it might be that you’re not giving enough. You’re not giving sacrificially enough. You haven’t broken that power over you. Those two things that I just mentioned are extremely important: giving is important; it breaks the power of money, and determining how much is enough is a great place to figure out how to be content with what you have.

Okay? Those two things, I think, are spiritually life-changing for a lot of people when they can finally wrap their heads around it. Okay, I'm going to go to Luke 6:38; there’s a great verse here.

It's a continuation of verse 37, but it says, "Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you, in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, and will be put into your lap; for with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you." All right, there's another example of God's grace, saying, "Listen, if you give away— you know, even if it's in a sacrificial manner— I'm going to give it back to you, running over." Okay, second verse, second time it said this. And this is— you know, we're not talking about Old Testament scripture; we're talking about Jesus saying these things. Okay? This is very reliable information, right? I mean, we believe this is all the word of God, but if this is coming straight out of Jesus's mouth, okay? As I said before, giving is a win-win-win situation. All right? And it is life-changing. All right? We go to the next one.

Oh, we know what the Bible says about owing. It says, "Pay the people you owe; pay the government; pay the taxes that you owe." Okay? This is pretty clear. The issue with debt— you know, and people are always looking for, like, formulas: like, what percentage of my income should I be spending on an auto loan, or what percentage should I spend on a mortgage? You know, or how much should I be giving? And everybody settles, you know, on 10%. But the reality is, that's not how the Bible works, right? The Bible works in principles. Okay? And it doesn't say that owing is evil or sinful— having debt. But what the Bible does tell us is that owing— and this also follows logically— that when we have an obligation to another person, we owe them money before God, right? We place those obligations in front of Him. Okay? Um, so by borrowing, you're denying possibly the chance for God to use your money in a productive way that He wants you to use it. Okay? That's the problem with borrowing. Okay? Borrowing also is presumptuous. Right? You're presuming that in the future you're going to have a certain amount of money to repay what you've borrowed. Okay? Now, I know we live in a weird world right now. We have basically a public mortgage system that's backed by the government, and it's extremely low-interest rates and all of this stuff. Um, but that's not the point. The point is that you might deny God the opportunity to work; it's presumptuous. And debt is oftentimes a symptom of a spiritual problem. Okay? If you have people that have too much debt, they usually have some type of spiritual problem, whether it's greed, or pride, or envy, or laziness. Okay? Whatever it might be. All right? It's often symptomatic— it's often symptomatic of some kind of spiritual problem. All right? So I think we all get that. All right? And then lastly, we have "grow." I've put Matthew 25 up there; that is the parable of the talents, and I think we know this story. Um, right? A lord gives three servants a different amount of money: five talents, two talents, one talent. He leaves; he comes back. The person with five made it ten; the person with two made it four; the person with one buried it in the ground and gave it back to him. And he berated the person who left it in the ground and didn't make productive use out of it. Right? It's his indication that God wants us to increase in the abundance of the world. He wants the world to increase in abundance, which means people need to be— there are certain reasons to be saving and to be investing. Okay? Um, and increasing your wealthiness. All right? This is also scriptural. So, um, building wealth is good, and building wealth is also the pathway to be able to steward and do more. Right? And so there is no cut-and-dry thing here. Right? You have to decide how much should you be giving away presently, what should your lifestyle spending be, how much should you be, you know, saving and investing for your own future security, but then also for more Kingdom work in the future. Okay? And as I said before, the only way to answer that is to pray and ask God Himself what He would have you do with it. That's the only way. All right? So lastly, I'll wrap this up. We have, um, some— we have the four uses of money: we have live, give, owe, grow. Right? Living— that's your spending, deciding how much is enough; giving— breaking the power of money over you; owing— right? Symptomatic of spiritual problems; it's presumptuous; denies God opportunities. And then growing— it's sound money management. You need to have, uh, an emergency fund and then also to do more Kingdom work in the future. Right? So those are the four uses of money. And to put very simply, you have five money management principles, which are: spend less than you earn; give generously; avoid debt; build cash flow margin. All right? That's saving. And then set long-term goals of what you actually want to achieve with your savings. Okay? So those are some things I hope that you can take away from tonight. But the point is that God owns everything. Right? The wealth that you have— it's not yours, just like your soul. And, because of that, we're stewards. And because we're stewards, every decision we make is a stewardship decision. Every financial decision we make included. Okay? So that's all I have. Let me please close you in prayer.

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank You for this wonderful book You've given us with Your instruction and for sending Your Son here to bear our sins. We're grateful for all the wealth and resources that You have provided us, and we just pray that as we come and ask You, that You would open our hearts and our eyes and let us see what You would have us do with Your treasure, with Your resources, with Your money, so that we might grow Your Kingdom and glorify You. For Yours is the glory and power forever.

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