How To Be Rich Devotionalናሙና

Migrating Hope

According to Paul, when you're rich there's a natural inclination for your hope to migrate toward money. And if you fall into this trap, then the wealthier you get, the more you will hope in riches. When riches become the basis for your hope - the source of it - you're headed down a slippery slope.

So here's the challenge. Financial stewardship and planning are important. We're supposed to be responsible with our money. We need to address things like life insurance, savings, and retirement. We just need to figure out how to do it without putting our hope in riches.

Proverbs 18:11 describes the migration of hope this way: "The wealth of the rich is their fortified city; they imagine it a wall too high to scale."

In other words, rich people (which includes us, remember from Day 1) have the potential to reach a point where they see money as the source of their safety and security. When somebody has a good income, there's a tendency to get caught up in a paycheck or a bank account. When something threatens a rich person's way of life, he can just write a check or swipe a credit card and neutralize the threat. Whatever he needs is within his reach - thanks to money. Like a high wall, money forms an invisible perimeter around him, giving him the spending power to keep trouble at bay.

And the writer of Proverbs observes that when things are going well financially„and we're experiencing a long string of situations in which we've needed something and all we had to do was reach for our wallets - our hope will tend to migrate. If we repeat this pattern long enough, we will form an association in our minds between hope and money. Eventually, we will begin to imagine that there is an amount of money large enough to take care of us for life.

Notice that the writer of that proverb said the rich "imagine" a wall too high to scale. The wall exists only in their imaginations. In reality, there's no amount of money that can protect us from everything.