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Financial Wisdom: God or Money
How do you know if you love God or money more? Ask yourself, do you worry more about missing your prayer time or missing your paycheck? Are you more anxious about what the Almighty thinks, or do you obsess over the opinion of others? Are you driven to seek God’s Kingdom first, or to blindly build your kingdom? Devotion to the eternal or the temporal cannot be a both/and, but a choice of which one really captures your worship.
Money makes promises it cannot keep—things like security, peace, and prosperity. But the Lord makes promises He does keep—grace, forgiveness, joy, and contentment. When the commands of these two contradict, who will you follow: Christ or cash? Decide now, so when you are in the emotion of the moment you do not give in to glittering gold.
What keeps you up at night? Is it how to make more money or how to make more of Jesus? Set your affections above, and you will be more effective below. The Lord is looking for people with whom He can entrust more of His blessings. He longs for faithful ones who use their finances to draw lost souls to salvation, hurting people to healing, and who boldly pray, “Your Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.”
You might take your family on a mission trip and see how the masses live with little money, but with a lot of the Lord. It is revolutionary for a soul that has been seduced by the mistress of money to see how believers without stuff affectionately embrace their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Expose your faith to the poor so you are liberated from wealth.
In the end, this is a heart issue; who captures your affections, your Savior or your stuff? Money makes a poor master, but a useful servant. On the other hand, Jesus is the trustworthy Master with whom you can place your faith and devotion. Money tries to maneuver itself into a place of priority, but by faith, you can relegate it to serve righteous causes. Love Jesus, not money.
“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them” (1 John 2:15).
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About this Plan
The Lord longs to shower His children with raindrops of wisdom. He delights in imparting His game plan for living. However, it takes our daily pursuit for the wisdom of God to penetrate our thinking. Wise living defaults to a Biblical worldview of thinking. In this plan adapted from his book, Wisdom for Living, Boyd Bailey encourages us to pursue spiritual, relational, physical, financial, and vocational wisdom in our lives.
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