Diamond Geezers: Finances – It Pays To Think About Your Money.

I’m prepping for some talks at New Wine North – they’ve kindly asked me to do a number of seminars including one this coming Sunday on ‘Money and Finances.’

In my forthcoming book Diamond Geezers there’s a chapter on Finances, so it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. And it pays to think about money!

Ever heard people say, “Well I don’t want to be rich – all those rich people are miserable anyway?” Well most of them aren’t. Not the ones I’ve met – and I have met a number of the richest people in this nation. Because while the Bible warns us not to put our TRUST in riches but in God, properly looking after what God gives you and having money gives you margin- options.

I’ll tell you what misery is with regard to finances. There have been times in my life when I have spent everything till I had next to nothing. Or I overextended on debt. My financial plan was ‘hope for the best.’ Blaming everyone else for my stupidity.

On his way to debtors prison, Mr. Micawber, in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, summed up financial misery, and its cause:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

One day I asked myself the big question; who taught me to borrow money? And I began to back away from debt as much as possible. It was a choice. Personal finance is 80% about choices. If I can just get some control on the idiot I shave with every morning.

I started looking at what Bible has to say. Financial wisdom is all over that book. Most of it is just common sense. But nothing is as uncommon as common sense. It’s plain and simple, easy to understand – but hard to APPLY.

It boils down to what’s called stewardship. Stewardship means looking after what belongs to another. In times past under the feudal system, there was a man who managed all the business issues for the Lord of the castle. He did okay and was provided for as long as he reminded himself every day – however much he got to control: “This isn’t mine. I’m NOT and owner, I’m just a steward.” Because if you owned it, you’d get to keep it. But as John Ortberg reminds us, one day, “It all goes back in the box.”

Jesus famously said, “Store up treasures in heaven . . .” Why? Because it’s right? No, because it’s wise! Because there it will last. It won’t be consumed by moths, rust, thieves. Good stewards have an eye on the money, and an eye on eternity.

Stewardship means I get to be a manager of God’s stuff. Which is great, because God is LOADED. So I can make big plans trusting his provision – if he says GO, his provision will always follow. (Don’t wait for it to all come up front, it ain’t that kind of a deal). When I wake up. When I look at my bank statement, when I make a spending or saving decision. I have to remind myself: “You don’t own anything –it’s all his.” That’s stewardship. And we slip away from that.

We don’t own anything – God owns it all. Can he trust you with what he gives you? Jesus said, “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? If you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own?”

Get that in your spirit. It’s not MY MONEY. I’m just a manager! It’s not my wife, my future, my body – I’m just a manager.

A new kind of economic recovery

I’m not an unconditional fan of much of his theology (and yes I have read his books, listened to him speak live and  his podcasts), but I’m very inspired and challenged by this article on the Sojourners site just posted by Brian McLaren follow link for fuller article).

For many people, economic recovery means “getting back to where we were a few months or years ago.” That means recovering our consumptive, greedy, unrestrained, undisciplined, irresponsible, and ecologically and socially unsustainable way of life.

I’d like to suggest another kind of recovery … drawing from the world of addiction. When an addict gets into recovery, he doesn’t want to go back and recover the “high” he had before, or even to recover the conditions he had before he began using drugs and alcohol. Instead, he wants to move forward to a new way of life — a wiser way of life that takes into account his experience of addiction. He realizes that his addiction to drugs was a symptom of other deeper issues and diseases in his life … unresolved pain or anger, the need to anesthetize painful emotions, lack of creativity in finding ways to feel happy and alive, unaddressed relational and spiritual deficits, lack of self-awareness, and so on.

So … maybe we can sabotage our addictive tendencies by letting the word “recovery” have a meaning that wakes us up rather than drugs us into the comfortable, dreamy, half-awareness in which we have lived for too long.

Great stuff! However the coverage of supposedly repentant bankers being quizzed about their performance, integrity and financial propriety (by – ahem – MPs) makes me seriously wonder how likely such a recovery of priorities in our culture actually is. Click here to see how much these guys earned for doing such a grand job for us all.

There’s just not enough abundance these days

Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what he thinks he has will be taken from him. Luke 8:18

Do you have an abundance mentality or a scarcity mind-set?

The way the world is reported right now it’s easy to dig into a bunker ; focus on what we don’t have and what’s the worst that could happen. In Jesus’ famous parable of the talents, the one talent guy came to the Master with his report, saying,

‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground.”

His problem was in what he THOUGHT he knew about God. But he had that all wrong. The one talent guy had a bad attitude. He felt his master was out to exploit. In order not to be cheated, he stifled his own potential.

Proverbs 3:5 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.” (Another translation says, ‘Do not rely on what you THINK you know).

Dr. Stephen Covey has written that developing an abundance mentality, “…opens possibilities, alternatives, and creativity.”

Those who possess an abundance mentality can find contentment and options where others find competition and envy. People with a scarcity mind‐set resent the successes of others, even people who are on their own team (this happens a lot where it should happen least – between churches! Leadership guru Jim Collins once advised church leaders, ‘Your competition is NOT other churches, it’s anything else someone could be doing Sunday morning).

People with an abundance mentality know that a candle loses nothing from lighting another. When change happens – and it will till the day you die – do you look for what everyone gains or focus on what might be lost? There are forces in life that have been designed to limit us – to keep us where we are. But God’s desire for our lives is that we make constant progress. We were not designed to be contained or restricted. He wants us to be fruitful. He’s determined to bless the determined who persevere. This is evidenced in God’s first words to man in Genesis 1:28. It’s there in John 15:4, Jesus spoke about bearing much fruit.

Half full or half empty?

So today… check your mental dialogue. Do you see limitations or possibilities?

Do you focus on what you don’t have or what you do have?

Do you see problems as insurmountable obstacles or creativity challenges? Do you see the mountain or the One who can move them? Do see that even if there’s less, that doesn’t mean there’s none. Do you see that there’s enough to go round, as long as you don’t try to hold on too tight.

Go forth – and multiply!

PS – for a facinating link to how global microfinance genius Muhammed Yunus sees the global financial crisis creating opportunity to help the poor; see this link reporting on his recent speech at Davos.