dizzle
December 27th 2003, 12:56 PM
Christian Living and Personal Finance
Part I
by "Ishmael" - Cliff Bennett (http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/member.php?s=&action=getinfo&userid=75)
After many years of doing finances the wrong way I sometimes think that I would be better qualified to write an article on what not to do when it comes to finances. But God has been good to me and so nowadays I feel like I have been given a mission to spread around the knowledge that I learned from Dave Ramsey (www.daveramsey.com), and others, about personal finance. It’s knowledge about money of course, but it’s also wisdom about life. About how to say NO! to those little things you buy that steal your money bit-by-bit and eventually steal your financial peace. And it is wisdom about how managing your money wisely helps save lots of things besides wealth—things like families, marriages, and your future. So I hope that this short series of articles by my wife and me will help you start a journey towards peace. Because managing your personal finances well is about finding a place of peace that very few people in our culture choose to seek anymore. -B
Introduction
Personal Finance is a spiritual discipline. And just like prayer, fasting, going to church, and Bible study takes discipline and commitment, so does personal finance. The Bible is fairly clear about this to my mind. Luke 16:10-14 says, “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?” Jesus made it clear in passage from the parable of the talents that we Christians are stewards of God’s wealth and that we are not only to preserve His investment in us but to make a profit as well. That is how we get the opportunity to manage more of God’s wealth. Pretty simple.
So why is it that Christians seem to have such a low degree of commitment to this discipline while keeping the more “spiritual” of the disciplines with an abundance of at least token discipline? There are various reasons but the most important reason is that the culture we are a part of has influenced us instead of us influencing it.
America is a culture of consumers who are driven to make purchases by an intense campaign of marketing that businesses of all kinds conduct on the open, free market. And most Americans, influenced by the superb marketing of corporate America, flock to the shopping malls like sheep ready to be fleeced of their money with no spending OR savings plan. In fact in a recent national survey conducted by Jean Chatzky (www.jeanchatzky.com) over half of Americans can't pay off their credit cards each month and 2 out of 10 say money just evaporates out their pockets - with no idea where it goes!
And the average American Christian is doing the exact same thing as the average American. According to a survey conducted by His Voice Financial Seminar (http://www.good-steward.org/Seminar/Seminar_1_Intro.htm) forty percent of Christians overspend each month. And all because Christians, just like non-Christians, have no plan for spending and an uncontrollable lust for more and more “stuff” titillated and fueled by advertising. And the endless cycle of making more money and spending more money begins and ends with broke Christians with lots of “stuff” that doesn’t deliver the happiness that it promised in the commercials on TV.
And that’s where me and Hope’s story begins, at the end of a very frustrating cycle of making more money and buying more “stuff”…
Too Much is Never Enough
About one year ago I had just come to my very first unit in the Army. I was making more money than I had ever made in my life yet was still broke. Oh, I had a nice paycheck coming in but that paycheck was going out just as quickly as it came in - “only the name on the check was changed to protect the innocent.”
It had always been the same for my wife and me during our seven years of marriage: when the income increased so did the debt. So we were just as broke at $50k per year as we were at $20k per year. What we didn’t know then was that more money wasn’t the answer to our financial problems.
“…More money will often not solve the problem; in fact, it may actually accelerate the problem.”1 There will never be enough to solve your money issues; instead, more becomes a shovel that digs you into deeper debt unless you decide change the way you think about money OR, in some cases, begin to think about money for the first time.
A sad reality is that in our culture most people don’t give a second thought to their money in terms of how they spend it. No, we just buy whatever we want, often on credit, until we find ourselves in debt and barely making ends meet. The payments steal any chance we have of saving anything against hard times and so we find ourselves enslaved to both our jobs and to our fears about the uncertainty of the future.
Make a Plan
So my wife and I decided that we were through with the stress and worry and started to develop a plan. The first step was to stop borrowing money! We drew a line in the sand and said, “never again!”
The Bible, in Proverbs 21:5 says,
“The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.”
Children always do what feels good; adults make a plan and stick to it.
The first part of that plan has to be to stop digging the hole you’re in by not taking on any more debt. Just stop borrowing money! And do it today. Draw a line in the sand and say, “THAT’S ENOUGH!!! I don’t want to be a slave anymore!”
Slavery in the 21st Century
Don’t think you are a slave? The Bible says in Proverbs 22:7 says, “The poor are ruled by the rich, and those who borrow are slaves of moneylenders.” And there are so many moneylenders in our culture. Money lending and borrowing money has become the norm in our culture. In fact, there were 50 million Discover cards, 49 million Citibank Visas, and 48 million American Express cards in circulation with an average household balance of $4500 per card by the end of 1998.2 No wonder America has become a society of slaves and masters!
Hope and I decided to be free from slavery and you can too…
Proverbs 6:1-5 says:
1 My son, if you have put up security for your neighbor, if you have struck hands in pledge for another, 2 if you have been trapped by what you said, ensnared by the words of your mouth, 3 then do this, my son, to free yourself, since you have fallen into your neighbor’s hands: Go and humble yourself; press your plea with your neighbor! 4 Allow no sleep to your eyes, no slumber to your eyelids. 5 Free yourself, like a gazelle from the hand of the hunter, like a bird from the snare of the fowler.
…You just have to decide to get yourself free and work at it with intensity.
Save Some Money
The second part of our plan was to save some of our money for an emergency— because we learned that the minute you decide not to borrow any more money you will walk out into the driveway and your tire will be flat. Life will go on and you will pull out a credit card and make new debt if you don’t have any cash. So we quickly put about $1,000 in a saving account as insurance against “life.”
Cut up the Plastic and Restore Your Hope
Then we cut up all our credit cards and started to aggressively pay off the debt. Yes, in the short term, we had to “live without” some new “stuff”, but after we paid off those first few credit cards we were be able to buy some “stuff” and more with the money we were KEEPING and not sending to the bank.
Proverbs 13:22 says,
“A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just.”
In other words, because of the decision my wife and I made, we were finally out from under credit card debt and were actually beginning to build some wealth. Not only that, but also our marriage started to grow better than it has ever been and our daughter begin to reap the benefits. We had restored hope in our family.
As long as we were in debt we had no hope and the Bible teaches, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick…” But once we got ourselves free we activated the second part of the proverb in our lives, “but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life” (Proverbs 13:11).
Having a sense of hope regarding your financial future is the best gift you could ever give your family. Run towards your debt - not away from it. Face it with the fierceness of an enemy in battle and you WILL see victory.
300
Further installments of this series will be posted on TheologyWeb for reflection and discussion. We thank Cliff very much for both his service to the United States of America and for his friendship and support of TheologyWeb. His service makes it possible for sites like this to exist, and we thank him and his fellow servicemen very much though Christ our Lord.
1Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert T. Kiyosaki, p. 65.
2As noted in Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University.
300
Notice - The featuring of a particular member article does not constitute endorsement of every single item or point of view contained therein by each and every member of TheologyWeb leadership. We strive to have a varied cross-section of representations of differing opinions on secondary Christian issues. The only requirement for the featuring of a particular article is that said article must not contradict the essentials articulated in the TheologyWeb statement of faith found here in our Mission Statement (http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/mission/)or be blatantly offensive to the Christian worldview of the site Owners.
Part I
by "Ishmael" - Cliff Bennett (http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/member.php?s=&action=getinfo&userid=75)
After many years of doing finances the wrong way I sometimes think that I would be better qualified to write an article on what not to do when it comes to finances. But God has been good to me and so nowadays I feel like I have been given a mission to spread around the knowledge that I learned from Dave Ramsey (www.daveramsey.com), and others, about personal finance. It’s knowledge about money of course, but it’s also wisdom about life. About how to say NO! to those little things you buy that steal your money bit-by-bit and eventually steal your financial peace. And it is wisdom about how managing your money wisely helps save lots of things besides wealth—things like families, marriages, and your future. So I hope that this short series of articles by my wife and me will help you start a journey towards peace. Because managing your personal finances well is about finding a place of peace that very few people in our culture choose to seek anymore. -B
Introduction
Personal Finance is a spiritual discipline. And just like prayer, fasting, going to church, and Bible study takes discipline and commitment, so does personal finance. The Bible is fairly clear about this to my mind. Luke 16:10-14 says, “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?” Jesus made it clear in passage from the parable of the talents that we Christians are stewards of God’s wealth and that we are not only to preserve His investment in us but to make a profit as well. That is how we get the opportunity to manage more of God’s wealth. Pretty simple.
So why is it that Christians seem to have such a low degree of commitment to this discipline while keeping the more “spiritual” of the disciplines with an abundance of at least token discipline? There are various reasons but the most important reason is that the culture we are a part of has influenced us instead of us influencing it.
America is a culture of consumers who are driven to make purchases by an intense campaign of marketing that businesses of all kinds conduct on the open, free market. And most Americans, influenced by the superb marketing of corporate America, flock to the shopping malls like sheep ready to be fleeced of their money with no spending OR savings plan. In fact in a recent national survey conducted by Jean Chatzky (www.jeanchatzky.com) over half of Americans can't pay off their credit cards each month and 2 out of 10 say money just evaporates out their pockets - with no idea where it goes!
And the average American Christian is doing the exact same thing as the average American. According to a survey conducted by His Voice Financial Seminar (http://www.good-steward.org/Seminar/Seminar_1_Intro.htm) forty percent of Christians overspend each month. And all because Christians, just like non-Christians, have no plan for spending and an uncontrollable lust for more and more “stuff” titillated and fueled by advertising. And the endless cycle of making more money and spending more money begins and ends with broke Christians with lots of “stuff” that doesn’t deliver the happiness that it promised in the commercials on TV.
And that’s where me and Hope’s story begins, at the end of a very frustrating cycle of making more money and buying more “stuff”…
Too Much is Never Enough
About one year ago I had just come to my very first unit in the Army. I was making more money than I had ever made in my life yet was still broke. Oh, I had a nice paycheck coming in but that paycheck was going out just as quickly as it came in - “only the name on the check was changed to protect the innocent.”
It had always been the same for my wife and me during our seven years of marriage: when the income increased so did the debt. So we were just as broke at $50k per year as we were at $20k per year. What we didn’t know then was that more money wasn’t the answer to our financial problems.
“…More money will often not solve the problem; in fact, it may actually accelerate the problem.”1 There will never be enough to solve your money issues; instead, more becomes a shovel that digs you into deeper debt unless you decide change the way you think about money OR, in some cases, begin to think about money for the first time.
A sad reality is that in our culture most people don’t give a second thought to their money in terms of how they spend it. No, we just buy whatever we want, often on credit, until we find ourselves in debt and barely making ends meet. The payments steal any chance we have of saving anything against hard times and so we find ourselves enslaved to both our jobs and to our fears about the uncertainty of the future.
Make a Plan
So my wife and I decided that we were through with the stress and worry and started to develop a plan. The first step was to stop borrowing money! We drew a line in the sand and said, “never again!”
The Bible, in Proverbs 21:5 says,
“The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.”
Children always do what feels good; adults make a plan and stick to it.
The first part of that plan has to be to stop digging the hole you’re in by not taking on any more debt. Just stop borrowing money! And do it today. Draw a line in the sand and say, “THAT’S ENOUGH!!! I don’t want to be a slave anymore!”
Slavery in the 21st Century
Don’t think you are a slave? The Bible says in Proverbs 22:7 says, “The poor are ruled by the rich, and those who borrow are slaves of moneylenders.” And there are so many moneylenders in our culture. Money lending and borrowing money has become the norm in our culture. In fact, there were 50 million Discover cards, 49 million Citibank Visas, and 48 million American Express cards in circulation with an average household balance of $4500 per card by the end of 1998.2 No wonder America has become a society of slaves and masters!
Hope and I decided to be free from slavery and you can too…
Proverbs 6:1-5 says:
1 My son, if you have put up security for your neighbor, if you have struck hands in pledge for another, 2 if you have been trapped by what you said, ensnared by the words of your mouth, 3 then do this, my son, to free yourself, since you have fallen into your neighbor’s hands: Go and humble yourself; press your plea with your neighbor! 4 Allow no sleep to your eyes, no slumber to your eyelids. 5 Free yourself, like a gazelle from the hand of the hunter, like a bird from the snare of the fowler.
…You just have to decide to get yourself free and work at it with intensity.
Save Some Money
The second part of our plan was to save some of our money for an emergency— because we learned that the minute you decide not to borrow any more money you will walk out into the driveway and your tire will be flat. Life will go on and you will pull out a credit card and make new debt if you don’t have any cash. So we quickly put about $1,000 in a saving account as insurance against “life.”
Cut up the Plastic and Restore Your Hope
Then we cut up all our credit cards and started to aggressively pay off the debt. Yes, in the short term, we had to “live without” some new “stuff”, but after we paid off those first few credit cards we were be able to buy some “stuff” and more with the money we were KEEPING and not sending to the bank.
Proverbs 13:22 says,
“A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just.”
In other words, because of the decision my wife and I made, we were finally out from under credit card debt and were actually beginning to build some wealth. Not only that, but also our marriage started to grow better than it has ever been and our daughter begin to reap the benefits. We had restored hope in our family.
As long as we were in debt we had no hope and the Bible teaches, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick…” But once we got ourselves free we activated the second part of the proverb in our lives, “but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life” (Proverbs 13:11).
Having a sense of hope regarding your financial future is the best gift you could ever give your family. Run towards your debt - not away from it. Face it with the fierceness of an enemy in battle and you WILL see victory.
300
Further installments of this series will be posted on TheologyWeb for reflection and discussion. We thank Cliff very much for both his service to the United States of America and for his friendship and support of TheologyWeb. His service makes it possible for sites like this to exist, and we thank him and his fellow servicemen very much though Christ our Lord.
1Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert T. Kiyosaki, p. 65.
2As noted in Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University.
300
Notice - The featuring of a particular member article does not constitute endorsement of every single item or point of view contained therein by each and every member of TheologyWeb leadership. We strive to have a varied cross-section of representations of differing opinions on secondary Christian issues. The only requirement for the featuring of a particular article is that said article must not contradict the essentials articulated in the TheologyWeb statement of faith found here in our Mission Statement (http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/mission/)or be blatantly offensive to the Christian worldview of the site Owners.