Managing Money God’s Way: Spending
Scott Bayles, pastor
Blooming Grove Christian Church: 9/25/16
I read a story this week about a wealthy man. As he lay on his deathbed, he spoke with his 3 best friends, a doctor, a professor, and a preacher. He said, “I’m going to prove them wrong. I’m going to take it with me. I’m giving you each $100,000 in an envelope. After I die, before they close my casket, I want you each to put the money in with me. Sure enough, he died, and at his funeral the 3 friends each stopped by the open casket and put in an envelope. Later that day, they were talking about their friend and his unusual request. Then, the doctor spoke up and said, “Guys, I need to get this off my chest. We all know that money wasn’t going to do any good in the ground. The hospital is completing a new children’s wing. I took $50,000 of that cash and gave it to that cause.” “Well, as long as we confessing,” said the professor, “You’re right – there really was no reason to put that money in the ground. I donated $70,000 of it to the university library.” They both looked expectantly at the preacher. He said, “I’m ashamed of both of you. Our friend trusted us. Why, I put in a check for the whole $100,000.”
This morning I want to talk about something that isn’t always easy for us to talk about… money! We have a lot of names for it—cash, cabbage, greenbacks, the dough, the gravy, the loot, the moola, the Benjamins, the all-mighty dollar—but a lot of us aren’t comfortable talking about money, especially in church.
But the reality is—the Bible has a lot to say about money! There thousands or verses in the Bible about wealth and finances… literally thousands. Did you know that 1 out of every 6 verses in the synoptic gospels is about material possessions? Did you know that over half of Jesus’s parables are about money or possessions? Did you know Jesus talked more about money than He did any other subject, including heaven, hell, temptation, sin and salvation? Clearly, money is a big deal to God! Why is that?
I think it’s because we spend our lives wrapped up in it. We spend so much of our time either making money, spending money, thinking about money, worried about money, using money, enjoying money, wishing we had more money, etc. God knew money would be a big deal to us, so it’s a big deal in the Bible.
Unfortunately, in church, we tend to think a sermon on money is just a plea for more giving—a guilt-driven appeal for you to open your checkbooks. For Jesus, though, teaching about money was essential preparation for a godly life. Like the old saying goes, “Show me your checkbook and I’ll show you what’s important to you.” In a sense, your checkbook is a little window into your soul. Few things test your faith and maturity more accurately than how you manage your money. In fact, I believe how you handle your money is the litmus test of spiritual maturity. Why? Because Jesus said, “And if you are untrustworthy about worldly wealth, who will trust you with the true riches of heaven?” (Luke 16:11 NLT).
In other words, God is watching me to see how I handle wealth (however much or little I have) in this life, how I manage it and what I do with it on earth. If God can’t trust me with material wealth (money) here on earth, then he won’t trust me with true spiritual riches in eternity. It’s a matter of stewardship. Stewardship is just an old English word for management.
The number one key when it comes to money is acknowledging that everything we have belongs to God. We’re simply called to manage God’s money. The Bible says, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, the world and all who live in it” (Psalm 24:1). That includes whatever you have in your wallet or bank account. God is the owner—period. A lot of Christians think they are managing money God’s way because they give a tithe at church. They forget that the other 90% belongs to God too, so we need to manage all of God’s money God’s way.
Now as far as I can tell, there are only three things we can do with money—we can spend it, we can save it, or we can share it! Those are the only three options (unless you have crazy money and you use it to wallpaper your house). In fact, at home in order to train out kids how to manage money, each one of them has three envelopes—one labeled spending, one labeled saving, and one labeled sharing. Whenever they earn money, they split it between those three envelopes, which helps them to visualize these three purposes for money.
So, today and for the next two weeks I want to talk about how we can spend, save, and share God’s money God’s way. To get us started I want to look at the best example in the Bible of how NOT to spend your money, which is the parable of the prodigal son.
The story is found in Luke 15 and it’s one of the most familiar stories in the Bible. You probably all know it and some of you could recite the story by heart. In fact, I preached from this passage last Father’s Day (using the father in the story as a role model for godly dads). But this morning I want to look at this story from a financial perspective because, like many of Jesus parables, this story has a lot to say about how we spend our money. The parable centers around a young man who learned lessons on sinful spending the hard way. I want to highlight some of the mistakes that he made in hopes that we don’t repeat them, but I also want to point out a few things he did right!
• SPENDING SELFISHLY
First, he spent selfishly. Jesus begins his parable saying, “A man had two sons. The younger son told his father, ‘I want my share of your estate now before you die’” (Luke 15:11-12 NLT). This self-centered son is a prime example of the discontentment and entitlement that seems to run rampant in our own culture today. In ancient times, it wasn’t completely unheard of for a son to request his inheritance prior to his parents’ passing, but it wasn’t very loving either. In fact, it was considered very shameful. It was as if he told his father, “I wish you would just hurry up and die!”
God means for us to love people and use money. This young man had it backwards. Unfortunately, he’s not the only one. In his book, Balancing the Tightrope, Barry Powell relates that in a survey of over 200,000 college freshman, 76% listed financial prosperity as the most important of their life goals.
Our consumer-driven culture breads this mentality, doesn’t it? We’re living in the most marketed-to culture in history. The average American sees over 3,000 advertisements a day. A child born today will likely see over a million commercials before age 20. The purpose of all this marketing in our culture is to drive home two points: (1) “You need what we’re selling.” (2) “You need it now!” And we’re okay with that, aren’t we? We love stuff!
The Bible calls it covetousness. And God thought it was serious enough to make “thou shall not covet” one of the Ten Commandments. Someone once said, “The only reason a great many American families don’t own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a zero down and $99 a month.”
Howard Hues was once the richest man in America. His net worth, adjusted for inflation, was around $43 billion. Someone once asked the eccentric billionaire, “How much is enough?” He answered, “Just a little more!”
Scripture agrees. It says, “Those who love money will never have enough. How meaningless to think that wealth brings true happiness!” (Ecclesiastes 5:10 NLT).
Jesus also warned, “Beware! Guard against every kind of greed. Life is not measured by how much you own” (Luke 12:15 NLT). In other words, your value is not determined by your valuables. Your self-worth is not based on your net worth. The most important things in life are not things. Jesus put it in the form of a question: “And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?” (Mark 8:36 NLT).
If we’re ever going to spend God’s money God’s way, we need to get over this materialistic love of stuff and learn to be content with what we have. Money does not equal happiness and stuff never satisfies.
• SPENDING STUPIDLY
Furthermore, the prodigal son spent stupidly! As the story continues, Jesus says, “A few days later this younger son packed all his belongings and moved to a distant land, and there he wasted all his money in wild living” (Luke 15:13 NLT). This young man left home with a boatload of cash. If he was smart, he could have easily lived on that money the rest of his life. Yet, he somehow managed to spend every penny he had thanks to a sinful and stupid lifestyle.
Unfortunately, he’s not the only one. According to a survey released by Bankrate.com, 76% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. In other word, three quarters of us are spending every penny we get. In fact, in our more honest moments many are like former PGA golfer Doug Sanders who talked about his flamboyant lifestyle. He said, "I’m working as hard as I can to get my life and my cash to run out at the same time. I figure if I can die right after lunch next Tuesday, I’ll have it just about right." The Bible has something to say about that. It says, “Wise people live in wealth and luxury, but stupid people spend their money as fast as they get it” (Proverbs 21:20 GNT).
How many of you have ever done something stupid with zeros on the end of it? We don’t want God calling us stupid, do we? That means we need to learn to live within our means. We don’t need to keep up with the Jones. It means learning to tell ourselves, “No.” Pastor Rick Warren put it this way: “Without self-control our yearning capacity will always exceed our earning capacity.”
Like most of us, the prodigal son didn’t have a money problem; he had a spending problem. He had a lack of self-control. What this kid really needed was a budget—a spending plan that he could stick to. And the same is true for the rest of us. Regardless of whether you make minimum wage or a six-figure salary, if you’re spending every penny you have, then you don’t have anything left for sharing or for saving. As we’re about to see, that’s big problem.
• SPENDING SHORTSIGHTEDLY
Finally, the prodigal son spent shortsightedly. Jesus continues his story, saying, “About the time his money ran out, a great famine swept over the land, and he began to starve” (Luke 15:14 NLT). You’re all familiar with Murphy’s Law, right? Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Well things just went really wrong and this kid was totally unprepared.
Unfortunately, many of us are in the same boat.
Online lender CashNetUSA said 22% of the 1,000 people it recently surveyed had less than $100 in savings to cover an emergency, while 46% had less than $800. That’s not good! Folk, life happens. Cars breakdown. People get laid off. Medical emergencies pop up unannounced. If we don’t plan for those financial emergencies, they can quickly turn into a financial crisis. I’ll talk in more detail about the importance of saving.
For now, I just want you to notice that a key symptom of stuffitis (covetousness) is shortsightedness: we can only see what’s right in front of us and we’re blind to the long-term consequences. That’s why we’d rather use a credit card to buy something today and end up paying interest on it for months, rather than save up for it and pay cash.
Because of his selfish, stupid, shortsighted approach to spending, the prodigal son hit rock bottom. He wasn’t just broke, he was “man, the slop those pigs are eating look pretty tempting, right about now” broke! He’s so broke the bank is about to repossess his cardboard box. He’s so broke he goes to KFC to lick other people’s fingers.
But, he’s story’s not over. Even though he was selfish, stupid and shortsighted, after he hit rock bottom, he did a couple things right!
First, he got a job!
Jesus says, “He persuaded a local farmer to hire him, and the man sent him into his fields to feed the pigs” (Luke 15:15 NLT). Now, you’ve got to understand how degrading this job was for a young Jewish man. We’ve got some farmers here and I’m sure they can tell you that being a farm hand is hard work—it’s an everyday, up-at-the-crack-of-dawn, demanding kind of job. So that tells us that this young man was willing to work hard. He was willing to get his hands dirty. But there’s another dimension to this situation, because Jewish law considered pigs unclean. If a Jewish person even touched a pig, he was considered unclean and couldn’t be allowed into the temple for worship. So here’s this young Jewish kid doing what he would consider the lowliest job on earth. And he not only took the job, but also “persuaded” the farmer to hire him. That means he had to argue and haggle his way into this job—probably begged and pleaded for this job. He didn’t “hold out” for something better. And that’s important, because I think most young people today would have starved to death before taking that job.
The longest I ever went without a job was about 3 months and the first job I was offered was a janitor position at a private Christian school in Saint Louis. I had to mop the floors, take out the trash, clean up vomit, and scrape gum off the bottom of desks—all for just $8 an hour. This was not the job I went to seminary to learn how to do. But I was thankful to have a job. In fact, I was never more thankful to get a paycheck than when I worked there, because (1) I need it and (2) I earned it! I gave that job my best effort until I found a better job that didn’t require me to mop up puke or scrape old gum.
Here’s the point: When you’re in financial trouble, you have to be willing to work! You may have to take a crappy job (or a crappy second job) just to get by for a while—to pay the rent, or the mortgage, or to keep the lights on, or get out of debt. God rewards hard work. The Bible says, “Lazy people are soon poor; hard workers get rich” (Proverbs 10:4 NLT).
Furthermore, he came up with a plan.
As the story continues, Jesus says the prodigal son thought to himself, “I will go home to my father and say, ‘Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you, and I am no longer worthy of being called your son. Please take me on as a hired servant”’ (Luke 15:18 NLT).
There are two parts to this plan—returning to his father in repentance and seeking a better paying job. I just want to focus on that first part. If you’re in financial trouble, there is nothing better you can do than to go to your Father with a broken and contrite spirit and ask for help. As I said before, there are literally thousands of verses in the Bible about wealth and finances—it teaches devastatingly simple principles for handling money God’s way and, believe it or not, they work. If we’ll read what God says about money and actually apply it to our spending habits, it will transform our lives, not to mention our bank accounts.
The Bible says, “Good planning and hard work lead to prosperity” (Proverbs 21:5 NLT). In other words, if you’ll work hard and stick to a smart spending plan, you can actually win with money.
Conclusion
When it comes to spending money God’s way, I think the prodigal son is a good example both of what not to do and what to do. Unlike the prodigal son, we don’t want to spend selfishly, stupidly, or shortsightedly. But like him, we do want to work hard and turn to our Father for help. Next week, we’ll talk about saving money God’s way.
Invitation
In the meantime, if you are struggling financially I want to encourage you, first of all, to seek God out in prayer. Tell him all about your struggles and surrender your finances to him. Afterward, I’d invite you to log into RightNow Media and click on the Biblical Finance tab. You’ll find a wealth of resources and information about how to develop a spending plan, how to get out of debt, and much more. If you need some one on one advise, we have several Financial Peace University graduates here in the church, so just pull me aside after church, call me at home, or even come forward will we sing.
