| God’s Economy or Man’s Economy We have a debt laden society and we, as Christians, need to wake up and take action. God has always spoken to His people, and throughout history He has prepared and given us words of warning. But even so, few Christians seem to really understand the devastation generated through the misuse of money. There are those who have accepted God's financial plan as their own. These Christians stand out like giants among their brothers because they are a part of God's Economy. But more common are the Christians who withhold this area of their life from God, and so they struggle within the world's financial system. The worlds financial system takes people hostage. It takes people's life’s. This is a very real and timely topic. Outside of God‘s Will, we have no immunity to Satan's schemes. We all have beliefs about money. We grew up with these beliefs. Our family background, what we were taught in school, our personal experiences ... all these things have shaped what we think and believe about money. Man's economy teaches us that we have money because we've earned it. We have money because we deserve it. We work hard for our money. We get up in the morning, go to work and do all that we have to do to accumulate this money. So... it's ours, of course! But God‘s Economy teaches us something very different about money. First of all, in God‘s Economy we learn that the purpose of work is really for the development of our character and to give us the opportunity to serve others. Wow! Now that‘s VERY different than working to just earn a paycheck, right? But in God‘s Economy, once we understand that God is our Provider, that He may use our job and our employer as the channel to give us our income, but ultimately, He's the Provider, it completely changes our prospective, not only as our source of income, but of how we handle our work. It's so easy to think that it‘s somebody else that needs to change, but the Lord says that change starts with us. We need to change the way we think. We need to change our minds. It starts with the individual... it starts with us. When we think about all the change that has been promised in our country that is NOT happening, when we look at the last 50 years where we've gone as a country, we have gone deeper and deeper into debt, we have greater foreign dependency than we have ever had, we have greater personal debt than we have ever had in our history. We are ALL caught up in it. But the Lord wants us as believers to be contrary to that and He said that we are transformed by the renewing our minds". It starts with what we believe, and so often we leave out His Truth about money when we think about the Scripture. We believe Him for eternal life, for salvation and how we are going to live our life, but not with our money. And that verse does apply to our money and it starts with our philosophy. And the very first distinction and dividing line that the Lord made between himself and money is over the issue of WHO is going to be our master. That’s the beginning point and in man's economy, money is our master. It's... I owe, I owe... so off to work I go! And we realize that we are getting up every morning thinking about money, throughout the day we‘re thinking about money, and as we go to bed we think about money. It can become the center of everything we do in our lives. Has money become your master? In God‘s Economy, HE is our only Master. HE is exclusively in control of our lives. And that's where it begins. The Lord said, “you have to decide which one you're going to serve“. The second philosophy that divides man‘s economy and God’s Economy is in the area of our treasure. In man’s economy we treasure money. We believe it can insulate us from problems. We think if we just had more income we would not have a hard time paying our bills. Or if we had a bigger house we would have a better situation for our children. We always believe that money insulates us from whatever problems we are having. But the Lord wants us to treasure Him and His Economy. HE is our Treasure. HE is more precious than anything we have and anything we could ever own. HE is more precious than our bank account and HE is our source of security. Money will never give us security. Did you know that the Lord gives every person on earth a problem that money cannot solve? Isn‘t that interesting? There are problems that money can never solve, no matter how much we have. And sometimes, the more we try to solve it with money, the worse it will get. Why? Because God designed our life experience that way so that we will know that money is never to be treasured above Him. Only God can solve our problems. God is unchanging. God taught us in Deuteronomy 8 the belief that we should have about money. And this is ancient wisdom going all the way back to the time of Moses when the Lord was saying, "Here is what I want you to know and learn about My Economy because it‘s so drastically different than your economy." And He spoke this to the Israelites knowing that one day they would be prosperous: "When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land He has given you. But be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, when your herds and your fox grow large, and your silver and your gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God. You may say to yourself, My power and the strength of My hands have produced this wealth for me." Money has a tendency to turn us inward and this is exalted in Man’s economy. In our hearts we will believe we are self made men. If we are thinking that, we are dead wrong. We fall into that trap and we start believing that it all came from us and it didn‘t come from God. God has given us an abundant earth with valuable resources and it all comes from Him. He can turn that off and take it away so quickly and He doesn‘t want us to forget it. That's a crucial point in living in God‘s Economy because otherwise we feel the stress and the burden to be our own provider. We have to understand our source and rely on Him to be our provider. As an example; We had a family relative who owed us a significant amount of money and we were in a place that we really needed that money in order to meet our living expenses. And what I found was that I was relying on that person rather than God to be my provider. And as I did, my stress level increased, our relationship with that person went downhill. It was a very difficult time. And God sweetly reminded me that HE was the one to provide for me and if He chose to use that person as the channel to do it, I would rejoice in Him, but if He did not, I needed to understand that He truly was my provider. And it turned out that He did not use that person to provide. But He provided in other such helpful, literally even miraculous ways, that it was a permanent reminder to me that when I discovered and lived in God‘s Economy, when I relied on Him to be my provider, the stress was gone, the aches in the relationship were gone because I really understood my source. Likewise, sometimes God withholds because we put confidence in another source and He uses that to teach us to turn back to Him. In 2 Corinthians 8-9 we find that the Macedonians were very poor in every way except they were rich towards God. As Paul wrote about them, he really captured that whole process and thought of the fact that what we have been given is to be used to give to others. 2 Corinthians 9:11 says: Being enriched in every thing to all bountifulness, which causeth through us thanksgiving to God. God will make you rich in every way so that you can always give freely, and your giving through us will make people give thanks to God. And if you can imagine how different our world would be in times like this when the times are so difficult, if we really gave freely and it resulted in giving thanks to God, now that's living in God's Economy! What needs to happen first is a spiritual transformation before there is a financial transformation because money is a matter of the heart and money can never solve money problems. Money is equated to happiness, but we are not here to make ourselves happy. The lies of the enemy are so powerful. We are here to be a trustworthy faithful steward of one master. God put us on earth, He provides for us so that we can fulfill His Purposes, not our own. crown.org |
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