YOUR MONEY GOD'S WAY

Thomas Nelson

Contents

Preface.............................................xiiiIntroduction........................................xx1. Counterfeit Convictions..........................12. The Fix-It Fantasy...............................223. Saviors or Enablers?.............................444. Self-Righteous Slackers..........................665. You Must Be Here to Help Me!.....................876. God Is an ATM....................................1067. The Scarlett Syndrome............................1248. The Cliff Jumpers................................1419. The Conviction Clean-Up Plan.....................159Conclusion..........................................181Acknowledgments.....................................185About the Author....................................191

Chapter One

Growing up in Texas, I learned a lot of colorful sayings, many of which I had to abandon when I became a pastor. However, one of those sayings probably applies to you right now: This ain't my first rodeo.

You could fill the bed of a Ford F-150 pickup with all the books and financial articles out there about investing, retirement accounts, saving, mortgages, home buying, and debt. It's probably a safe bet that whenever you flip through a magazine article on finance or look at most books on the topic, you think, Yeah, I've heard that before.

This ain't your first rodeo. Wasn't mine either.

As a teenager, I had a subscription to Money magazine. I paid cashy for my first car. The first home Scott and I purchased as newlyweds had a fifteen-year, fixed-rate mortgage with payments of only $675 a month. We put 10 percent down.

We started out smart, but somewhere along the way, we got stupid. Real stupid.

After only a year, that little house wasn't good enough anymore. So we upgraded, this time with no money down and a thirty-year loan. A traffic accident totaled my paid-for car, so I went into debt to buy another brand-new car, which I quickly tired of and traded in for yet another one.

Credit cards furnished the nicer house and handled any repairs we had not bothered to save up for. Then the baby came.

And so the cycle began.

I had read all the books. I had all the information. And I still made bad choices.

Sound familiar? Chances are, you've made bad choices too. And you knew better.

As a believer in Christ, you have probably read a good bit of the Bible. You may have even read all of it several times. Maybe you're like me and went to one of those Christian schools that made you diagram Bible verses during the sentence structure lessons in English class. Fun, right?

Lack of biblical knowledge, for many Christians, is not the problem. And usually, neither is lack of conviction.

As Christians we have convictions, things we hold to be true, principles we hold in our hearts and endeavor to live out every day. If you were sitting in my office, I could have you read the Great Commission to me out of Matthew 28, and you could probably explain to me, quite passionately, that it means we have a calling to share the good news of Christ with the world. But if we turned back just a few pages and I asked you to read the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, you would probably get a confused look on your face and perhaps give me a Robin Hood analogy, tinged with disgust: "The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer."

Wrong answer.

Let me ask you this: How are you going to spread the good news of Christ all over the world, or fund the work of missionaries who do, if you don't have any money? Would God have given us the parable of the talents simply to convey that it's hopeless? I think not.

You've certainly read financial books before, along with countless magazine articles about getting your ducks in a row. And you probably beat yourself up for not doing those things you read about. You've read the Bible, you know what you believe, and you've absorbed the common-sense financial stuff. So what's the problem? What's happening to this information between my eyes, my brain, and my heart? you? wonder. I read it, I understand it, I agree with it-but I don't do it. Why?

Ephesians 6:12 explains what we're up against: "We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places." Still, I'm not one for giving the devil too much credit. Satan may hand us the rope, but we're the ones who tie the knot and jump off the financial chair.

What happens between the information on the page, the absorption in the brain, and the execution of those ideas in the heart is that the idea we know we should implement gets polluted by counterfeit convictions.

Counterfeit convictions are beliefs that started out as biblical truths but that we absorb into our hearts incorrectly. It doesn't matter whether we believe wrongly for selfish reasons, such as deciding that passages on giving and generosity don't apply to us anymore, or for fearful ones, for instance, that God only loves you if you're rich. It also doesn't matter to what degree our convictions are wrong. We can be way off base or have an understanding that is skewed just a little bit. And that's all it takes. You don't have to drive your car completely off the freeway to mess up your journey; you can drift just a little bit into the other lane, miss your exit, and ultimately miss your final destination. That's the power of deception. Unfortunately, when we're deceived, we don't know it, and we're often hesitant to acknowledge it when someone else points it out.

A counterfeit conviction, like counterfeit money, looks an awful lot like the real thing. It sometimes takes a trained eye to tell the difference. But if you look closely with a discerning eye, there's always a flaw that gives it away. If we ignore the flaw and try to apply counterfeit convictions to our Christian lives, the results never work out as we expect them to. We end up confused, disappointed, and frustrated with God. Then we get angry because we believe He is not answering our prayers, when in fact, the problem is not with God but with what we've come to expect from Him in our financial woes.

The only weapon against counterfeit convictions is the timeless truths found in God's Word, the Bible. A timeless truth is a simple biblical principle that we can count on to lead us down the right path.

If you go back to our counterfeit money analogy, you can put the two terms-counterfeit convictions ands timeless truths-together like this: A counterfeit-conviction is like fake money: it looks good, but it's worthless. It may fool some people for a little while, but eventually it will be proved to be what it is: a phony. And just as you can't make a real deposit at a bank with fake money, you can't make a positive impact in your life when your spiritual currency is made up of phony beliefs.

Do you know those penlights cashiers and bank tellers use to verify money's authenticity? That's like a timeless truth. For us, a timeless truth is God's Word and the light of the Holy Spirit shining on our convictions, showing us which ones are real and which ones are phony. False convictions can't make it past the clarifying light of God's Word.

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