Money Is Simply a Tool
Excerpted from Splitting Heirs: Giving Your Money and Things to Your Children Without Ruining Their Lives by Ron Blue
A key to financial freedom and to effective wealth transfer is understanding our life purposes. God has a general purpose for all believers, such as bringing glory to Him and sharing the good news of God’s salvation through Jesus Christ.
Each believer also has specific purposes for life unique to his gifts, talents, contacts, and opportunities. As we prayerfully discern where our gifts and experiences lie, God begins to reveal to us where to spend our efforts, time, emotional energy, and money on those areas. Then, of course, do we obey what He has revealed to us?
Our role as stewards involves both general purposes for our lives—faithfully managing what God has entrusted us with—and specific purposes. God owns it all. All the resources and abilities are within my control only temporarily. As the Bible says,
And [Job] said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.” In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.
- Job 1: 21–22
This is one rule with no exceptions. Your hearse will not be pulling a U-Haul. Someone asked John D. Rockefeller’s accountant if he knew exactly how much Mr. Rockefeller had left when he died. The accountant replied, “Certainly, to the penny. He left everything.”
As you live this one life where you take nothing with you, you are writing a story. You are a playwright putting the finishing touches on the story of your life. You get a lot of input on the twists and turns of the plot. You can write a story about how you live with your money and how you leave it. What will the story say? How will that story impact others?
I recently met with a couple with significant wealth. He was a businessman who had sold his successful company for millions of dollars. His wife of forty-one years made the comment while we were sitting there discussing the sale of his business, “Finally I can replace the dresser in my bedroom.” Sensing this sounded interesting, I said, “Tell me what you mean.”
She told how they had bought a dresser when they got married. About fifteen years ago, a drawer broke, and they had never repaired it or replaced it. During that time, every day, she had been looking at this dresser in their bedroom with a broken, empty drawer. This couple earned a very high income for many years. As I glanced at the husband, I sensed he was mentally patting himself on the back for not having bought a new dresser—for saving that money.
I thought to myself, How could I talk to this guy without offending him? I first asked him whether he loved his wife. He said he did. That didn’t offend him. Then I continued, “What if that dresser represented to your wife something more than a place to store clothes? For example, the dresser potentially is a statement of who she is because it is a part of what she is allowed to decorate and to manage. Just as you have built a business, she has built a home. She builds the things that are in the house.”
As he was processing this, I changed my tone and asked offhandedly, “How much money would you pay for your wife’s peace of mind, contentment, and happiness?”
He said, “Well, I’d spend anything.”
“Then buy a dresser. My point is that money is a tool. You should spend money to accomplish an objective. Buying something for your wife’s peace, such as a new dresser, may be just as important as investing it or giving it away. God gave money to us as a tool to use.”
Biblical stewardship is the accomplishment of God-given objectives using God-given resources. I am accountable for all of His resources, not just 10 percent of them. It isn’t necessarily more spiritual to give to your church than to spend money on a much-needed family vacation. It’s all God’s anyway, whether I buy groceries, buy sneakers, or give to the poor.
God’s purposes are not money or things. Money and things may represent opportunities to accomplish His goals and objectives while we’re here. My point in including this illustration is that the businessman is writing a story. It is one of a wise, frugal, business genius. But it is also a rich man so tight that a gallon of WD-40 couldn’t loosen his wallet to spend eight hundred dollars for a dresser. What I urged him to do is include a romance chapter in his life story about his love for his wife.
Faith & Finance Perspective
The quote, “Some people are so heavenly minded that they are of no earthly good” is attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., a physician and poet. The quote is a warning that people should not be so focused on spiritual and eternal things that they neglect the needs of others and the present day.
There’s a lot to be said about those who are wholeheartedly committed to serving Christ’s Kingdom through biblical stewardship. Their generosity has fueled the advance of the gospel into spiritually desolate communities in our own country and throughout the world. Their faithful and consistent giving has housed the homeless, clothed the naked, fed the hungry, and cared for the infirm. These are the things that are near to God’s heart, and as His faithful beloved, we strive to make them nearer to ours.
But God never instructs his children to forsake their own needs or those of their families. There’s a fine line between sacrifice and deprivation. It may be noble and godly to forfeit some earthly pleasures in favor of seeing God’s purposes fulfilled—but not to withhold providing for the needs—and even some of the wants—of those entrusted to our care. Our Heavenly Father is “omniwealthy.” He not only owns the cattle on a thousand hills (Psalm 50:10) but can also make anything He pleases out of nothing, as He did in Creation. And in His infinite wealth, He doesn’t want us to live and serve under a scarcity mentality. Being sensibly frugal and fervently generous are not mutually exclusive in His economy.
As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy.
1 Timothy 6:17