Loosening the Grip of Money

People are pretty sensitive about their money. For six years I was an account/relationship manager to issuers of tax-exempt bonds. In the matrixed world of public finance, my job was to make sure that multiple parties paid what they owed and were paid what they were owed:  bondholders, the borrower, the government entity issuing the bonds on behalf of the borrower, and of course, the bank who paid my salary. At times the interests of the various parties were not exactly in sync. Many days I dealt with people swift to anger––as opposed to the spiritual gift of being slow to anger––if they had any worries whatsoever about their money, no matter how irrational their concerns.

In case you’ve been wondering about the lack of penny pinching posts, it’s because I know how delicate a topic this can be. Just because I might have saved money by relentless use of coupons doesn’t mean that the same strategy will work as well for you. And no matter how little one person has in financial resources, someone will always have less. Or someone will perceive that they have less, whether or not that’s true. In our hyper-sensitive world, people just won’t listen to someone they perceive has it ‘better’ than they do, regardless of the truth.

Rather than focus on a particular technique today, I encourage you to do a little soul-searching about the role and hold of money in your life. My former pastor used to talk about how you can tell what your priorities really are by looking at your checkbook or your debit and credit card transactions. My current pastor doesn’t talk a lot about financial giving, but he has mentioned that the purpose of tithing is to break the hold of materialism on your life.

Ouch.

Nothing reveals your heart more than what you do with money. Nothing.

God often judges us in the area of our prejudice.* God will challenge what you really believe, what you really trust, particularly if you have made any claim to follow Christ. I’d like to add that God will ask you to give up things you think you can’t live without, especially if money has a tight grip on your heart.

Why would He do that? Of course He has layers of reasons for everything He does, but an important one is to break the spirit of poverty.

If you haven’t noticed, our culture is rife with materialism and self-centeredness. At the heart of this is the spirit of poverty, a spirit which is perpetually discontent, stingy and blind to the possibilities God has set before you. One way Christians can really stand out in this culture is to be people who are givers, rather than people who are takers. And I’m not just talking about money, I’m also talking about your time, because time is money, too.

Look, I’m no superwoman. I love purses, and before too many running injuries took hold of my body, I firmly believed that shoes were the best part of fashion, and loved finding just the right pair.

But when my son was an infant, I knew that I knew that I knew that God was calling me to lay down that banking career that I had labored so long and so hard to have. I knew that all those years of feeling like a poor little nobody still had too much of a hold on my heart. Too much of my identity was tangled up in the size and reliability of my paycheck, and the title on my business card.

So I went part-time when my son was born. And when my daughter was born, my husband and I decided that I would stay at home with our little kids. I didn’t know anyone at my level in banking who did that––ever––not before or since.

When I quit my banking job, our income was immediately cut in half. We still don’t make as much as we did that last year I worked for the bank. But we are spiritually rich, and spiritually pretty free.

My penny-pinching posts revolve around disciplines, specific techniques and skills development. This one definitely falls into the category of disciplines. I would never write about or recommend something as personal as handling money in a way that honors Christ unless I had wrestled with these very same things.

I encourage you to pray about your relationship with money. Then pay attention, and do what God asks you to do. He’ll make it clear. You might already know some changes He wants you to make in your financial and time management priorities. But even if you have no idea how He might answer those prayers about money, get ready, because obedience to what He calls you to do is the key to opening the doorway to spiritual and occasionally financial blessings.

*While I wish I thought up this sentence, I believe the author is Os Guinness.