If you want real financial freedom, one thing will help you get there faster than any other: Thankfulness
Financial slavery starts in your heart, not your bank account. And the key to breaking free from that slavery is changing the attitude of your heart. So If you learn to have a heart of thankfulness, nothing can make a slave of you ever again.
Thankfulness helps us affirm some really key truths about money. Everything in the world belongs to God, and He has entrusted some of those resources to us. We don’t have a fundamental right to expect things from this universe; rather God gives us things to bless us. He is a good father who delights in giving good gifts to His children.
Thankfulness focuses our financial management on God’s heart for our money. tweet this!When we accept that God really does own it all, and that everything we have is a gift from Him, we can’t help but to be thankful for all of the blessings in our lives (financial and otherwise). When we make a habit of giving thanks to Him, we keep our hearts in right alignment with His. Thankfulness focuses our financial management on His priorities for our money.
Escape Slavery with Thankfulness
Thankfulness is also a great remedy for many of attitudes that can bind us up in slavery. A thankful heart isn’t stingy, greedy or envious. Thankfulness is the antidote to discontentment and frees us from false identity, false motivations and a false poverty mentality.
A thankful heart also enables a wise mind. If you’re thankful for the resources that you have, you’re much more likely to handle them well. You work hard to account for every dollar, making sure not to spend His money on wasteful or unwise things.
Thankfulness will also guide you in giving. Because if you’re are grateful for the way that God has freely given you, you will freely give back to Him and to others. So a healthy attitude toward tithing comes from thankfulness. And a thankful heart is a generous heart.
Growing a thankful heart will set you free from financial slavery. It puts you in a position to be richly blessed and to bless those around you. There is no financial problem that doesn’t find its solution in a thankful heart.
Thanksgiving Every Day
How do you grow a thankful heart? Start by making every day a thanksgiving day. It doesn’t take a turkey, just some intentionality in your time with God.
There is no financial problem that doesn’t find its solution in a thankful heart. tweet this!Each time you pray, begin with something you’re thankful for. On difficult days, that might mean something very basic. Thank God first for hot water, or your microwave, or some other small convenience in life.
Above all, approach every prayer time as an opportunity to thank God for something new. Don’t rush through this portion of your prayer. Linger on it. The more you thank God, the more He’ll give you to be thankful for.
Develop a habit of thanksgiving in prayer, and you’ll also see thankfulness grow in every part of life. And that might be the first step in reaching the freedom that God has waiting for you.
Via Flickr, by user Spirit-Fire. Used under Creative Commons License.
What is it that they say about the best laid plans of mice and men? To paraphrase, they often fall apart.
Building a budget is an absolutely critical first step to becoming the master of your money, but it’s only a step. Financial teachers talk incessantly about the importance of budgeting, and rightfully so. But a budget itself is no silver bullet; the fact that you write down a plan for your money doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to work. Success with a budget takes a much more critical ingredient — you.
Think about it — no matter how thorough or detailed you are in putting it together, a budget is just a plan. It’s just words and numbers on a piece of paper, or in a computer spreadsheet. Sure, your budget has lots of good intentions and great ideas; you’ve even remembered to budget for expenses that will come up in the future. But that budget is inanimate. It has no power. On its own, it accomplishes nothing. A budget won’t work without the power of you behind it.
No plan in the history of the world has ever worked without the will of committed human beings seeing it through. Allied forces had a great plan to storm the beaches of Normandy during World War II, but it took thousands and thousands of dedicated men willing to run headlong into enemy fire to make D-Day the success that we remember today. And though the stakes of your financial life don’t seem as high as a pivotal battle in a global war, the principle remains: In order to make your plan a success, you must throw the full force of your will behind it.
Unfortunately, we humans are experts and making plans and then abandoning them, or watching them fall apart in real time because we don’t commit like we should. We see this in examples from all areas of our lives. Remember that girl that you planned to ask out, but then when the time came, you chickened out? Or maybe you decided to start an exercise regimen at the beginning of the year, only to see it fizzle after a week or two. And don’t even get me started on the corporate world — how many times have you had a staff meeting that results in a vague plan to start addressing a problem or improving a product? And how many times do those good ideas and intentions implode because no one takes responsibility for seeing that they get done?
Fortunately, there’s a remedy for all of this. Proverbs 21:5 refers to it as diligence:
The plans of the diligent lead to profit
as surely as haste leads to poverty.
Diligence is an idea that we don’t often talk about these days, but as the proverb says, it’s a crucial element in doing anything successfully. Diligence means hard work, applied faithfully over time. Go to the gym once, and you can work hard. Go to the gym faithfully for six months, and that’s diligence.
To succeed in budgeting, you need a good plan, but you also need to throw yourself diligently into doing the work required to execute your plan. That’s going to mean spending a lot of time crunching numbers to perfect your budget (especially when you’re first learning how to budget). It also means having the discipline to live by the plan that you set in your budget, resisting the urge to spend money that you haven’t planned for, and being faithful to save, give and invest in the areas where you have strategically planned to do so.
If you want to succeed with your finances, put together a great budget plan… and then throw the full force of your self behind it.
God doesn’t need your money, but He wants your heart.
We believe that God has a master plan for your financial success, and that tithing is part of that plan. God says that the tithe belongs to Him, that it supports the work of the ministry, and that He will bless those who are faithful to tithe. But here’s the secret to it all: God wants to tithe because tithing unites your heart to His.
Our last post in this series answered objections to the tithe that have been raised by some readers. That article dealt with a lot of biblical teachings about tithing, examining Old Testament and New Testament passages in detail. There’s a debate still raging in the comments section that gets even further into the minutiae of Old Testament law. But we feel that it’s important to follow up that sort of discussion with a look inside ourselves. Because the letter of the law is not nearly as important as the change that obedience produces in our hearts.
We believe that above all else, the chief thing that God wants from the tithe is the heart of the tither. After all, He doesn’t really need our money — He already owns everything, according to Psalm 24:1:
The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it,
the world, and all who live in it.
So although God uses the money that we give in our tithes, He doesn’t exactly need it. God is sovereign and infinite, and commands all of the world’s resources. Why, then, does He want us to give and tithe?
Because our gifts and tithes come with our hearts attached. Luke 12:34 states it pretty plainly:
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
The important thing about our money is that it is linked to our hearts. God doesn’t need our money, but He desperately desires our hearts. And giving a portion of our money to God is a guaranteed way to give him access to our hearts.
Where our treasure is, there our hearts will be also. When we give to God, we’re uniting our hearts with His heart. Our finances go to support and expand His work on the earth. We become tangibly invested in His kingdom. We are no longer people who show up at church on Sunday and sit in a pew hoping to be entertained. Rather, we are active participants in the Kingdom of God. We invest our hearts into His work when we also invest our money.
Critics of the tithe like to argue that the law of the Old Testament isn’t binding to the New Testament church. In a sense, they’re right — because of the work of Jesus on the cross, the law has lost its power to condemn us. But even though the curse of the law has been dismantled, the principles, promises and wisdom behind the Old Testament tithes remain. Among those are the principle that God owns everything to begin with, and the promise that He blesses those who faithfully tithe to them. And Deut. 14:23 also tells us that tithing helps us “learn to revere the Lord” — joining our hearts more closely with His.
The more we grow in our relationships with God — the more our hearts become intertwined with His — the more this reality will show up in our financial lives. Tithing isn’t the finish line in Christian financial management; rather, it’s the starting line. God wants us not only to tithe, but also to give generously, both to His ministries and to the people around us who are in need. He gives us tithing as a baseline. We may first begin tithing as a matter of obedience. But as we go along obeying, God changes us, working generosity into our hearts. Faithful tithing builds up the giving muscle, so that as we grow, we turn into people who have generous hearts. Tithing teaches us to be united in heart with the Kingdom of God, and it grows us into greater givers.
In the end, people that really don’t want to tithe will come up with plenty of reasons why they don’t have to. And they’re right — they don’t have to tithe. But they miss out on a lot of blessings. They miss out on the abundant blessing that God promises to tithers in Malachi 3:10. They miss out on the greater blessing that come from being a greater giver, because it’s more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35). They also miss the blessing of having their hearts knit together with God’s through obedience and the giving of their finances — and that might be the greatest loss of all.
So we’ll wrap up the whole discussion with this thought: We tithe because we love God, because we want to obey Him, because we want to support His work, because we want to share in His promises, and because we want to unite our hearts with His.
If you take issue with our theology, that’s okay. As for us, though, we’d rather steer too close to the law in our generosity than to steer too far from grace in our stinginess. How about you?
Photo via Flickr, by user Q Thomas Bower. Used under Creative Commons License.
Via Flickr, by user Spirit-Fire. Used under Creative Commons License.
God doesn’t need your money, but He wants your heart.
