Hello and welcome to another podcast of It’s Not Your Money: Finding the Peace of Putting God First. The message of It’s Not Your Money is to help you connect your faith-life with your financial life. The first step in that journey is to trust God. You can trust God to provide.
We all know the angst we experience when striving to balance family and personal time with advancing our career and earning more money to build our investment accounts in order to buy the things we think we need now and to have enough for the future. On the last cast I proposed that to alleviate this stress and angst, we need to change our attitudes toward money and possessions by admitting that God owns everything and God gives us everything as we read in 1 Chronicles 29. Therefore, we can rest easy in the truth that He loves us and will provide for us. We can trust God at His word. Let’s consider a handful of Bible verses that encourage us to trust God:
Psalm 37:3 Trust in the Lord and do good that you may dwell in the land and live secure.
Proverbs 3:5-6 Trust in the Lord with all your heart, on your own intelligence do not rely; In all your ways be mindful of him, and he will make straight your paths.
2 Corinthians 1:9-10 Indeed, we had accepted within ourselves the sentence of death, that we might trust not in ourselves but in God who raises the dead. He rescued us from such great danger of death, and he will continue to rescue us; in him we have put our hope [that] he will also rescue us again
Trust is one of the main attributes God asks of us. We can trust God that He will, as Paul says, rescue us. We can rely on His love and grace. We can be vulnerable with Him. This may sound a little counter-intuitive. It may be counter-cultural to trust in anyone other than ourselves to provide for us. After all, I am the one who is to look out for my needs – to follow society’s dictum to “look out for number one!” You may have heard the aphorism, “If it is to be, it is up to me.”
And so we strive and stress to make more money to get more stuff. That is the way to happiness. That is the way to feel successful. That is the way of our world. How is that working out for you?
Get off that merry-go-round. Listen to what the Psalmist says in Chapter 49:6-14, “Why should I fear in evil days…Of those who trust in their wealth and boast of their abundant riches? No man can ransom even a brother, or pay to God his own ransom…Indeed, he will see that the wise die, and the fool will perish together, and they leave their wealth to others…This is the way of those who trust in themselves.”
We think we can trust in ourselves and in our wealth, and that our riches will make us happy. But, we cannot redeem ourselves. Riches are transitory. We can’t take it with us. There is now trailer hitch on a hearse.
So there seems to be some competition between what the world tells us we need to do and what we need to have to be happy versus what God says. We’ll begin to consider a handful of “World Says vs. God Says” axioms in the next podcast. Until then, please stop for a moment and ask yourself if you can trust God. What keeps you from trusting God and putting Him first in your life? Know that trust comes from faith, and like faith, the more we exercise it, the stronger it becomes.
Thank you for listening. Please share this podcast with your family and friends. And please like my FB page. Hey – and go to my website itsnotyourmoney.org, to the “Join In” tab and share your story of how you placed your trust in God, and what happened. Do that and reference this podcast, and I’ll send you a copy of my book for free.
Till next time, Be Well.
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