As ministers, we have a responsibility to walk with God in financial correctness. We will always need money and materials. Having them brings some degree of confidence to be able to do all we want to do, but it also brings the sense of independence. Financial independence is a goal to many people including ministers. The down side of that is that it may make us independent of God also.
Someone had said, if God cannot control your finances, He can hardly control you, and I agree with that to a large content. But that's not the best, God still want us to have these things but would still want us to be malleable to Him.
God wants us to depend on Him for all we need, when we get to that point when we can do it ourselves, we become slippery in God's hand and so most times God would want us to grow with the experiences He's taking us through.
One balance we need in the area of finance for instance is between total dependence and being faithful.
We need to know that it is possible to live totally trusting the Lord and still be financially faithful. That's actually how the Lord wants it to be. But we often think living dependently on God is impossible as ministers of God. The world's financial system swallowed up the faith of the church in this regard. We suddenly believe that ministry isn't work enough to be done without doing other things to make money.
Here we have the possibility of being controlled by our needs and desire for money and materials. Our service to God can nor be dictated by our needs or our inability to control our own finances. That's quite close to serving God at the terms of our financial situation. We are saying on other words, that we can only give ourselves to Him only when we have things in order financially.
And we think that once we don't have that financial back up or position in ministry, we wouldn't be able to be all we were meant to be even when God is there with us. That makes people believe more in money than in God. Is that what's called choosing between serving God and mammon? And isn't that why we are where we are with the abomination of the desolate sitting at the Holy place?
But on the other hand, we also believe that without an external source of income from a secular commercial work, you have to be dependent on the church, ministry or you have to become a burden to people around you. Some, believing that the church now has total responsibility for their sustenance, go without caution to do all manners of unsavoury, ungodly things to extract money through every means of manipulation from God's people.
The balance here is simple, our faith must be in the supernatural, in God and not in people even if God would largely use people as channels to bring in what He has sent.
We must believe that God is our source, our employer, who don't only reward but sustains while even before the reward come for the work to go on.
We must believe that God is able to supply any how even miraculously. And we must be sure that God is the possessor of the heaven and the earth, and of all that live in them both in the spiritual and the physical. And He is free to use anything or anyone.
The actual truth is that God has actually provided what we all would need before the need would come. Each of us has a purpose to meet needs in other people's lives just as we were raised to meet needs and to be solutions for other people and their issues.
The provisions are already here before the needs ever came. God anticipated the problems and the needs and so raised the solutions upfront.
So we can actually live in the balance of being able to live by faith in our work for God particularly when God doesn't have a place for us outside the ministry. Even when God sends us into the secular, we must remember that our Source is more than our businesses or careers, God is our source!
We can live totally on God and still be financially faithful. When we live trusting God, we also are able to live without trusting men or being a burden on them, we also would be able to preserve our boasting like Paul did not because we are able to do it ourselves but like Abraham, who won't take even a shoestring from the recovered loot of the Kings of the land lest they say, they made Abraham rich.
What are you ready to do as a servant of God because of your needs and your desires? Can you rest on God's providence even if you have to lose your life to save it?
Are you willing to enjoy God's faithful miracles of providence?
Remain blessed