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
Can we rest totally on God financially, be funded and still be blameless? Can we be faithful when we have to depend on God and not on men or on ourselves?
ReplyDeleteYes, we can!
You addressed the two extremes carefully and laid a good principle for readers to follow.
Genuine ministers have real needs which need to be met without turning to manipulation or lust for money.
God is the Source and Sustainer. Beside direct financial rewards from the ministry, I totally agree that He also uses our skills to bless us.
Are there things that you can do during those spare times and days when you have nothing or very less ministry work, and get blessed? Deploy your skills, without compromising ministry ethics, and still get blessed.
Pastor, I think there are few ministers who are just lazy and have bad work habits & ethics. Yet they aspire ambitiously and unreasonably.
Whoever brings this distracting doctrine that once God calls you, you must abandon every useful, cultivated, learned means of meeting others' needs as well as your needs must have caused great confusion and distress.
Not all ministers are called to direct pulpit ministry. Among those called, some can peacefully engage in the use of their God-given skills for productive means and financial gains until the time that their ministry assignments overwhelm their time and space.
Even as a direct full time minister (whatever that means), nothing stops you from investing; if it is honest, non-compromising and non-distracting from ministry and family life!
Can we be financially blameless? Certainly.
If you are accountable to an independent, objective body;
If you cooperate with God's customized training for your life;
If you are humble;
If you receive some periodic functional, financial, training and advice from proven sources;
If you use common sense in practical living that is acceptable to God and human beings who have their heads on their necks and not in the sky,
If you have money, but money does not have you.
Have you ever asked yourself, what percentage of the church income should be directed to your personal comprehensive compensation?
You have 18 adult members at your church in the last three to five years. Yet you have no skill or any other means of livelihood.
You take over 80% of the church income because you believe that you are a Levite (you don't even know where Israel is located on the old Atlas map). Some of your ministry workers actually spend more time preparing for Sunday meetings than you do, yet they work with their hands and deploy their skills for meaningful living.
If we are to publish the ministry financial account's details, will you be able to practise Philippians 4:8 - whatever has praise, of good report, just, honest, virtue?
Bru, you are not blameless.
Go get a job, a career or some meaningful employment. It may be for a season.
However, if the evidence shows that you are a diligent worker called to ministry and you are fully engaged, patiently wait on God for daily living and life's reward.
While waiting, maintain healthy budget and financial discipline. You simply don't need that $1000 jacket to attend PFN meeting.
Neither do you need to be on that TV station when your script has no logical presentation.
Go on YouTube channels; it's cheaper.
Okay, you don't know how to do that? Well, ask that teenager in your ministry who you believe has no anointing and he will teach you or simply set you up.
Stop draining yourself and the church!
Please, equally stop yelling at me while teaching. I can hear you! After all, your teachers didn't yell at you while teaching you either.
Thanks Pastor.
This comment is Rude and defile all moral and biblical standards.
ReplyDeleteI know it is physically difficult to understand how one can live without an assured income and it is often assumed that once you are working in ministry on a full time basis, you must be living off people and on the church of God. That's common sense assumption but to those called into it, it isn't so even if it is difficult to understand.
ReplyDeleteThis is the essence of the message. People serve mammon just because they can't see God make a table in the wilderness and so limit the Holy One of Israel.
Meanwhile, Jesus Christ who we serve and call Lord, worked in the ministry without working in the secular for money, can we judge Him like we judge ourselves today?
Our ministry bear a lot of financial burden, yet we don't take either offerings nor tithe, not because we don't believe in them, we do and we don't judge those who take them. We don't live on manna, but our faith lays on the same things Jesus Christ taught and we've believed and worked with that template for many years.
God raises men and women who minister to us of their substance on their own volition. We don't charge for our trainings, we don't sell our materials, we don't do any sort of merchandising with God's people. Money isn't a motivation at all for us in ministry. Yet we don't go about telling people this, except under a situation as this.
Money is powerful. It always demand our worship and engagement. This is one reason why the Antichrist will use his wile around buying and selling and make it impossible for those who don't have his mark to exist... Once we don't have the boundary set, we can start living for money, whereby our insatiable needs and appetites keep us busy and to the extent that will lose any other sense of purpose other than balancing our books...
Many of us, because of our fear of suffering can't make sacrifice for the gospel. No, it's not that they don't want to burden the church or anyone but they fear the pains of committing totally to God and so withdraw halfway, not following the Lord fully.
I understand that some are lazy, they just hide under the full time thing to be slack in business but it'll be wrong to say every one who sincerely does that is in that category. That will include Christ and His disciples maybe except Paul and Barnabas at those times when they had to engage in secular work for specific reasons recorded in scripture.
To say it's the way the Lord has ordained it that people called into that level of ministry to engage in secular work is not to be true to scriptures and that will be misleading.
Even Paul in 1Corinthians 9 didn't mince words in telling it copiously how the Lord had ordained it that they who preach the gospel, should live by it... To condemn that may be dangerous.
But we have to also be convinced of the kind of lifestyle we want to live.
In all, if you are called to minister the gospel, be sure you're 100% committed without fear and God will always be faithful even if you have to suffer for a while...
Really blessed by the teaching God bless you sir Evans Emmanuel.
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