I was speaking at the Friday night service of Covenant Center International last night in West Palm Beach, Florida, and found myself saying several times during the message, which was a study into what I learned during a life audit last year - that we need to focus on being an 'Economic Force'.
What on earth could that mean ?
For the last fourteen years I've lived by faith and often thought it was quite natural to pray for bills to be paid each month. This worked well. It only took a salary and a few weeks to start to worry about finance when for the first time in so many years, I didn't need to and shouldn't have to.
Thought's like - will my pay cheque last until the end of the month, what will I do if it doesn't - it was almost as if someone switched the 'God Button' off.
When the Bible talks about the spirit of mammon, I now understand that more clearly than at any other time in my life. The paralysing fear to step out of a routine or out of a world system to still include God in all decisions, particularly where the is risk involved.
If we look at the hard facts, most of us have more debt than we could easily repay over the next decade let alone the next year or so, and the addiction of credit that we are force fed with in commercials, paper advertising and so called debt consolidation solutions is at fever pitch.
What's needed is a concerted effort to break free from this spirit of the age and re-involve God in our personal economics.
Of course we haven't even touched on the subject of being an economic force yourself yet.
People often think that greed is the driving force to impulse buying yet, I'm more convinced it's the fear of not being able to make a spot purchase and flex our credit muscle that bring us to constantly test whether we've finally reached and crossed over the socially unacceptable financial crash, where our debts are so high we have no natural ability to become debt free within our lifetime.
Yet, just taking some small steps to stem our spending habits and focus on our finances can produce significant results and bring us to a place with God's help of financial freedom which in turn prepares the way for us to become philanthropists for the kingdom and bring others to the same freedom.
The way of the world is simple, to trap us with a level of debt which enrols us to a new kind of slavery, economic slavery.
For example if you put $£1,000 on a credit card which has a 14.9% rate and you only make the minimum pay of 3% or $£5 per month it will take you 12 yes TWELVE years to repay this card. The final amount you will also repay is $£2625.21. Ever thought about that. Roughly each 5 $£ you pay above the minimum payment on this debt reduces the length of repayment by three months.
When you think that the average British or American person has $£30,000 of unsecured loan and credit card debt, you start to see that people are bearly making minimum payment because the total minimum payments chew up most of their salary.
So what's the secret - STOP all unnecesary payments and pay more off the largest debt you have, reducing the biggest amount reduces slowly the interest you will pay and also the time it takes to pay the loan/credit card. Of course I would also recommend you also pay off the largest interest rate item you have.
Then resist all attempts by the spirit of mammon to provoke you to buy a new car, new TV, a flashy holiday, STOP and pay down your debt.
I'm not speaking as a perfectionist in this, I've been there, done it, bought the Tee-Shirt factory.
After years of digging my way out, I'm now starting to look at how easy it is to live free of debt and also start to look at how to be influential with finance in a Kingdom perspective.
I'm more relaxed, less stressed and more focussed on what is a good deal, what is an emotive reaction on my part and what is a great opportunity.
Financing the Kingdom, becomes a reality and without much effort and often little finance, you begin to see that you can literally change the direction of people's lives, by extending a hand once your out of the rabbit hole of debt yourself.
So the moral of the story - the greatest step you can take toward 'being' an economic force is to remove the influence of debt in your life through conquering it's ability to tempt you into a trap that is designed to keep you there the whole of your life. The greatest gift to philanthropy you can be is when you are determined to live outside the tempatation of this world system and become responsible with our finances.
