GOD WANTS IT ALL
A business colleague of mine who I respect runs a restaurant here in Philadelphia. She is very generous and innovative. The restaurant business being as tough as it is, hers probably ekes out a $20,000 profit on sales of $4 million at the end of the year, once she’s done paying everyone including herself. You could take a tenth of that and give it to a variety of charities, which in fact she does.
But in the process of making that $20,000, she spends another $3,980,000 per year on stuff: raw materials, decorations, salaries, etc. So her philanthropic focus isn’t on the $20,000 but on the $3,980,000: how can she hire people who really need jobs, buy produce from poor farmers, and make sure her facility is environmentally friendly. She realizes as a small business that what counts isn’t how generous you are with your profits at the end of the day, but how progressive you are with your operations throughout the day.
And so it is, I believe, with our Christian discipleship. God doesn’t just want us to give our 10% (and by the way, I do believe we ought to give our 10%); he wants to know what we’re doing with the other 90%. Are we being good stewards of our whole budgets, and not just of the tenth we offer? I must say in terms of strategic allocations of financial resources, I am lazier with my overall budget, which is nine times larger than what I give to charitable causes. That’s like doing a bunch of research on which car to buy, and then casually buying a house without a second thought.
But I think this lordship principle also applies to our time. Christianity isn’t just giving God our best at church and in Bible study. Even if we’re really active in those things, there is about nine times more time that we give to other things: work, most notably, but also social activities, community service, and entertainment. Have we given those times to God, too, to redeem for His purpose? Or is that time and energy spent on trivial, meaningless, and even detrimental things? How can we say we are seeking for God’s kingdom, for example, no matter how active we are at church and in Bible study, when we give five times more time to a job that means nothing for the Kingdom?
Please do not read my rantings as a dis on secular vocations. What I am actually arguing for is to redeem those secular vocations. You can be a IT geek, businessman, lawyer, or janitor for Jesus. The problem is not in the jobs we are selecting per se, but in our inability to surrender them to God.
Jesus saved his harshest words for pious hypocrites who looked good in the religious gatherings but whose lives were relatively empty of true Christian discipleship. My restaurateur colleague understood that she could make her biggest impact not through her profits but through her operations. I hope we Christians can all understand that the whole of our budgets and the whole of our lives is nine times more than what we typically allocate to Jesus. O that we’d surrender the whole of our budgets and the whole of our lives to Him.
A business colleague of mine who I respect runs a restaurant here in Philadelphia. She is very generous and innovative. The restaurant business being as tough as it is, hers probably ekes out a $20,000 profit on sales of $4 million at the end of the year, once she’s done paying everyone including herself. You could take a tenth of that and give it to a variety of charities, which in fact she does.
But in the process of making that $20,000, she spends another $3,980,000 per year on stuff: raw materials, decorations, salaries, etc. So her philanthropic focus isn’t on the $20,000 but on the $3,980,000: how can she hire people who really need jobs, buy produce from poor farmers, and make sure her facility is environmentally friendly. She realizes as a small business that what counts isn’t how generous you are with your profits at the end of the day, but how progressive you are with your operations throughout the day.
And so it is, I believe, with our Christian discipleship. God doesn’t just want us to give our 10% (and by the way, I do believe we ought to give our 10%); he wants to know what we’re doing with the other 90%. Are we being good stewards of our whole budgets, and not just of the tenth we offer? I must say in terms of strategic allocations of financial resources, I am lazier with my overall budget, which is nine times larger than what I give to charitable causes. That’s like doing a bunch of research on which car to buy, and then casually buying a house without a second thought.
But I think this lordship principle also applies to our time. Christianity isn’t just giving God our best at church and in Bible study. Even if we’re really active in those things, there is about nine times more time that we give to other things: work, most notably, but also social activities, community service, and entertainment. Have we given those times to God, too, to redeem for His purpose? Or is that time and energy spent on trivial, meaningless, and even detrimental things? How can we say we are seeking for God’s kingdom, for example, no matter how active we are at church and in Bible study, when we give five times more time to a job that means nothing for the Kingdom?
Please do not read my rantings as a dis on secular vocations. What I am actually arguing for is to redeem those secular vocations. You can be a IT geek, businessman, lawyer, or janitor for Jesus. The problem is not in the jobs we are selecting per se, but in our inability to surrender them to God.
Jesus saved his harshest words for pious hypocrites who looked good in the religious gatherings but whose lives were relatively empty of true Christian discipleship. My restaurateur colleague understood that she could make her biggest impact not through her profits but through her operations. I hope we Christians can all understand that the whole of our budgets and the whole of our lives is nine times more than what we typically allocate to Jesus. O that we’d surrender the whole of our budgets and the whole of our lives to Him.
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