Episode 73 - Christian Financial Stewardship - Part One

Christian Financial Stewardship is important if we want to be disciples of the Lord. In this episode, I will go over Part One of Christian Financial Stewardship when I discuss generosity, faithfulness, and good order(which yields peace). I will hopefully clarify questions you might have about tithing. Join me for part two in episode 74. I start by sharing our story and how we learned to implement these principles in our lives and the fruit that it yielded.

Transcript

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Paul, Welcome to Catholic money talk, where we talk about all things money and finance, and we try to do it through a lens of being Catholic, where our ultimate goal is to one day be in Heaven with the Lord. I am your host. Paul Scarfone, thank you for being here today. Welcome back to Catholic money talk. Today, I want to talk about managing our finances, and from a very broad faith perspective, and we're going to hit on all the different elements of financial management. But before we do that, let's say a prayer in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen, Heavenly Father. We thank you for this day. We thank you for all the ways that you love and bless us, Lord, Lord. We know that you have an awesome plan for us and that you love us so much. We ask you to help us yield to your Holy Spirit. Come O Holy Spirit. Be with us in all the different situations, good or difficult that we might find ourselves in, Lord, and show us where you are in those moments and lead us closer to you. We ask all this in Jesus name, amen, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen, so managing our finances. I'd really almost like to say like faithfulness in managing our finances. If we look in Galatians five, there's a list. St Paul points out different fruits of the Spirit, and I want to think of three of them in particular, generosity, faithfulness and peace. And I'm going to interchange peace with good order, because good order is peace, right? When our emotions are good order, when our faith life, when our spirituality, when our relationship with God, is in good order, we have peace. So peace and good order go hand in hand. And these three generosity, faithfulness and good order, which is peace, they're the keys for us to use our finance as well. So first, let's look at generosity. We need to be generous, because the Lord is generous. We are made in the image and likeness of God. And what do we know about God? God loved us so much that He gave His only Son to come and die for our sins. He gave us his son. We have a generous God, and we are made in His image and likeness. So the more generous we are, the more we move closer to being that person that God created us to be, right? It's almost like there's this big spectrum. And the more we're generous, we move on the spectrum from selfish to self less, right? We get to selfless. That's where we meet God. That's where we meet Jesus. I love the story in the Gospel, Matthew 13, about the sower and the seed, right? The farmer, which is God, he goes around. He throws his seeds everywhere. He's so generous sowing. He even lets it fall on Rocky grounds and paths and thorny areas. But he's so generous. He sows it everywhere. He gives us His love, whether we are ready to receive it or not. And boy, is it great when we're ready to accept it, because when we're able, when we're ready to receive it and accept it, when we're that fertile soil, it yields 10 times to 100 times, right? Whatever that number is. But even if we're not ready, he is still generous. This is so important. God's always generous, but we don't see that growth in our lives until we are ready to accept his love and his generosity. In Second Corinthians, nine, verse six, Paul presents the principle of sowing and reaping. Right? He says, he who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. We all I, if I surveyed a bunch of people, we would all say, yes, we want to reap bountifully, but we just don't want to sow generously and do all that work, right? There might be some of us that find it pretty easy to be generous and others, maybe we find it a little harder to be generous, or maybe it's more of you know, we're generous in some things, but not other things. And what I like to ask myself when I'm thinking about measuring generosity right, a great question is, are we willing to give away that which we value the most? For some of us, it might be money. For some of us, it might be time. For some of us, it might be, you know, something else. But are we willing to give away that which we value the most, or are we hoarding something? And however you answer these questions, that's going to say something about. Our hearts, about our hearts, right? So that's that's generosity. Let's look at faithfulness. So faithfulness is the second character trait. It's so important for us in use of our finances, right? The Lord is faithful, a rock. The Scripture says we can count on him. We can rely on His Word, and he asks us to be faithful in our turn. Right in return to Him, the Lord especially praises servants who are reliable and faithful, and he entrusts more to them. Right in the parable of the talents from Matthew 25 he says to the good servant, right? Well done, good and faithful servant. This is what, this is what we all want to hear from the Lord at the end of our lives, he is looking for faithful servants. So in order to be faithful servants, we have to faithfully fulfill the responsibilities that we have, right? And that's going to be tied to our vocation, our roles in our family, our roles at work, right? Are we faithfully fulfilling the responsibilities we have? And we have to be kind to people, and we have to do what we commit ourselves to do. We need to be people of integrity. We have to be people the Lord and others can rely on. We need to be trustworthy, right? So in our actions and behaviors, we must be faithful. So in this third character, quality, this trait, this good order, right good order, it brings peace. Think of creation right before creation, everything was in chaos. Then God spoke His word and brought order to all of creation, and it was good and it was peaceful, so to be faithful servants who fulfill our responsibilities and meet our commitments. We need to have a handle on our finances. We need good order in the area of our money, just as we need it in other areas of our life, like time, right? There's so many different areas of our life that need good order. Today, we'll talk about finances, and so these three things go together. We are to be generous people. We are to be faithful and responsible people, and we need to learn wisdom of good order in the area of our finances. We need to learn how to manage our money wisely so we can be generous and faithful in a consistent way, and this will bring peace. And in all of this consistency, practice working at this constantly is key. Sometimes there's going to be seasons in our life where maybe we can be more generous than others, or things might run more smoothly and less surprises, right? But at all times generous, faithful and good order need to be present. So in order to kind of get a little deeper with all three of these, I first want to look at Christian discipleship and finances, okay? And there's some scripture verses you can flip through the Bible and the catechism and find different supporting lines that are going to point to a lot of these things. And I would challenge you to as I talk through some of these. If some might resonate with you. Some might challenge you. Maybe you may feel defensive. I know I have at times when when I've learned new elements, particularly as related to how to handle finances. I think I do a good job, but we can always learn and get better, because we're trying to get closer to the Lord, right? We want to know Him, love Him, serve Him in this life, so we can be happy with him forever in the next how do we do that with our finances? That's what we're talking about today, right? Jesus. So Christian discipleship and finances. Let's look at what Jesus said when he called his disciples the first step. Sell. All right. He said that to the rich young man, and Jesus, looking upon him, loved him and said to him, You lack one thing. Go sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven and come follow me. It's from Luke 18, verse 21 does this mean that we literally have to give away everything we have before we can be a Christian disciple of the Lord? No, but I will tell you, if the Lord tells you to you should definitely do that. Right? He might call some of us to do that, but we can see from the rest of the New Testament that the answer is no, not everyone has to sell everything they have. But what the Lord was doing was he was teaching his disciples, right, not to put money first, to put Jesus first. Therefore do not be anxious, saying, What shall we eat, or What shall we drink, or What shall we wear? For the Gentiles, seek all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all but seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well. From Matthew six, this passage gives us the principles we're looking for. If we put his kingdom first, he provides for us. The trick is actually, however, we have to put his kingdom first, and sometimes, when he does provide for us, it might not be the way we think he should have, or what we think we need. And that goes back to, are we fertile soil? Right? The Lord's just showering His blessings upon us. We might not, we might think we're all set, but we're still there, and we're just rocky ground, right? He showers down all his blessings on us, and we're like, yeah, that's it's not working for me. Well, that's because we have to do some work on us. We need to change our hearts, right? So we have to put his kingdom first. But putting his kingdom first, it does require us to make a discipleship step right, or a commitment to be His disciple, and we need to make it as a personal commitment. It's not just going to Mass on Sunday and like I did my part, Lord and how you do everything I want you to do. That's not how this works. We have to give him our entire heart all the time, when we're in mass, when we're in front of the Eucharist, when we're in prayer and when we're not, when we're at work, when we're dealing with a difficult child, or when we're stressed at work with a challenging situation, or maybe we're in a disagreement with our spouse, we constantly have have to be putting the Lord first and bringing him our hearts, and then he he'll take care of everything he'll take for so how do we make that commitment of discipleship to the Lord? We need to give our lives to Him and deny that they belong to us. I no longer live, but now you live inside me, right? This is when we recognize that everything belongs to God, all of our money and the ability to earn it, they all belong to God. When I talk to people about this, sometimes they'll ask me. They'll say, Well, Paul, how much, how much, how much money belongs to how much of our money belongs to God? And I'll ask them, Well, what do you think? How much money of your how much of your money belongs to God? And they might answer, oh, is it like 10% or something like that? I say, No, no, it's, it's 100% everything we have belongs to God. And here's the cool part, and this is really, this is really good news. You know, if you've ever been in a job or maybe in a household or maybe on some committee or situation where you had to manage a budget, it's so much easier to manage someone else's money than your own, because it's very straightforward, right? This is for this. This is for that. But when you're managing your own money, your emotions and desires get in the way. So this means that our time and our money, they no longer belong to us. They are his, and we are simply his stewards. We need to know why he entrusted to us the financial resources that we have, and then we have to use them for the reasons he gave them to us. So if we have genuinely made a discipleship commitment towards the Lord, everything else becomes easier, because all of a sudden we look through everything with that lens, and we see that our financial resources are simply not ours to dispose of as we will. He will provide for us, but we need to do our part. A few years ago, I was attending a talk about time and time management and good order and time management, the speaker said that God gives us all the time we need to do what he wants us to do, and if we feel like we ran out of time, we've probably spent some time doing things that weren't part of God's plan, right? Because he's got this whole plan mapped out, and he provides the time we need to do all the things he asks. And I think the same can be said for our financial resources. But sometimes, sometimes we make different decisions that put us in a spot that we think, Lauren, I don't think he gave me enough money here, but he probably did. He might have, he very much might. Have, but we might have made a few of our own decisions, right, putting ourselves first that put us into a mess. But he'll continue to provide as we find our way back on track to doing his work, but it will require effort from us. He doesn't just drop bags of money on our front porch. Instead, he allows us to participate. He invites us and places us as stewards, and we have to have proper stewardship, right, generosity, faithfulness and good order to honor him. And it's good to remember that this, all of this, it's not really about money, it's not really about money, it's about our hearts. So we need to deny ourselves to be good disciples. We need to have a handle on our desires, especially our desire for material things. Because our desire for material things, they can lead us away from the faith. And there is a great, a great St Augustine quote, saw this in prayer time a few years ago, and I, I've saved it. I look at it pretty regularly. And here, here's this, here's this quote, the love of worldly possessions is a sort of bird line which entangles the soul and prevents it from flying to God. So just imagine that for a second. The love of worldly possessions is a sort of bird line which entangles the soul and prevents it from flying to God. Man. That's something we have to be careful of, right? We need to have a handle on our desires, especially our desire for material things, because they can lead us away from the faith. And it's easier to say this than to do it right. We need a practical approach to Christian, to Catholic personal financial management to be able to live as a live our life as a disciple, right? A disciple on a mission towards the Lord. Christian discipleship. I've talked about this before. I like to think of this as our lifestyle cup. Right, in Psalm 23 it says The Lord is my shepherd. There's nothing I shall want goes to the whole the whole verse, but the line my cup shall run it over. And I think of this cup is like our lifestyle, right? If our lifestyle decisions we have made, right? The home purchases, the cars, whatever. If all that's added up to our lifestyle is the size of a swimming pool, we might never experience runneth over, right? We're not going to experience overflow, but if it's the size of maybe a pint glass or a shot glass, right, a sand pale spackle bucket, right, we might better chance to experience overflow. It just depends what amount of flow is going into that bucket, right? So we need to make sure we have prayerfully discerned our lifestyle and these decisions we've made so that we can have good overflow. You need to have prayerful discernment to seek what size of cup the Lord is calling us to our cup runneth over. We need to create a lifestyle that gives us space, that creates and enables overflow for us to use for the Lord, right? So that was discipleship, right? This is the why we apply discipleship, our faith lens, to looking at our finances. So generosity, the first thing we're going to do is talk about a Christian approach to financial giving, and let's talk about the tithe, right? I say we should give a tithe of our income to our church and our faith community, right? Those areas that we worship the Lord and we're provided formation, that's our church, right? This is very important, because if you survey Catholics, you're going to get several different opinions, right? So I am giving you mine, and I'm going to give you reasons why and to substantiate it a bit, right? If you survey Catholics, get a bunch of different answers. If you survey parish priests, a lot of them are going to say, yes, you need to tithe, right? They're think they might be thinking about the the parish, P and L, right, the cash flow. If you talk to religious brothers and sisters, maybe they're in a community that begs or seeks alms for running their mission right, they're going to say, yes, please give, right? But there's no you can't look up in the catechism and say, does the Catholic Church have a line that says all Catholics must tithe 10% of their gross income before taxes? It's not there, right? Just Catholic Church doesn't have that. There many evangelical Christians. They'll embrace the tithe because it's biblical, right? It. Let's, let's think about that for a second. The biblical origination right, the origins of the tithe. The tithe started as part of the old covenant between the Lord and His people, right. And Jesus came to establish the New Covenant. He required us to level up. Right? The old law, Jesus says this. The old law was, don't kill. And then Jesus says, Dude, you can't even get mad. The old law was no adultery. Jesus said, You can't even have lustful thoughts. The old law was the tithe. Jesus wants us to level up, right? Sell all you have. Seek ye first, the kingdom of God, right? The tithe. That was just the starting point. So I submit that we're not just called to tithe. We're called to go way beyond that. So let's get into this. The tithe, that means a 10th, right? This is what God expected from the old covenant people in order to provide for his worship in the temple by supporting the priests and the Levites. Right? We see this New Testament. The same thing was expected actually in the New Testament from the New Covenant people, except that it was given to support Christian workers. Right? In First Corinthians, the Lord commanded the same practice. Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get their food from the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in the sacrificial offerings in the same way the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel. First, Corinthians, 913, 14. So this means that as Christians, as Catholics, we should support our church and community and those who work in them to advance the gospel. We should do so by giving a 10th of our income. Sometimes people say, Oh, I tithe 2% right? That's not tithing. A tithe is 10th right. You can give 2% that's that's great, but a tithe is 10% right? We can arm wrestle before it's after taxes. I like to do before taxes. That's just, that's cool, right? Be on that side. Be on the generous side. This isn't a legalistic thing. It's not a salvation issue, right? It doesn't improve your seating chart in heaven, right? How much you tithe. But this is an area where, especially in the United States, in a first world country, consumerism, capitalism, we need to be challenged. Our money is not our own. It belongs to God, and we have to use it for his service. He gives us 100% we give 10% back, right? He or just look at it. He gives us 90% the other 10% we gotta just give back to him, because he keeps it so because he keeps it. The tithe should be given where we worship and receive our Christian support and formation. So some Catholics, right, they might set 10% of their income apart and give it to any good Christian or Catholic cause they see to be worthwhile, right? I even get to question. Sometimes people will say, my kids go to Catholic school. Can I just consider that my tithe? No, no, that's not just giving your money and surrendering it to the Lord. That's doing something that you're trying to get some goods or value from. That's not just a free gift to the Lord, no, you can make a donation to your kids school, you know, Catholic school, you can give to your parish, but to somehow say, like, Oh, my giving is paying Catholic school tuition. That's not so the tithe should be given where we worship and receive our support and formation. And there's a difference between tithing and just a donation, right? The tithe is actually part of our worship, and we should give it where we worship. And we can see this clearly in scriptures. The tithe was given to the purposes the Lord specified. He did also encourage us to make other donations and contributions in addition to the tithe, right? So part of your tithe should go to your church where you belong to, right? You should belong to a church you can also give a tithe to if there's another outreach or community maybe that you came through, right? Maybe there was some faith formation that you came through, where you really met Christ, right? I know for myself through campus ministry. You know, that was a big, big, important part of me finding the Lord and creating a personal relationship with Christ, right? Was through my college years, so giving to places that you've received your formation is great, right? Because they're doing the work of the church. Right? You worship here. You should receive your faith support here. And there's a basic principle behind tithing and anything we do for Lord, namely that the Lord comes first, right? So we give the tithe first. We don't just give what's left. We give the tithe first, and then we can spend on our needs, and then after that, we can spend on our wants, right? So some some of you listing you might be tithing already. Others might not be tithing, and you might feel like, whoa. This is a drastic change, and that's okay. I recommend that you start to work towards it. You can also do it gradually, as you pray and the desire grows within you to live as a Christian disciple, and you'll see giving the Lord, giving to the Lord, is not something that's going to oppress you. It's a source of joy, and I can, I can speak of that in my own life. If you asked my wife, Taryn, hey, what's the what's the best, most important financial decision you guys ever made, she would say it was in 2013 when we started tithing. I promise you, she would say that. And if you're struggling with this, talk to your priest. Talk to people in your faith community, people that support your growth towards the Lord. Maybe it's you know, older brother, older sister, mom or a dad, uncle. Maybe it's a spiritual director. Talk to them about this, someone who is trying to help you live faithfully, right? And share it with them, right? You don't need someone who understands financial portfolios. You want someone that understands the Lord and who cares about your heart. So I'm going to pause there for today. We'll consider that part one, and I will start Part Two next week with how all of this impacted Taryn and my story as it relates to managing our finances. So thank you for joining me today. I hope you come back next week and listen to part two. God bless you. Paul, thank you for listening to Catholic money talk. I hope you join us again next time, please click Subscribe in your podcast app to get notified of new episodes. God bless you and have a great day. Foreign.