Episode 75 - Managers not Owners

God owns everything. We are only managers. What does that mean?

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 being a manager and not an owner, and what that means for our finances. But before I 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. We know that you have an awesome plan for us. Allow us to yield to your Holy Spirit. Lord, we know that you love us. Let us experience your love and be able to share that love and all the gifts that you've given us. Let's be able to share those with others. Lord, let us see with your eyes and love with your heart. We ask this through Jesus name, amen, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. So managers, not owners. So I talk a lot about the importance of being generous. And recently, Taryn and I, we were sitting down with this woman who works for our kids school. She works in the development office, and she she was asking us, why is it that we, Paul and Taryn, support the school outside of the fact that our children attend school there? And that's a good question, and it's it's one that's been asked to me before, not particularly about the kids school, but it's one I hear other people struggle to answer as well. And so in our quest to be generous, why do we give? Where we give? And so people ask me, Paul, where should we give? Now I encourage people to tie the last two episodes I talked a lot about that a tithe should be the starting point of our giving, and then we go up from there with generosity. A tithe is 10% we give it freely to the Lord. It's part of our worship. We should give it where we worship. It'll be our church, our local parish, you know, where we're registered. We can also give to our diocese and other places where we receive our ongoing formation that supports our Catholic life, that is where the first 10% should go. So for Taryn and I, our tithe, 1/10 of our income gets split, gets split three ways, goes to our parish, to our diocese and our lay faith community that we're a part of. So where do we give beyond that, and how do we determine where it goes? And before I answer this question, I want to highlight the very important principle that I started the podcast with, we are managers, not owners. So let me say that again, we are managers, not owners. In Deuteronomy, 10, verse 14, it says, look, the heavens, even the highest heavens, belong to the Lord your God, as well as the earth and everything on it, everything belongs to God, all of our possessions, that's all of our money and our ability to earn it. It all belongs to God. He owns it all, and whatever we seem to have control over, we only have control of it as managers for the Lord. How do we know love and serve God with our finances? We remember our place, that God is the owner and we are not all of the money we have belongs to God. Nothing, nothing belongs to us. The instruction from the Lord is to tithe, and that's a great first step in US managing our finances well for him. So we tithe as a way to surrender it all to him when we manage someone else's money, and many of us have might have found ourselves in that situation, whether it be through work, through our job, through maybe a volunteer service we do, or a household we maybe lived in with friends. When we manage someone else's money, we take direction from them, right? So if you're in a job, or, let's say you're running a little organization, they say, here's here's the money, and here's what you need to accomplish with that. And it's pretty straightforward and it's easy to follow. So whoever's money, it is the owner, we take direction from the owner. That's why we tithe. That's why we prayerfully discern our goals and our budgets. Because we're trying to take direction from the Lord, because he's the owner. We do that so that we can understand the direction that he's giving us, so we can understand his instructions for the money and the possessions that he has given us. To manage for him. So we tithe, we pay for our needs, food, shelter, clothing and transportation to work. Those are our top needs. Those are really our only super you know basic needs, those are our four walls, the four basic needs that are required for us to survive, food, shelter, clothing and transportation work. So after we tithe, after we pay our four walls, then it comes our wants. And I guess the word is competing, right? The things competing with our wants are also other opportunities to give and be generous. That is why it's important to make decisions and have a good financial lifestyle that gives us room and flexibility to be able to respond when the Lord asks us to act. And I've talked about this in Episode 49 on what is our financial lifestyle, and how do you determine that? And then episode 62 on living below our means. Right? These episodes, they talk about the importance of right sizing our lifestyle as it relates to our finances, to live on less than we make, so that there's money for us to use for the Lord and the way he moves us again, we are not owners. Our money is not for the benefit of ourselves. We're only managing it for the Lord. He allows us to use it for our needs and even some of our wants, but there are times when he invites us to use the money to serve him to serve others, and we need to be ready to do that. So this brings me back to that question I stated earlier, how do we know when and where to give this a great question. You could do a few quick online searches, right? Go on to Google and come up with a rather robust list of charities, awesome, awesome organizations that are doing great work and they're in need of money to support their mission. And we could quickly just give all of our money away to those organizations. But is that what we're supposed to do? I mean, pray about it, and you can ask the Lord and see how he moves you. But let me offer you this, and this is the way Taryn and I approach, identifying those places where the Lord wants us to give more right beyond our tithe, these other things the Lord wants us to support. So the Lord knows where we are. He knows what inspires us. He knows what draws our hearts into mission. And you know, doing a quick Bible study, you can find several scripture verses that tell us that God knows our hearts and that he meets us where we are. And I believe that the Lord sends opportunities to us, for us to be generous and to share all that He's given us and to love. And if all we have belongs to him, why would He not also send us opportunities to share that right, to share everything he's given us. Let me give a just a quick example. There was a young lady. It's going back a few years ago. She worked for us. She was like a nanny to our younger kids, and she did that during college. She was a college student, so during the summers and different breaks she'd have, she'd come and watch our kids for us. So Tara and I could work. And after college, she decided to take some time to go on mission to spread God's love and to evangelize college students. So in order to do this, she had to raise money to cover her expenses as a missionary. And so she asked Taryn and I to support her. And you know, the mission she's doing, it's wonderful, and there's several college age missionaries that work in this type of service, and we could give a little bit to so many of them, right, just a little bit to a lot of people in order to try and support them all. But this young woman, she's in our life, she has meant a lot to our family. And when we think about like, why us, why us supporting her? Or if we think, why her, why should we be supporting her? It's because the Lord put her into our life. He blessed our relationship, our friendship. He makes it so easy for us to desire to support her on mission. And I think moments like this, they are clear invites from the Lord into being generous and supporting his plan for salvation. And this, you know, this is the perspective that I think is so important. He doesn't need us, right? God doesn't need us. He has everything. He is God. God does not need our money, but he wants our hearts, and he desires our loving participation in His great plan. It's all about our hearts. It's the important thing here. It's all about our hearts. It's. In Matthew six verse 21 it's a scripture verse I really like to ponder and pray about and think about as it relates to finances. So Matthew 621 What does it say, For where your treasure is there, also will your heart be? And one of the ways I like to look at the scripture verse, if we think about this for a moment, if you could take all your money, right? However you do it, sell everything, you get all your money, and you put it into one single investment, right? All your money, all your treasure, you put into one single investment. You would look in on that investment very regularly. I know I would, maybe multiple times a day, right? How is it doing? Why would we do that? Well, because that's our treasure, that's where we just put everything, and that becomes where your heart goes, right? We have a concern that it does well. The same thing happens when we give to our Lord, right, when we give to Jesus and we give to his work, when we give our treasure, right, that hard earned money that the Lord has blessed us with, right, when we give that to a mission, we begin to have a concern for that mission, right? For that it to go well, for it to be successful, right? And I don't mean successful like, you know, like popular and famous, but that they might accomplish the work they set out to do, right, bringing others to the Lord. And we start to think about that. You know, when we put our treasure there, we think about it. We pray about it more. We begin to inspect on it, to check in on it. We tell others about it. We want to give more, to invest more of our heart into that mission, For where your treasure is there also will your heart be. It's all about our hearts. And the Lord knows this, right? He knows everything. He presents us with opportunities that resonate with our hearts so that we can easily serve and love. This is how generosity works, right? He's in charge. He's the owner. We're just a manager. We must take direction from him, and one of the ways he gives direction is he tugs on our hearts. Now, Tara and I have gone to a handful of Christian music concerts, and there's typically a point in the concert where they may, they make an ask to support and the concert we've been it's it's to feed children in the world, and they make a great ask, right to raise money for these poor kids and and there's many people that will raise their hand and they receive a packet to sign up to support These kids. And I think this is a great charity doing great work. And every time I hear the pitch, I think, like, what can we do? How many kids can we help feed? But I'm going to be honest, I'm going to admit we've never signed up for one of these kids. Why not? Well, in those moments, I've just never felt the Spirit say you got to do this. I've never heard Jesus say to me, this is where I want you to give you know, I was just at a conference this past weekend, Catholic conference, and the speaker was talking about just how to share love, and he was giving an example of the, I mean, absolutely wonderful thing that him and his wife were doing, taking care of foster kids, opening their home to strangers, providing for the material needs of so many people. And as he's talking, it's so easy to start to feel like we need to be doing this, like we're falling behind. You know, I mean, as a guy, maybe I start to think it's some competition. It isn't. But the Lord puts those areas in our heart where he wants us to act, where he invites us into mission. And clearly, the fellow who is speaking him and his wife have been called to mission in this particular situation. And something to remember for me. You know, one of the things he was also talking about is, we all don't have our own little story, right? All these separate little stories. What's your story? Right? God has his story, and we all get invited to play a small role in it, and our availability to play the role that he has for us, it's so important. We must be available. We are managers. We are to be taking orders from him because he's the owner. We must be available. It's all his, and we must be ready to spring into action when we are called upon. That is why we need to have an appropriate financial lifestyle. That is why we must live on less than we make, because we need to have that space, that flexibility in our finances, to move when he calls, when we don't, when we're maxed out on our lifestyle. When we're living paycheck to paycheck because we've been taking our own directions, pursuing our own interests, when we've been handling money like it belongs to us, we put ourselves in a tough situation. We handcuff ourselves, and then when the Lord shows up and asks us to give we can't, we feel trapped because we've dug ourselves into a hole. We're stuck, and we can't move. And I know what this is like. I mean, Taryn and I, we were stuck several years ago. I think it was in 2012 my kids school was tight on money. Well, that's happened a lot of times, but in this particular situation was in 2012 kids. School was tight on money. Donations had slowed. Enrollment was low, and they were considering closing the school unless they could raise something like there's like $250,000 and the school court called a meeting, went to this important meeting. They invited all the families to it. The treasurer, the school board, he gets up, he lays out the situation. There were 125 families in the school, and the Ask was for each family to donate $2,000 so that the school could remain open. And when I came home from that meeting, Tara and I were discussing the situation, and we were broke. We had no money. We had two car loans, credit card debt, medical debt, called personal loans, student loans, home equity. I mean, we weren't budgeting. We weren't managing our money for the Lord. We were paycheck to paycheck. We were just rats running in a wheel. And, you know, I think we scraped together like maybe 600 bucks, and we gave that, and I remember just feeling sick like we should be able to do more well a week or so goes by, we get a letter from the school that they had raised the 250,000 that they needed to stay open. And I knew there were probably a few people who were able to give more than that 2000 that everyone had been asked to give. And I was so grateful that others were clearly there was some other people in a better situation than us that were doing a better job at managing their money for the Lord, and this was one of the big reasons that pushed Taryn and I to begin to learn how to handle money in God's way, right under his instruction to put worldly knowledge to the side, I was full of worldly knowledge working the bank, but we wanted to see what the Lord had to say about handling finances. Two short years later, I'm on the board of the kids school, and I remember, you know, one of my first things I did, I was just curious. I want to look back in the records to see how the school had made it through that time. And I remember seeing, you know, you know, all these kind of transactions. I remember seeing one couple's name. They were about our age. I had known that they had their act together, you know, handling money. I didn't think that they were like, loaded or wealthy by any stretch. Or at least, they didn't live like they are. They don't live like they are. I think they live well under their means. And I saw that they had given the school$10,000 donation during that time. Wow. That blew me away. They did their part, right there. Two grand plus covered four other families that maybe couldn't give they inspired me, and that helped Tara and I to push forward, to drive towards the commitment that we need to place all that we have at the feet of Jesus and say, Lord, this all belongs to you. What would you have us do with it? Help us to manage it well for you, and so that's what brings us to today, the way we live, the way we tithe, the way we budget, the way we give. Again, we tithe freely to the places we worship, to where we are formed, to where we receive life, then we pay for our needs, then we pray about our wants, and all those areas that the Lord calls us to be generous. When someone comes up to us and asks us to support a work that the Lord is doing, and if we feel that the Lord ignites our hearts and tells us to give. We give many times we have to, you know, put a line through one of our wants in our budget, or maybe we possibly delay hitting some goal, you know, in the time frame that we had set, because this money we have, it's the Lord's, and when he sends someone to us asking for some of it, we must quickly give it, because it's not ours, and God has blessed us so abundantly. He is the owner. He constantly. Provides for us, and we try our best to follow His instruction and to use all that He has given us to show love, to build His kingdom and to proclaim His glory, keeping the right perspective that he is the owner and we are simply his managers. It's made managing finances so very easy. It causes us to rely on Him and to trust him. It brings us great joy, and it fills us with hope. My prayer is that you too might acquire this perspective, ask the Lord to bless you with it so that the approach to your finances is with the eyes of a manager. Because you are a manager. God is the owner. I hope this has been helpful. Thank you for joining me today. God bless Thank you for listening to Catholic money talk. I hope you join us again next time, please click Subscribe on your podcast app to get notified of new episodes. God bless you and have a great day. You. You.