Episode 117 - It's All About Our Hearts

Nearly half of Jesus’ parables deal with money, wealth, or stewardship—not because God needs our money, but because money reveals what is in our hearts. This episode looks at time, finances, generosity, and why making Jesus Lord of our money begins with the heart. 

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

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's topic is the title of today's episode is, it's all about our hearts, and we're going to dive into that after we say a prayer. So let's start with 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 plan is for us to draw close to you, for us to turn our hearts to you. Allow us to do that. Lord, bless us no matter what situation we may find ourselves in, let us recognize you in every moment. Lord. Send us your Holy Spirit to guard, guide and protect us and allow us to yield to your Holy Spirit. Come O Holy Spirit, we ask the salt in Jesus name amen, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. So it's all about our hearts. And the reason I want to talk about this is because it comes up a lot in my podcast, in my coaching, in when I talk to people about their budget. You know the Lord when he was here, right, in his three years of ministry, he talked a lot about money and finances. He also talked a lot about our hearts. He used parables to do that, and he highlighted examples that he witnessed and saw to his apostles about this, right? It's all about our hearts. God, honestly, he doesn't care about our money. He cares about our hearts. So the heart is the issue. So how do we how do we do this, right? God made us to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this life, so we could be happy with him forever in the next how do we do that with our money? And why is that important? So I submit to you that what we do with our time and our money reveals what is in our hearts, right? This is the starting point, our schedules, our budgets. They're not just neutral. They are mirrors to us, right? And in some people, if we complain about we don't have enough time, we don't have enough money. Usually, there's just a lack of order. Usually there's a lack of order that we need to correct first before we can calmly, peacefully and objectively determine where our challenges might actually be. So orders. Orders very important, particularly with our time and our money, because we use those on the things that are most important to us. Or if we spend all of our time at work in the office, then that's what we love the most. If we spend all of our time on social media wasting time, that's what we love the most. Otherwise we wouldn't do it right. The same thing with our money, if we spend all of our money on our wants, on Extras, whether it be TV, movie subscriptions or leisure time, hobbies. If we lose use all of our money, if we lose our money, right? Waste it on those, those things, then that's what's most important to us. So if we we spend our time, we spend our money on the things that are most important to us. In the in the Gospels, Jesus told about 33 unique parables, right? There's some duplicates amongst the different four gospels, but of those 33 unique parables, nearly half of them. It could be more than half, depending on how you look at them, deal with money, wealth, possessions or stewardship. And again, it's not because God needs our money, but it's because money reveals our hearts. Jesus knew what was in their hearts. He says it a few times when he's talking to Pharisees or people challenging them, he knew what was in their hearts, right? And he addresses that so he knows what's in our hearts, our budgets and schedules. They're not just practical tools. They're spiritual mirrors. They show us what we trust, what we cling to, they show us what we fear losing. When Jesus talks about money, He's not asking for a transaction, he's inviting a transformation of our hearts. That's what's happening. It so God doesn't want our money. He wants our hearts. And this is the theme. We see this very clearly. I have a whole episode on this one, but on the story of the rich young man. It's from Matthew 19, verse 16 to 22 and I'll read it for you. Here it goes. Now someone approached him and said, Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life? He answered him, Why do you ask me about the good? There is only one who is good if you wish to enter into life keep the commandments. And he asked him, which ones? And Jesus replied, You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. The young man said to him, all of these I have observed, what do I still lack? And Jesus said to him, if you wish to be perfect, go sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come follow me. When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad, for he had many possessions. And then Jesus turned and said to his disciples, amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. So what does this mean? I is a good man. He keeps the commandments, right? This rich young man, he keeps the commandments and, and I've talked about this before, I love that. It says he had many possessions. I'm going to guess he was a budgeter. He might have been a saver. He might have been as we if we looked at him, we would have said, Ah, he is good with money. And maybe he's even generous. He probably tithes, right? He probably tithes. But was he generous enough? Did he surrender his possessions enough to the Lord to say, Lord, I'll do whatever it takes to follow you? He didn't. He had more trust in his possessions. He hung more tightly to his possessions than he did to Lord. One of the ways I like to ask people about generosity is, I'll say, you know, how do you measure generosity? Are you willing to give away that which you value the most. Are we willing to give away that which we value the most? For some of us, it's time. For some of us, it might be money for maybe there's other things. But are we generous with those things that we value the most? Now Jesus doesn't tell everyone to sell everything. He tells that man, because Jesus knew what was in his heart. That's so important. You know, when we when we rely on Jesus, when we rely on God and we don't rely rely on our possessions, that's when we are poor. We just heard that in the Sunday's gospel with the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, right? That's what that's what he just said to the rich young man. So what you have give to the poor, and then you have treasure in heaven, right? In the beatitude Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. You got to give it away. You can't hold on to things. So the young man, his issue wasn't wealth. His issue was attachment. Money revealed what he loved the most and what he couldn't let go of. Jesus also says, We cannot serve two masters. You know, if we think of just the Gospel of Matthew, particularly chapter six, he talked, there's a few lines in chapter six that I love. No one can serve two masters. That's Matthew 624, he talks about, you will either one love love one and hate the other, right? Which was God or Mammon? Mammon, which is the love of money? It's not just money itself. It's the love of it, the desire of it, the want to hold on to it. Christ says, you know, money will compete for his lordship if you're not careful, and people will make money the lord of their lives. We want to make Jesus the Lord of our lives. We want to make Jesus the Lord of our money, not money the Lord of our lives. So we like to believe that we can, we do? We like to believe that we can love God and hold tightly to everything else, like I'm just holding on to these things, Lord, but I love you, then let go of them. Jesus doesn't leave room for that illusion that we can hold on to other things and be all for him in Matthew 621, so same chapter of Matthew Matthew six, Jesus also talks where your treasure is there, your heart will be. Usually we think of it the other way. Usually we think of it like where your heart is. That's where your treasure no but we were when we put our treasure somewhere, that's where our heart will go. Great example is if you took all of your money, all of your money, and you invested it in one single stock, one single company, every day, multiple times a day, you would check in to see how that company is doing, because that's where your heart's going to go, because that's where your treasure is, right? So where your treasures there your heart will be. So what we do with our money reveals our hearts, and it actually does a little bit more than that, too. It forms them. Right? Generosity is a test of the heart. It's not about excess, right? Think of the story of the widow's mite, where the wealthy people are giving so much, and the widow comes up and gives her two pennies, and Jesus says to his apostles, like she gave more than they did, because she gave everything. What they gave didn't hurt. It was just excess. They didn't need it anyway. When we're generous, we're giving till it hurts, and maybe even beyond. So what we do with our money, it's not, doesn't just reveal our hearts. It also forms them. It's like a muscle, right? Generosity, it's it's a virtue. It's a habit, habit of the heart that we have to work at. We have to choose. You can just choose to be generous, to character, quality. It's not something you have to go to school to learn about. You could just do it. You're not born with it. You just do it. You just make a decision. I'm going to be generous. I'm going to think of others first. I'm going to put the Lord first. So generate generosity. Asks. Are we willing to give away that which we value the most right that which we hold on most tightly to, and that's why generosity is spiritual work. It loosens our grip. It retrains our loves. It reorders our hearts. You on a retreat once it was on time management, budget making, Jesus, the Lord of our time, our schedule, and the person giving the talk said, in life, God gives us all the time we need to do His will. Oh, so that means, if we utter the words, I just didn't have enough time today, do time today. Well, that means we didn't do we spent some time doing some stuff that God didn't want us to do. Maybe we were lazy, maybe we were slothful, maybe we were wasting time. Maybe we were not choosing hard. We were picking the easy things to do. We weren't rising to the challenges of the things that we ought to do. Instead, we're doing the things we wanted to do. God always gives us enough time to do His will. I believe the same is true with money. God gives us enough money to do what he wants us to do with it. But if we waste it, if we spend it carelessly, or if we even just choose to things that we feel like doing, you know what I want to do, that I deserve it. I'm going to pay for that. I'm going to do that. I got the money. I can do that. And then something else shows up, and we don't, you know, part of tearing my I'll say financial conversion happened when we were struggling with debt. This is 1314, years ago, struggling with debt, trying to find a better way to do things. And our school, where the kids went to school, needed money. They basically presented a financial presentation to the whole school and said that we need to raise certain amount of money. Amount of money or will close. And they basically broke it down to we need $2,000 per family. Now $2,000 it's not that much money, but when you're buried under debt, it is so much money. And I remember thinking, oh my goodness, I want the kids school to stay in existence. And we scraped everything we could. And I think we maybe we got together 800 bucks, and that was painful, just because of the mess we were still living in and and we gave that. And I remember thinking in that moment, I want to live in a well ordered way not to be buried by debt. So that when the Lord calls, when the Lord says, Hey, I need you to do something. I need you to participate here, we're able to that's what making Jesus Lord of the finance is all about, that freedom, that availability. So when the Lord comes and says, Hey, I need some of that money to put over here, you're. Able to respond. I wasn't thinking about talking about this today but, but I will the story of the sower and the seed. It's one of my favorite ones in relation to my life and finances. When Tara and I were first married, right? We've been married. It'll be 23 years this year. We were first married. Household Income, 40 grand. We weren't generous. We weren't giving much anywhere. Maybe $25 a month to our church, because that's all we had left. All right, that was our attitude. Well, Lord, you can have whatever's left after 10 years of living like that. And just because I remember in that for when we're making $40,000 a year, I remember thinking, Man, when I make $100,000 we're gonna have so much money, so much excess, I'll be able to give tons of money away. And so what happened over 10 years? We have kids, we also make more money. Taransa, stay at home, mom, I get promotions at work. I do well. And it got worse. The financial strain got worse. And I remember thinking, you know, I think I was pulling tax stuff together, and I looked at kind of what we had given to church and some other places, and I was like, Wow, this isn't a lot of money at all. And and I'm looking at my tax turn going, and I made $100,000 this year. Boy, I thought life would be a lot easier at $100,000 and that's what started our journey. And and we got our act together. We flipped over how we budget, and we first gave 10% to our church and to our faith community, right off the top, so 10 grand, and we divvied up between those two. And then we did our budget, and we didn't have enough money and to pay all the wants that we had. So we had to get rid of wants. We had to negotiate some things, cancel some things, right? Just saying no to so many things. I've got other episodes where I talk more detail about this, but we're able to pay our bills. And slowly but surely, we got out of debt, and income began to increase. And it was funny. I remember in prayer, I said to the Lord, Lord, it's true, right? This prosperity gospel thing, you start giving your money to the Lord, and he'll start blessing you. And the Lord just kind of felt them Look at me. It was basically said, you're an idiot. I've been blessing you the whole time. How do you think you went from 40 to 100 you just weren't ready to receive it. You weren't fertile ground, right? So the sower and the seed, the sower comes out and throws scattered seeds on every type of ground, thorny ground, rocky ground, the pathway, and only a little bit falls in good soil, right? All the other ones, the seeds just get they get killed. But the good soil, you know, pulls a harvest of 1010, 100 times, right? I don't have the scripture verse in front of me. I wasn't planning on telling us today, but, but I feel like that in my own life, the Lord was blessing me the whole time he was sowing seeds on my entire life, finances, too, and because they weren't in order, because Jesus wasn't the Lord of My finances, because my heart wasn't right. Once we created a budget, we put the Lord first in our budget with the tithe that began to create the fertile soil, and then, as the Lord blessed it, we've been able to experience more and more blessings in our life because of being fertile ground. Had we been fertile ground when we were making $40,000 a year our journey from 40 to 100 wouldn't have felt stifling. It would have felt fruitful. See, it was it was about us, in our hearts. It wasn't about we didn't make enough money. It was about our attitude, our perspective. We were concerned about our money, Lord, you could have what's left. It's different. When we make Jesus, Lord of our finances, we say, God, everything belongs to you. Thank you for letting me use some of this. So let's talk about when we're doing well, and when life's, you know, progressing on, maybe we're doing well at work, we're making more money, but we're not experiencing blessings. I'd like to talk about Psalm 23 my cup runneth over the Lord bless us so much that there's overflow. When there's not enough overflow, it's because our cup is too big, right? What's our lifestyle? Financial lifestyle? Have we said yes to so many things, right? Small things, like movie subscriptions, Netflix, all those things, but maybe yes to bigger things that we didn't properly discern, car payments, a large mortgage, vacations, a vacation home, and all of a sudden we've got a swimming pool? Of a financial lifestyle, and we don't experience overflow. We feel empty because we don't have enough to fill it. But when we choose, prayerfully, discern our financial decisions, and choose a simple lifestyle, that's more like, I don't know, a spackle bucket, a sand pail, a pint glass, a shot glass, a thimble. Oh, boy, that's so easy to overflow. And overflow is important because wealth exists to be shared in the compendium of the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, I have it here on my desk. There's a lot of great quotes in here. The goods of creation are destined for the whole human race, right? St basil, the great, he's got a few in here. Goods, even when legitimately owned, always have universal destination. Any type of improper accumulation is immoral because it openly contradicts the universal destination assigned to all goods by the Creator. Whoa, so we can't hang on to possessions for ourselves. We have to constantly put them at the service of God. Riches fulfill their function of service to men when they are destined to produce benefits for others and for society. How could we ever do good to our neighbor? Asked st Clement of Alexandria if none of us possessed anything. And I love this. St Basil the Great has a exhortation. He invites the wealthy to open the doors of their storehouses, and he exhorts them a great torrent rushes in 1000s of channels through the fertile land, thus, by 1000 different paths, make your riches reach the homes of the poor. Wealth explains st Basil is like water issued forth from the fountain the greater frequency with which it is drawn, the purer it is, while it becomes foul, if the fountain remains unused, I love the story of the story. I love the example of my kids like smoothies. So sometimes after dinner, they're, you know, dessert, slash bedtime snack, my wife will make them a fruit smoothie, maybe put a little protein powder in there. And when she puts all the fruit in the blender, there's usually raspberries or blueberries in there, it blends. She dumps it into the their cups, and then the mix the blender. It's a clear pitcher shaped item. It looks so disgusting because it's got all this Blended Fruit kind of paste to the inside of it. And if you put that underneath the faucet, you turn the faucet on full blast. Immediately, the water that goes in, kind of loosens all the grime from the edge of the pitcher. It starts to overflow, and it'll keep overflowing and overflowing. And what looked like at the beginning, yucky, colored water within about a minute of that faucet on there and it just overflowing and spilling out. The water becomes clear, right? That's how it is in our hearts and our life with finances. If we think we're just building bigger barns and storehouses to keep all our money for us, or any money we have for us, it's going to stay nasty. But if we create a lifestyle, prayerfully discern a simple lifestyle to create overflow. Boy, it's going to clean our hearts out really well. That's what St Basil the Great is talking about here. The other beautiful story I love, and I was thinking about this this morning as I was prepping to record. This is a story about the loaves and fishes, right? Jesus multiplies everything. It because it all belongs to him, right? The loaves and the fishes. Little boy had, hey, there's a little boy here with two loaves and five fish, or five loaves and two fish. This little boy has it. Oh, it's, it's really God's and he has all. He owns, everything, everything you've created, everything. So why can't he multiply it, too? But the cool thing, the beautiful part, is that Jesus allows us, right, the apostles, which is us, his people, to distribute it. He invites us to participate, so we need to give freely. Wealth is not evil, but if we hoard it, we become evil. Right. Wealth exists to be shared, and the Lord invites us to do that. But. In order to do that, we have to have good order in our life. We need to make Jesus the Lord of our life, the Lord of our finances. We need to acknowledge Him as the owner of all things by tithing. That's the first thing we do with money. We tithe, we give it to the Lord, and then we can pay for our needs and our wants. And then we can give generously to other places. We could support great organizations, Catholic or not, that are doing good work. We can give to the poor. Well, look, we have to you. Don't want to utter the words that I did many times. I just don't have enough. Lord, you can have what's left. We don't want to say that. We don't want to say that about our time. We don't want to say that about our money. And if we find ourselves saying it, we have some changes to make. We have some heart changes we need to make right some heart surgery that we need, and we have to change some order in our lives. There might there might be an order and it's wrong, or there might just be chaos. So I challenge you, particularly, in a few weeks, we're going to start Lent. What a great time to think about this. But I challenge you, when we talk about money, when we talk about how we manage our money, when we talk about our budget, that's a mirror. It's a reflection of what's in our hearts. Are we happy with what we see? So let we can ask ourselves, what do I desire the most? What do I fear losing? And is there something that I trust more than God? When we give generously, we're saying, Lord, I don't need this, because I have you. I rely on you, Lord. And remember, Jesus already knows what's in our hearts, and He's inviting us to let him heal and reorder them so that he can be not just the Lord of our finances, he can be the Lord of every aspect of our life, amen. So I hope this was helpful. It's all about our hearts. 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 in your podcast app to get notified of new episodes. God bless you and have a great day you.