Stewarding Abundance - Episode 19

Moses warned Israel about the danger of abundance before they had experienced a single day of it. The forgetting, he said, was not a risk. It was a certainty — unless the leader was deliberately, actively working against it. 

Episode Summary 

Some of the most catastrophic business failures don’t happen in lean years. They happen in fat ones. The business that survived difficulty, grew into a strong season, and then — precisely because things were going well — made the decisions that eventually undid it. Overexpanded. Spent what should have been saved. Lost the disciplines that built the growth. Let success do what success consistently does: produce a slow, quiet, entirely predictable amnesia. 

Three passages address this with unusual precision. Deuteronomy 8 gives Moses’ diagnosis of the specific spiritual danger of abundance — the lifted heart, the shifted pronoun, the forgetting of the One who gave the power to get wealth. Proverbs 30:8–9 gives Agur’s extraordinarily honest prayer: don’t give me too much, lest I be full and deny you. And Genesis 41 gives Joseph’s counter-cyclical financial plan — the most practical model of stewarding abundance in Scripture. You’ll walk away with a practice of deliberate remembrance and a ‘Joseph number’ for building the reserve that protects your team in the season after this one. 

What You’ll Learn 

• The three specific temptations of abundance that Scripture identifies — lifestyle inflation, overexpansion, and the attribution shift — and why the last one is the most dangerous 
• What the Hebrew rūm (lifted up) and zākār (remember) in Deuteronomy 8 reveal about why prosperity amnesia is predictable — and what the active antidote looks like 
• Why Agur’s prayer in Proverbs 30 is one of the most clinically honest statements about the spiritual effect of wealth in all of Scripture — and what kāḥash (deny) means in behavioral rather than intellectual terms 
• How Joseph’s plan in Genesis 41 works as a model of counter-cyclical financial management — and what the Hebrew mis̄mār (guard/reserve) requires of the leader in a peak season 
• How to establish a practice of deliberate remembrance and how to set your ‘Joseph number’ — the specific reserve allocation that protects your business through the lean season you cannot predict 

Scripture References 

Deuteronomy 8:11–18 — Take care lest you forget the LORD your God… lest your heart be lifted up and you forget… Beware lest you say, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth’ 

Proverbs 30:8–9 — Give me neither poverty nor riches… lest I be full and deny you and say, ‘Who is the LORD?’ 

Genesis 41:33–36 — Let Pharaoh select a discerning and wise man… that food shall be a reserve for the land against the seven years of famine 

Key Quote 

“The lean cows followed the fat ones. They always do. The question is whether the fat years were stewarded like Joseph would have stewarded them.” 

Timestamps 

0:00  —  Hook and Introduction 

2:25  —  Why This Matters in Business 

5:00  —  What Scripture Says 

13:27  —  Illustration 

15:50  —  Application 

19:10  —  Encouragement and Prayer 

Call to Action 

If your business is in a strong season right now, this is the most important episode in the series for you to hear before the season turns. And if you know a leader who is riding a peak and spending like it will last forever, send it to them. It might be the most useful thing they hear this quarter. 

Profit and Principle  •  Where Sunday’s truth meets Monday’s bottom line. 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

If someone asks you to name the most dangerous season for a business, what would you say? A cash crisis? A recession? Maybe losing a key leader? Those are all serious, but if you've been in business long enough, you may notice something counterintuitive. Some of the most catastrophic business failures don't happen in the lean years. They happen in the fat ones. The business that survived the difficult season. They grew into a strong season, and then, precisely because things were going well, they made decisions that eventually undid it. They overexpanded and they took on too much and spent when they should have been saving. They lost the discipline that built the growth in the first place. They let the success do what success has a tendency to do, which is to produce a slow, quiet, entirely predictable amnesia. Scripture identifies this pattern with remarkable precision. Moses describes it before Israel has entered the promised land, before they have experienced abundance at all, and he warns them exactly of this. When you are full and your houses are good, and your herds are multiplying, and your silver and gold is increased, he says, then your heart will be lifted up and you will forget. Not if, but when. The forgetting is the expected outcome of prosperity if the leader is not deliberately, actively working against it. This episode is good for two kinds of listeners. The first is the leader currently in their best season. You've got strong revenue, a growing team, and some great momentum. This episode is a warning you need to hear before the season turns on you. The second is the leader in a difficult season looking forward to the good one. This is the episode to return to when that season arrives. I'm Daryl, this is Profit and Principal. There are three passages today I want to look at regarding what faithfulship looks like when the business is booming, and two specific practices for managing abundance with the discipline it really requires. So let's look at why this matters in business. Let me name the specific temptations of abundance because they're more predictable than most leaders want to acknowledge. The first is lifestyle inflation in the business and in the leader's personal life. When revenue grows, costs have a natural tendency to grow with it. Office space that was adequate becomes not quite sufficient. Compensation structures that seemed reasonable at the start, now they feel modest. Equipment gets refreshed, our amenities multiply. Now none of these decisions are necessarily wrong on their own. The problem is the compounding. Fixed costs added during peak seasons become obligations that survive into the lean ones. The business that built its cost structure on its best year is a business that finds itself overexposed when that year doesn't repeat. The second temptation is overexpanding, taking on more than the business's infrastructure can support, because the opportunity is real and the confidence is high. Peak seasons are when bad acquisitions get made, when new markets get entered without adequate preparation, when the product line gets extended because the core is strong and the team feels capable of anything. The confidence is often justified. The business is really capable, but capability in one domain does not automatically transfer to another, and the resources consumed by a premature expansion are not available for the core business when it needs them. And here's the third temptation. This is the one scripture addresses most directly, and that is the attribution shift. When a business is struggling, the leader tends to be acutely aware of their dependence. They're praying, they're watching, they're grateful for every client and every dollar. When the business is thriving, the awareness of dependence fades. Success starts to feel earned. The disciplines that produce the growth, the careful decision making, those attentions that we give to relationships, the financial rigor, well, those start to feel less necessary because it's going well without them for now. Moses saw this pattern 3,000 years ago. It hasn't changed. So let's take a look at what scripture says. We're going to start out in Deuteronomy chapter 8, verses 11 through 18. And here's what we read: take care lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments. It goes on, lest when you have eaten and are full, and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God. Beware lest you say in your heart, My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth. You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the power to get wealth. This is one of the most searching passages in all of Deuteronomy, and it rewards careful reading, because Moses is doing something unusual here. He is warning Israel against the danger they have not yet experienced. They are on the eastern bank of the Jordan. The promised land is ahead of them. The abundance is theoretical, and Moses is already worried about what it will do to them. The structure of the warning is a list of good things, full stomachs, good houses, multiplying herds, accumulating silver and gold. These are all signs of blessings. And Moses doesn't call them bad. What he calls dangerous is what they produce in the heart, because he says your heart will be lifted up. The word he uses here means to be high or to be exalted. It describes pride in its most basic form. The sense that you are above your actual position. The full stomach produces elevation. The elevation produces forgetting. And the forgetting produces the specific attribution error Moses identifies. That phrase deserves to sit with you for a moment. My power, my hand, my wealth. Do you see what's happening here? The pronoun shifts from God to self. The credit that belonged to the giver migrates to the receiver. And Moses says that migration, that shift in attribution, is the beginning of the end for a people who were built on something more solid than their own ability. Verse 18 is the corrective. The word here remember in the Hebrew, it's an active deliberate verb. This isn't passive recollection, it's intentional practiced memory. The antidote to prosperity amnesia is not feeling grateful when things go well. It is building practices of remembrance that keep the attribution accurate when everything in your experience is telling you to take the credit yourself. Let me address the business leader in a peak season. Where has the pronoun shifted? Where are you saying my power, my hand, and my wealth in ways that have quietly crowded out the acknowledgement of what you've actually been given? Next, let's look at Proverbs chapter 30, verses 8 and 9. It says this, give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, Who is the Lord? Or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God. This is one of the most honest prayers in all of Scripture. It comes from Agar, son of Jacob, a figure we know almost nothing about, in a collection of wisdom sayings that are unusually frank about human weakness. And what Agar is doing here is extraordinary. He's asking God not to give him too much. The logic is explicit and unsettling, lest I be fool and deny you and say who is the Lord? Agar knows what abundance does to him. He knows that a full stomach produces a specific kind of forgetfulness, not vague ingratitude, but the functional denial of God's existence. Not an intellectual atheism, but a practical one. The full person who no longer feels dependent on anyone for anything begins to operate as though the question who is the Lord is either unanswerable or irrelevant. Now the Hebrew word for deny it means to disown or to repudiate something. Agar is not afraid of the kind of denial that shows up in an argument. He's afraid of the kind that shows up in behavior, the slow functional repudiation of dependence that comes from never needing to depend on anyone. This is a passage about the spiritual danger of abundance. It's not saying that wealth is wrong. It is saying that wealth without carefully maintained practices of dependence produces a person who acts as though God does not exist, and who may not even notice that they have gotten there. For the business leader in a strong season, Agar's prayer is a diagnostic. Is there anything in the current abundance that is producing the quiet feeling of not needing anyone? That feeling, this proverb says, is the most dangerous thing that prosperity can do to you. Now let's take a look next at Genesis chapter forty-one, verses thirty-three through thirty six. And Moses writes this Now therefore, let Pharaoh select a discerning and wise man, and set him over the land of Egypt. Let Pharaoh proceed to appoint overseers over the land, and take one fifth of the produce of the land of Egypt during the seven plentiful years, and let them gather all the food of these good years that are coming, and store up the grain under the authority of Pharaoh for food in the cities, and let them keep it. That food shall be a reserve for the land against the seven years of famine that are to occur in the land of Egypt, so that the land may not perish through the famine. This is Joseph interpreting Pharaoh's dream. Seven fat cows, followed by seven lean ones, seven full ears of grain consumed by seven withered ones, and immediately pivoting from interpretation to application. He doesn't just tell Pharaoh what the dream means, he tells him what to do about it, and what he describes is one of the earliest and most practical models of counter-cyclical financial management in recorded history. The plan is specific. During the seven years of abundance, set aside 20%, not after expenses, not after what's left over, but make a deliberate, non-negotiable allocation of the surplus toward a reserve that is held against coming scarcity. The good years fund the lean ones. The fat seasons protect against the hungry ones. Abundance is not for consumption, it's for preparation. The Hebrew word translated reserve means to guard, means to watch something and keep it under protection. This is not surplus that accidentally accumulates, it is surplus that is intentionally set aside and actively protected. Joseph is describing a practice, not a hope. He's describing a structure, not a sentiment. For the business leader in a peak season, the Genesis 41 question is direct. What percentage of the current abundance are you setting aside as a guard against the season that follows this one? Because the lean years are not a possibility. In business as in Egypt, they are a certainty. The only question is whether the good years will have been stored wisely enough to survive them. I want to give you a contrast between two leaders who both experienced the same peak season and reached very different places because of what they did with it. A technology firm, and I'll call the founders Kevin and Sarah, they both built strong companies through a decade of disciplined growth. They ran in similar markets and they had similar-sized teams. And both experienced the same exceptional three-year run when industry demand surged and their revenues approximately doubled. Kevin treated the surge as the new normal. He rebuilt his cost structure around the peak revenue. He moved to larger offices. He hired aggressively to the expanded capacity and took meaningful distributions. Now he was confidence. He believed he'd earned it. The growth felt like validation of everything he had built and every decision he had made. Now, Sarah, on the other hand, she treated the surge as a gift with a known expiration date. She reread Genesis 41 during the second year of the run. She had a practice of connecting scripture to her business seasons, and it changed how she made decisions. She hired more conservatively than the demand seemed to require. She kept her cost structure closer to her baseline than her peak. She set aside a meaningful percentage of the surplus into a reserve she committed not to touch for operational needs. And she told this to her leadership team explicitly. Sarah managed a difficult season with reserves intact. She didn't have to lay off anyone, and came out the other side with the team and culture she had built. When the next growth cycle came, she was positioned to take advantage of it. Kevin, on the other hand, was still rebuilding. The lean cows followed the fat ones. They always do. The question is whether the fat years were stewarded like Joseph Wood has stewarded them. So what can we do about it? Well there are two practices here, one for your soul and one for your balance sheet. So for the first one, build a practice of deliberate remembrance into your peak season. Moses' antidote to prosperity amnesia is to remember. Not a feeling of gratitude when things go well, but a built-in practice that keeps the attribution accurate. This week, in whatever way is authentic to you, establish one specific practice of remembrance that you will maintain through the current season, whatever it is. It might be a monthly review that begins not with the numbers, but with the written acknowledgement of what you did not earn and cannot manufacture, the timing, the relationships, the capabilities of your team, the market condition, the health that lets you work. It might be a giving commitment made specifically in proportion to the season's surplus so that generosity scales with abundance and keeps the attribution visible. It might be a quarterly conversation with a trusted advisor or mentor who has permission to ask you the Deuteronomy 8 question directly. Has your heart been lifted up? Has the pronoun shifted? The specific practice is less important than the regularity. Moses doesn't say remember occasionally, he says remember. This is a what we call a present imperative with ongoing action. Build it in, because the forces working against it are consistent and strong, and a good intention without structure will not survive a peak season. Secondly, set a Joseph number and protect it. The Genesis 41 application is concrete. What percentage of current surplus are you setting aside as reserve against the lean season that follows this one? Joseph's answer was 20%. That specific number came from the dream. Seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. And your business cycles will have their own rhythm. But the principle is transferable. During peak seasons, a meaningful, non-negotiable allocation of surplus goes into reserve. This week, if your business is in or approaching a strong season, set that number. Not what you'll try to save if everything else is covered, but a percentage off the top, set aside first before the abundance normalizes into spending. Call that your Joseph number. And then protect it the way described. Actively, deliberately, guard it. Not as a constraint on growth, but as a discipline that makes the growth survivable when it cycles. If you already have reserve, the question is whether it is large enough to protect the business through the lean season you can't predict. Run the scenario honestly. If revenue dropped by 30% for 18 months, what would your reserve buy you? If the answer is less than six months of baseline operations, your Joseph number may need to grow before the fat cows stop coming. I want to close with something that I think is easy to miss in an episode like this one. The warning against prosperity amnesia is not a case against prosperity. God is not asking you to feel bad about a strong season or to perform modesty you don't feel. The abundance is a gift. The strong season is something to receive with gratitude, not guilt. What this episode is asking is that you receive it faithfully, with the practices that keep you honest about where it came from, and the discipline that positions you to steward it well for what comes next. The leader who navigates a peak season with humility and tact, attribution accurate, reserves building, and disciplines maintained, that leader comes out of the season stronger than when they entered it. Not just financially, but as a person, as a leader, as someone whose character was tested by success and was not found wanting. That is a rarer thing than surviving adversity. Adversity tests us in ways that are obvious and urgent. Prosperity tests us in ways that are subtle and slow, and the failure is often not noticed until the fat cows are long gone. Joseph was thirty years old when he stood before Pharaoh and described a plan that would save the ancient world from famine. He had spent the previous years in a pit and in prison. He knew something about the relationship between difficult seasons and fruitful ones. The wisdom he brought to the abundance was forged in the lack. Don't waste the lean years if you're in them, and don't waste the fat ones if you're not. Let me pray for you. Father, I pray for every leader listening who is in a strong season right now, and for every leader who is watching a strong season from a distance and hoping for it. For those in abundance, protect them from the lifted heart. Keep the attribution accurate. Give them the discipline of Joseph and the honesty of Agar to receive what they have been given without letting it produce the amnesia Moses warned against. Help them build the reserve that protects their team in the seasons they can't predict. And for those in a lean season looking toward the good one, give them patience and let this episode be a compass they return to when the fat cows finally come. Let them steward the abundance faithfully when it arrives. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Well, thank you for joining us again for this episode of Profit and Principle. I hope you're getting value from this. And if you are, I have a small ask. If you would ask your friends, your other colleagues to listen to this episode, I would greatly appreciate it. You can also go to our website, profitandprinciple.com, and there you can check out some resources available to you. You can sign up for our weekly newsletter. You can also read the blog that unpacks this episode further. And then finally, you can download a free one page PDF that you can use in either a personal or small group Bible study to explore this topic even further. So I hope you'll take advantage of those free resources. And until then, look forward to seeing you and hearing from you next week.