thought exercise on Financial Resources

In 2021, Americans gave an impressive $326.87 billion to charity. But when that’s weighed against Americans’ 2021 income of $23.617 trillion, that works out to just 1.4 percent of our earnings.

A little girl once wrote a letter to an advice column in the Newspaper. In it, she tells a story about her uncle and aunt. “My uncle was the tightest man I ever met.” She said. “All his life, every ti...

The celebrated CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes presented a segment on August 14, 2022, titled “Hope Chicago.” The segment tells a remarkable story about what happened to students at a high school on...

Honoré de Balzac, who would later gain fame as a celebrated writer in post-Napoleonic France, was known for his intricate characters and keenly realistic writing style. Like many young artists, he end...

One of the most challenging and complex economic realities faced by many of our neighbors who live paycheck to paycheck is finding financial resources to cover immediate and unexpected expenses. To ad...

The Bible envisions the global church as one body with no national or geographic boundaries. This one body is called to steward all of its resources — spiritual, human, technological, theological, org...

In their book Passing the Plate (Oxford, 2008), Christian Smith and Michael Emerson introduce the phrase “discretionary obligation” as a way to understand the typical American Christian’s approach to ...

Imagine you’re a financial counselor. Today you have two appointments, first with an elderly woman and then a middle-aged man. The woman’s husband died six years ago. She says, “I have no more money. ...

In his book on the subject, Philip Yancey describes the tension he himself deals with as a Christian related to money: Many Christians have one issue that haunts them and never falls silent: for som...

One Sunday, an usher brought to me an offering plate holding a bacon biscuit that a college student had deposited in the morning offering. A little note attached said, “Silver and gold have I none, bu...

Consider the following summary of an interview conducted by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two of the world’s leading researchers on poverty: In a village in Indonesia we met Ibu Emptat, the wif...

For some people the brokenness in these foundational relationships results in material poverty, that is their not having sufficient money to provide for the basic physical needs of themselves and thei...

Looking through the lens of Holy Scripture, human work must be seen first and foremost as value contribution, not economic compensation. We can have a flourishing, fruitful life even if we don’t get a...

Some years ago our pastor told an unusual story about a Southern plantation owner who left a $50,000 inheritance to a former slave who had served him faithfully all his life. That was quite a sum of m...

Seeing that wealth is neither to be avoided nor praised but rather stewarded wisely and generously, how should we think about material wealth creation? This is an important question worthy of thoughtf...

When Jesus warns us not to store up treasures on Earth, it’s not because wealth might be lost; it’s because wealth will always be lost. Either it leaves us while we live, or we leave it when we die. N...

15 percent of everything Christ said relates to this topic [of money and possessions]—more than His teachings on heaven and hell combined. Why did Jesus put such an emphasis on money and possessions? ...

I recently attended an event sponsored by Compassion International, the International Child Sponsorship Organization. The event was called “Stepping into My Shoes”. The purpose being to show children ...

In Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don't Give Away More Money, the authors point out that if Americans who professed to be "strong" or "very strong" Christians tit...

Alexander Maclaren writes about the importance of recognizing our dependence on God for all we have: Up to the very edge we are driven before He puts out His hand to help us. It is best for us that w...

What’s the biggest misconception Christians have about giving? That when we give money away to a church or ministry, or to help the needy, it’s gone. While we hope others will benefit from it, we’re q...

… Larry Laudan, a philosopher of science, has spent the last decade studying risk-management. He writes of how we live in a society so fear-driven that we suffer from what he calls risk-lock – a condi...

While most of us probably avoid borrowing money, there are cases in which people actually enjoy borrowing from other people. For instance, the Austrian poet Peter Altenberg loved to borrow money from ...

Henry Ford Sr. the car magnate, having already become massively wealthy, had decided to visit Cork, Ireland, the hometown from which his father had emigrated to the states. Upon arrival, he was warmly...

The same week the global economy shrank by $7 trillion, Zimbabwe’s inflation rate hit a record 231 million percent. In other words, if you had saved $1 million Zimbabwean dollars by Monday, on Tuesday...

When 67-year-old carpenter Russell Herman died in 1994, his will included a staggering set of bequests. Included in his plan for distribution was more than two billion dollars for the City of East St....

One Sunday morning, after delivering a sermon, a preacher was asked by a friend how it was received by the congregation. The sermon focused on the Christian responsibility of the wealthy to help the p...

One day, a father bought his little boy some French fries. The father, doing what any dad would do, reaches over and moves to take one of the fries off of his kid’s plate. The little boy screams, slap...

We are meant to be part of the flow of abundance: to open our hands to receive what we need and share what we have with others. Jesus taught his followers to be radically generous when he said: “Sell ...

While we are comparing, consider this. What we call “poverty” today would have been considered middle class just a few generations ago. In 2000, the average “poor” family had goods and services rivali...