If you’ve been around a church more than once or twice, you’ve probably heard a tired-but-true saying that sounds something like this: “God loves you, and has a wonderful plan for your life.”

For most of us, this sounds pretty reasonable. That God loves me — this, I can grasp. That He has a wonderful plan for my life — well, I hope so. It stands to reason that a good, loving God would have a great plan for me. But often times, it can seem so frightfully unobtainable.  God might have a wonderful plan for me, but how am I ever supposed to get there if my life is such a mess right now?

If the mess of your life includes financial difficulties, the idea of God’s Wonderful Plan can seem downright far-fetched. “If He has great plans for me, how come I have trouble paying the rent? What part of His ‘great plans’ include a crappy, low-paying job that I hate and a five-digit student loan that will never go away? If His plan is so great, I wish He would let me in on it now, because the little corner of the world I occupy is not that great at all.”

Or maybe you disassociate God’s great plan from the reality of your financial life. “I believe that He has a great plan for me to marry someone awesome. His wonderful plan includes cute kids and a great church that we can feel at home in. Maybe His plan for my life means me having some amazing adventures on the mission field; maybe it means me becoming a dynamic and famous youth speaker; maybe someone in Nashville will realize how awesome my church worship band is, and sign us to a huge recording contract. Yeah, I bet God’s Wonderful Plan for my life is to make me part of the next Hillsong United.”

But money? Does it even factor in to the picture?

Yes. Money is part of life, and a big part at that. And if we believe that God has a great plan for our lives, it follows that the plan includes our money as well. Scripture backs that idea up, too. Consider this — Jeremiah 29:11, the verse that most people quote when talking about God’s Wonderful Plan, specifically refers to prosperity:

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

There’s no getting around it: God has a plan to prosper us. Does this mean that we can just sit at home, “claim it in faith” and wait for God to miraculously send money our way? Not at all; in fact, as we’ll see, God’s Master Plan for Your Money includes a lot of hard work on your part. But the beauty of it is that God has a plan to make our financial lives a victory, a testimony and a blessing to others.

If your financial life feels far from ideal, that doesn’t mean that God is unfaithful. What it may mean is that you just haven’t learned and implemented His plan for your money. Fortunately, it’s all found in scripture. Stay tuned, and we’ll unpack the basics of God’s master plan for your money, and we’ll learn great, practical ways to put it into practice.

Up next: Five priorities of God’s Master Plan for Your Money