Something amazing happens when you become master of your money — after years of working to meet the demands of your finances, you can turn the tables and put your finances to work for you. And that is a very good feeling.

Imagine it: For years, you lived as a slave to money, tossed back and forth by waves of bad advice and short-sighted financial decisions. When you had finally had enough, you decided to break free, and to become the master of your money. That meant some hard work — you had to develop a rigorous budget, and stick to it. You had to live below your means so that you could get out from beneath the burden of your debt as quickly as possible. And then you had to work to store up emergency savings to cover you when life throws disasters your way. Today, after months or years of hard work, you have truly become the master of your money. So what do you do with it?

Put your money work for you.

You see, God never intended for us to be slaves to money. He never intended for us to work, toil and worry about our finances. We end up doing those things because of the mess we’ve made of ourselves and our society. But what God wants is for us to have total authority over our finances, and for us to use the funds at our disposal according to His financial plan. That means providing for our families, tithing to our local church, giving to the poor and supporting ministries. And as we discussed last week, it also means building up an inheritance for future generations.

We can accomplish many things in God’s plan just by using a good budget and diverting our monthly cash flow toward the correct causes and priorities. But think about how much more effective we could be in accomplishing God’s plans for our finances if we had a large sum of wealth to work with. If you had a large amount of investments that were returning tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, think of all you could do with that money. Think of how your church would benefit from a tithe off of that income. Think of how much of a difference you could make for your favorite ministries or non-profit organizations. You could give hundreds of dollars each month. You could even give thousands.

In our society, we tend to treat people who work to build wealth with a certain amount of mistrust. But that’s an immature attitude. Building wealth is a lot like building muscle. A 90-pound weakling may be able to lift some small bricks, but a strapping 200-pound man can lift a much heavier load, and carry them much farther. The more financial muscle we build, the more we can carry. The more we can carry, the faster we can accomplishes God’s purposes here on earth.

Building wealth makes us more effective in God’s Kingdom. So once you’ve mastered your money, it’s time to really put it to work for you.

In the coming articles in this series, we’re going to turn the corner together. We’ve talked a lot about the hard work that is necessary to get a handle on your finances. Now, we’re going to start dealing with the ways that we can grow our wealth, and put it to work for us. This is where things start to get fun.

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Photo by Images Of Money. Used under Creative Commons License.