Resisting Financial Temptations

I want to share with you something I read more than 20 years ago. In context, it was intended to explain how we can have greater success in resisting sin. But I want to make a parallel application in the area of our stewardship — how we can more closely follow God’s principles for spending, saving, investing, and giving the money He has entrusted to us.

To be successful in these areas, there’s more involved than simply learning the rules of money management. To paraphrase renowned investor Warren Buffett, if it was simply a matter of gaining enough knowledge, all librarians would be rich!

To manage money well, we must also demonstrate the crucial element of self-control. Not just coming up with a budget that will get you debt-free and help you save for future needs, but living it out week by week. Not only devising an investing strategy, but sticking with it no matter what the markets are doing or the pundits are saying. Not just having good intentions about raising your giving from 10% to 15%, but making the sacrifices so it will actually happen.

Of course, it would be easy to accomplish our goals if it weren’t for all those appealing opportunities to deviate from our plans. We’re so prone to make an exception “just this time.” Or, as 19th-century novelist and playwright Oscar Wilde humorously put it, “I can resist anything except temptation.”

It’s in this very area that author Sam Storms’ advice lifted my spirit. In Pleasures Evermore: The Life-Changing Power of Enjoying God, he put it this way:

Storms is echoing the view author and pastor John Piper put forth in his classic Desiring God — that the longing to be happy is a universal human experience, and it is good, not sinful. We should seek to intensify this longing and nourish it with whatever will provide the deepest and most enduring satisfaction. And the deepest and most enduring happiness is found, not in material comforts or financial success, but only in God.

It is as the old hymn taught us as children: “Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.”

Resisting Financial Temptations

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