Teaching Tuesday: Walking in Wisdom - Proverbs 3:9-10, 28:19-20

Series: Walking in Wisdom
Sermon: Wisdom for Money - Proverbs 3:9-10, 28:19-20 (10.21.25)
Watch the messages HERE. 

The wise store up choice food and olive oil, but fools gulp theirs down. - Proverbs 21:20

When I was working at LCU one of the things I did for a few years was teach a five week money class that students could sign up for if they wanted to. When I got to teaching about investments I always got questions about risk. 

Isn’t it risky to have most of your money in something that could - in theory - totally crash and burn?

Yes, there is some risk in investing. But three quick things: 

1) There is risk in not investing; it’s called an opportunity cost. You can put your surplus money in a bank or bond that doesn’t make enough to outpace inflation, but you’d be costing yourself the opportunity to make gains through compound interest, so you’re actually losing money over time and have less to live on and give away. That’s risky. 

2) The American stock market has never lost money over a five year period. 100% of investors (with mutual funds, at least) made money on their money if they stayed in rather than got out when stuff got bad for awhile. 

That includes Covid, it includes the 2008 recession, and it even includes the Great Depression. If you’re debt free and you aren’t investing - wisely, with professional guidance - you are costing yourself and you are costing God’s church because you aren’t stewarding his resources in a way that makes the most of what he’s given you to manage. 

3) Even if the very worst happened - even if there was a nuclear war and Wall Street was destroyed and the stock market totally disappeared - the money you had in a bank account or a Folger's can buried in the backyard wouldn’t be worth anything anyway. Money only really has value because we say it does. It doesn’t have inherent value. 

After the Civil War, Confederate currency was so worthless it was used as wallpaper and kindling to start fires for cooking. If the world’s coming to an end, you need bottled water and firewood, not green paper.

So you might as well invest and bless the church and leave something for your children’s children. 

One of the themes I notice when I read the passages in Proverbs related to money is that financial wisdom is often about balance. Danger lies in the extremes. 

Save and invest, but don’t hoard; don’t be greedy. 

Work hard and earn a living, but don’t obsess over wealth accumulation. 

Care about wise stewardship, but don’t make money about status or identity. 

Don’t enable laziness, but be generous with the poor and needy. 

When we put all of these ideas together and apply them to our approach to money management, we are able to “honor God with [our] wealth” (Proverbs 3:9) because we have enough to be generous, but not so much that we don’t feel as if we need to rely on him; we haven’t replaced God with money as our sustaining presence and the purpose of our lives. 

Pray: 
God, thank you for blessing us with what we need. Help us want the same things you want. Please forgive us when we make an idol out of money or try to find joy in what it can buy rather than in you. You are our only true source of abiding joy. You are the giver of life and our reason to live. By the power of your Spirit, guide us to find the right balance as we earn, spend, save, and give. May it all be for your glory and the growth of your kingdom. Amen.  

TO KNOW GOD AND TO MAKE HIM KNOWN! 

- Pastor Brady