Fearless with Money

Don’t store up treasures here on earth where they can erode away or may be stolen. Store them in heaven where they will never lose their value. - Matthew 6:19-20 TLB

A film editor once said, “ I had this date the other night with woman who wanted to walk along the beach. I’m wearing a twelve-hundred-dollar suit, a seventy-dollar tie, a hundred-and-fifty-dollar shirt, and a pair of two-hundred-dollar shoes. It costs me fifteen dollars to clean my suit and six dollars to have my shirt hand-washed.

“I don’t even want to think about what it would cost if I would get a drop of spaghetti sauce on my tie. And this woman wants me to roll up my pants and walk along the beach! All I can think about is how much it’s going to cost me if she wants to sit down on the sand. Here’s the bottom line that I have to ask myself: Can I afford to wear my own clothes?”

Another man, a lawyer, once said, “I don’t think I’m trapped on this treadmill forever, but I’m certainly involved with it right now....It’s the old merry-go-round of how much money is enough money? And it’s never enough.”

From Steven Carter and Julia Sokol's Lives Without Balance (New York, NY: Villard Books, Random House Inc. 1991), 125, 194.

Fearless Against Impure Thoughts

Norman Vincent Peale once stayed home for a month while his wife and children went on vacation. About midway through that month, Peale met a beautiful girl looking for excitement. When she made it clear that she would like to go on a date with Peale, he “put his conscience in mothballs” and arranged to meet her on Saturday night.

Peale awoke on Saturday morning and decided to take a walk on the beach. He took an old ax along to chop some rope away from the wreck of an old barge that had washed up on the shore. Due to the freshness of the morning and the rhythm of the ax, Peale began to chop in earnest.

As he chopped, a strange thing began to happen. He said, “I felt as if I were outside myself, looking at myself through a kind of fog that was gradually clearing. Suddenly I knew that what I had been planning for that evening was so wrong, so out of keeping with the innermost me.” Peale promptly canceled the date.

From God’s Little Lessons for Leaders (p. 95).

"To be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace." Romans 8:6 KJV

Cutting Out Criticism

Below is an excerpt from Catherine Marshall's A Closer Walk.

"One morning last week He [God] gave me an assignment: for one day I was to go on a “fast” from criticism. I was not to criticize anybody about anything. For the first half of the day, I simply felt a void, almost as if I had been wiped out as a person. This was especially true at lunch....I listened to the others and kept silent....In our talkative family no one seemed to notice. Bemused, I noticed that my comments were not missed. The federal government, the judicial system, and the institutional church could apparently get along fine without my penetrating observations. But still I didn’t see what this fast on criticism was accomplishing–until mid-afternoon. That afternoon, a specific, positive vision for this life was dropped into my mind with God’s unmistakable hallmark on it–joy! Ideas began to flow in a way I had not experienced in years. Now it was apparent what the Lord wanted me to see. My critical nature had not corrected a single one of the multitudinous things I found fault with. What it had done was stifle my own creativity."

What a challenge for us today, but what a freedom that comes with it!

"Show me your ways, O Lord, teach me your paths; guide me in your truth and teach me." Psalm 25:4-5