The Heart of Wealth

Book excerpt: Are you ready to probe how your heart relates to your wealth? Are you more focused on building God's Kingdom or your own?With a blend of biblical wisdom and stories of courageous people in some of the world's most vulnerable places, reading this book can help us explore how to maximize all we are and have for the glory of God. We discuss training our hearts to put their security in God, dethroning the idol of money, uprooting its related weeds of the heart (idolatry, pride, entitlement, presumption, possessiveness and envy), and displacing them with life-giving gratitude and generosity. Our hearts are then free to embrace what - or who - is on God's heart, namely the poor and the lost. We must also expunge the heretical notion that devalues God's good creation and his bountiful provision through it. This is key to seeing wealth creation as a spiritual gift and living into our callings as recipients, multipliers and conduits of God's overflowing blessings. It is wrong for us to use wealth to isolate ourselves from the messy lives of the poor. Rather, we're called to follow Jesus in sharing the sufferings of others and practicing our oneness with brothers and sisters in the global church. It is right to enjoy the material blessings God bestows - but not solely with people like us. We are to take seriously Christ's command to invite the poor to our dinner parties! We must follow Jesus across the divide into the lives of those whose dignity needs affirming and hope needs awakening. We can help develop their economic capacities to take care of their own families while learning from their stellar examples of dependence on God, generous hospitality, and unshakable gratitude. Then all will have plenty to share and find abundant joy in loving our neighbors and sharing together in God's goodness.