Hi homeschool parents. Let me ask you a question. What’s the most important thing to understand when it comes to your money and your finances?
Is it how to budget? How to be able to take care of all of your expenses and still have enough left over at the end?
Maybe it’s understanding how to invest. How much? How to get the best return? What types of things to invest in?
Maybe it’s understanding how much do you need to save in order to retire or how to pay for college for your kids?
Those are all great questions and those are important to understand, but those aren’t the most important thing. So you might be wondering what is the most important thing to understand?
Well, let me tell you a story.
Suppose that you’re preparing dinner and you figure out, I’m missing some ingredients.
So you call over your son, you give him a shopping list of things that you need and you give him $20 and you send him off to the store. Well, about an hour later, your son rolls back home. He’s got a bag of Taco Bell and he’s got a half eaten large Dairy Queen Blizzard.
You’re a little bit confused. You ask him, hey, where are the Taco Bell and Dairy Queen? You’d be pretty upset, wouldn’t you? Maybe something like this has even happened to you before. You’d be upset.
I mean, you gave him a job to do. You trusted him with a task and he totally disregarded what you asked him to do. You gave him money to get the job done, but he just spent the money like it was his, like he was the owner.
You’d be pretty upset. After all, you’re the owner, aren’t you? And you trusted him with that and he disappointed you. So what is the most important thing when it comes to your money? It’s knowing who the real owner is.
But guess what? When it comes to your bank account, your 401k, your investments, your house, your car, you’re not the real owner. God is. Let me read to you what it says in Psalm 24 verses 1 and 2.
The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.
For he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers. So the Bible is pretty clear. God is the real owner.
God owns everything. And if I’m not the owner, if God is the owner, then what am I? I’m the manager. I’m the steward.
It’s my responsibility to take care of the things that God’s entrusted to me and to use them according to his priorities, to use them for his purposes and for his glory. So how do I know what God’s priorities are? How do I know what his purposes are? Well, God’s given us a pretty good idea of the things that are important to him. That’s right here in the Bible.
And so we can just learn what’s important to God by diving into his word. So the next time you’re trying to figure out how to budget, how to invest the types of things to invest in or give towards, why don’t you ask yourself, what would the owner do? That’s the most important question. So I’m cheering you on and may we both strive to be the most faithful stewards that we can be until we both hear, “well done.”
