Summary and Conclusions
Are you a Christian? Have you acknowledged and confessed your sins to God? Have you asked God to forgive you? Have you invited Christ into your life? Have you received Christ as your personal savior? Have you received God’s free gift of eternal life with Him? Do you believe that Christ died for your sins when He was innocent? Do you believe that God raised Him from the dead?
If you answered these questions “yes”, then you have been born again. You are a new creation. The old has passed away and there has been a noticeable change in your life. You are now living a new life. You are starting over and are now living the Christian life. Because of who God is, creator and owner, and because God is sovereign, He is (our) Lord and Master. That makes us (Christians) what the Bible calls stewards/servants/slaves. As such, our job is management of God’s possessions/resources. Management is simply the wise use of means ( resources) to accomplish ends (goals and objectives).
I would contend that it is not possible to wisely use resources to accomplish goals and objectives without a plan. Clearly, the Bible endorses the concept of planning. Jesus identifies planning as a “no-brainer”. Luke 14:28-30 For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost, to see if he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation, and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him, saying This man began to build and was not able to finish
A goal or objective without a plan is just a wish.
If you do much reading on the subject of planning you will find many definitions, but they all boil down to simply deciding in advance what to do, how to do it, who will do it, and when it will get done. I have facilitated the planning process for a number of organizations over the years using a simple four step process. If you have completed the planning exercises presented over the last several weeks, you have completed the first step in the process. Obviously, all plans start from where we are at the moment. Identifying that starting point is what I call “Getting In Touch”. If you (and the appropriate team/family members) completed these weekly exercises you (all) are “in touch” spiritually, financially, and personally.
We spent the first two sessions getting in touch spiritually. I became a Christian in February (can’t remember the exact date) of 1974. It was a Sunday morning while sitting in the sanctuary (auditorium) of Christ Presbyterian Church in Edina, Minnesota, waiting for the church service to begin. I prayed to God and asked Him to forgive my sins and invited Christ into my life. I told Him I wanted to receive Him as my personal savior. I was led to this point in my life (age 34) by my wonderful little sweetheart wife. She had been attending BSF and witnessing to me for about a year. I was making her life really difficult by persecuting her for turning our home into a “monastery”. But, praise the Lord, I was convicted by the Holy Spirit to turn to Christ.
How about you? What’s your story? I’m not going to give you answers to the other 31 questions that describe my spiritual condition. Frankly, it’s too convicting and embarrassing. If you’re like me, you didn’t have any trouble identifying some changes that need to be made in your life. Setting goals and objectives is going to be real easy for me in the spiritual department.
Getting in touch financially always involves some research (digging). We started out by estimating how much it costs you (and your family) to live on an annual basis. Some expenditures occur daily or almost daily, some weekly, some monthly, and some only a couple times a year. Naturally, we had to do some calculations to get everything on an annual basis. Perhaps it would be better to say that we are trying to describe how God’s resources flow through your household. We want to identify all of the money that flows through your home.
Then we estimated the total of all the income received by your household annually. This used to be real easy for me because I had a paycheck from an employer and that was it. Now that I am in the declining years of life the family receives very little in the way of salary, a little from interest, a little from dividends, a little from capital gains, a little from SS, a little from rent, and a little from a business. These all come at different times during the year and in different months, etc. It’s a real pain in the neck to keep track of but my job as manager demands it. All of this must be converted into an annual figure for comparison with living expenditures. Some of you might prefer to convert everything into monthly numbers for more timely tracking. That’s fine, just so you do it. The key question is this: “Is your income sufficient to cover all your expenditures?” If not, you are living beyond your means and headed for insolvency/bankruptcy.
The third measure of our financial condition is what we refer to as net worth. You listed all the stuff God has entrusted to your care and estimated its current value. These are called assets. Then in the following week you listed all your liabilities (debt). The value of the assets minus the value of the liabilities determines your net worth. If it’s positive, praise The Lord. If it’s negative, you have a problem; because if you sold all your (God’s) assets you wouldn’t receive enough to pay off all YOUR debts. Yes, God promised to provide for our needs but He didn’t promise to make the loan payments on my airplane/boat/RV/big screen TV, etc.
Who you are as a person is determined initially by the Lord (He is sovereign after all). However, there are also some genetics involved. There are some personal decisions involved. There’s some past history involved. Your environment growing up is certainly involved. Certainly you were influenced by your parents in the growing up years. We are all carrying what we call “baggage” that we picked up mostly during the time between our first and second birth. Aside from our re-creation at the second birth, we all have certain values, different ways of thinking about things, different temperaments, different ways of relating to others, etc. Whether we like it or not, or whether it is right or wrong, who we are has an impact on our job responsibilities in the Christian life. It has an impact on our attitude which in turn impacts our management style and approach. I have raised a few questions/issues with you in an attempt to alert you to this matter. You should at least be aware of these issues so you hopefully won’t be blindsided along the management way. If this were just about you it would be one thing, but you are responsible for the whole management team. Each one of them is probably not like you, but they must be involved for successful management of God’s resources. There are, of course, all kinds of psychiatric evaluation instruments out there, and they are all helpful to some extent in describing our “personality”. If you want to pursue this avenue a little further you could go to “www.crown.org” and take their abbreviated “Personality I.D.” analysis on line, or you could buy the workbook from them for $16. Or you could read Tim LaHaye’s book The Spirit Controlled Temperament which sells for $10.77 on Amazon (or $3 used).
If you have completed all these exercises, you may now consider yourself “in touch” and ready to move on to the next step in the planning process. The next step (2) is what I refer to as “Strategic Planning”. It is simply deciding in advance what to do. We will proceed with this next step in the coming weeks.
However, before we move on, I want us to take an inventory of the resources God is asking us to manage. God has endowed each of us with certain physical, mental, and emotional qualities. Added to these He has made it possible to receive some extra training and education as well as experience. This is how He provides for our needs. He expects us to employ these (qualities, training, education, experience) in “jobs”, in WORK. And He places a high priority on meeting our needs.
1 Tim 5:8 But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever. NAS
1 Thess 4:11-12.…make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you; 12 so that you may behave properly toward outsiders and not be in any need. NAS
2 Thess 3:10 For even when we were with you, we used to give you this order: if anyone will not work, neither let him eat. NAS
Some of you work for large companies in specialized positions. What you do contributes to the provision of a larger product or service. I worked for a farmer lobbying organization for many years doing economic research and corporate planning. My job contributed to a larger product. However, some of you are self employed and produce products or provide services that can be purchased by individuals, even individual believers at your church. If you would like to make known the availability of those products and/or services to all of us (believers) at our churches, I encourage you to create a directory of products and services offered by members/attenders of your church. You could use the form below as a guide for putting such a directory together. Then you could publish such a list for the believers in your church.. I visualize something like the “Yellow Pages” but with a bit more detail. I don’t know about you but I would rather buy from our own family of believers whenever they can provide what I am looking for.
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INVENTORY OF church/Believers’ BUSINESSES
Company/Business Name: ____________________________________________
Your name: _______________________________________________________
Business location/address: ____________________________________________
Business Email address: _____________Business website address: ___________
Business Phone: _______________ Business cell phone: ________________
Describe the nature of your business. List the products and/or services your business provides: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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Now for everybody: What resources has God entrusted to your management: those that are not being used to provide for the needs of your family, those that could be used for God’s glory in the body, those that could be used to achieve His goals and objectives, those that could be used for God’s overriding purpose as revealed by that well known hymn, “To God Be The Glory” or as expressed in John 12:27-28 Now My soul has become troubled; and what shall I say, ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose I came to this hour. “Father, glorify Thy name.” There came therefore a voice out of heaven: “I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again. NAS Or as expressed in Matt 5:16 Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven. NAS Do you have some time to offer? Do you have specific talents, skills, abilities, knowledge, experience, expertise, etc. to offer? Do you have some equipment or facilities to offer? What? Remember these are God’s resources you are willing to make available for the benefit of the other believers here at your church, or church missionaries, or other missionaries you may support, or other believers you may know, or whatever. You can use the form below to put together and publish a directory-inventory of church resources available to other believers.
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GOD’S RESOURCE INVENTORY AT OUR CHURCH
Your name: ______________ Phone #_______________
Email: ______________
Time available: _______hours: ¨ per day, ¨ per week, ¨ per month. Other: _____
Any specific days during the week? M – T – W – Th – F – S – Su – Any day
Any specific hours during the day? ___________ Any specific location? _______
What can you do or are you willing to do? ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
What expertise/experience do you possess? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
How extensive is it? _________________________________________________________________
How do you wish to make it available? __________________________________
When is it available? ________________________________________________
What are you willing to do? __________________________________________
What facilities, equipment, tools, etc. are you willing to share? _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
When? __________________________________________________________
How long? ________________________________________________________
Other conditions? __________________________________________________
What other resources has God placed in your care that you are willing to make available to other Christians here at your church? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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