The Story of Kingdomnomics

Phil’s Story

Misdirected Beginnings

“Phil, could you come in for a minute?”

I’d heard the door of the study open, and my father wanted to have a talk with me.

I sat across from him as he produced an impressive sheet of paper and placed it in my hands. “Phil,” he said, “this is what we call a stock certificate. It’s very, very important.”

He went on to explain that as long as he held this document, he had proof that he owned something: some piece, or “share,” of a business concern that was engaged in the earning of money. Whenever that company made new dollars, he would get his share, paid out in “dividends.”

This was all new information for me, but I could already see how powerful the concepts were. I could earn money by going outside, mowing the lawn, and getting paid for it—or I could buy into the work of others.

When my father saw I understood that much, he said, “There’s more, son. And this is where it gets exciting. When you receive your dividends—your earnings—what do you do with them?”

I thought I had the right answer. “Put it all in the bank? Save them?”

“Not exactly. You have to buy groceries, right? And pay your bills. So you do that with some of the money. Then, you take the rest of it and look for more shares to buy. And if you’re smart about how you do it, you will generate a stream of income that continues to grow larger. Sort of like running a dairy farm.”

“What?”

He laughed, and took back the stock certificate. “Let’s say for a minute that this is the deed to a cow. It produces milk, and you sell the milk, right? With the proceeds of that milk, you buy another cow. This one produces milk, too, and now you have two streams of revenue. You never sell the cows—until they grow old and stop producing. Healthy cows are your money-makers. Whether it’s milk or oil or cars—anything people can produce and sell—you want to keep buying these shares of business. They give you leverage to buy still more shares. So, if you get a bad cow occasionally, that’s all right, because you have other cows to cover the loss.”

This talk changed the way I viewed the world. I thought about lots of cows giving lots of milk, and making lots of money. Why, everyone could be rich!

No, that wasn’t exactly right. Only buying the right cows, my father explained, would make that possible. So education was critical when it came to equipping myself to enter a highly competitive world of people with the same dreams of cows, cash, property, and natural gas wells. I would have to do my best in the classroom to get the edge, so I could start earning wealth as soon as possible. That wealth would generate greater wealth.

That was the extent of my thinking. I wanted to make money. I thought that was the American Dream. Because when you have enough money, you can do what you want, when you want. And it was working, too. I was on my way to becoming a prosperous man.

But deep down, I realized that accumulation was changing me on the inside, and I didn’t like how. I saw myself as a consumer, but I was the one being quietly consumed.
Phil’s Story

Course Correction

One night I turned on my TV set and saw Billy Graham speaking to a great crowd. I respected this man; I was curious about what he was saying. He was explaining that many experts on the Bible believed we were coming to the end of history, and that soon we would each have a personal reckoning with our Creator. It seemed as if Billy Graham was speaking to me personally.

There comes a time when we look at ourselves and say, “What’s the point of all this? Where does traveling the trail of more eventually lead? And what price am I paying to take that path?” These were the questions I was asking myself at this point in my life.

Billy Graham was talking to me about the biggest issues of life just as surely as my father had discussed with me the economics of cows and cash. Dr. Graham asked what would happen to my eternal soul if I were to die that evening. And I had no answer.

Maybe I wouldn’t die that night. But it was going to happen, and as things stood, I wouldn’t be ready. My heart was in disarray.

I struggled with what to do. My first instinct was to go to church. But my childhood impression of churchgoing was that when you went to church you put on a coat and tie, and I couldn’t see what that had to do with anything today. This was a crossroads moment. I came very close to making some weak excuse, and moving on with my life.

However, something inside me wouldn’t let me walk away and discard that confrontation with eternal truth. In the end I found a church, and there I heard about what it means to live as a true follower of Jesus Christ. It wasn’t enough to for me to intellectually accept Christ’s reality. I had to know him in a genuine relationship. I had to let him have all of me, so that every sin and imperfection within me could be cleansed in the way that only he could accomplish. There wasn’t anything I could do. I could only come before him in humility; but that was all right, because he could and would do the rest. He could cleanse me, forgive me, and make me a new creature.

I came to understand what it meant for Jesus to die on that cross—that he did it to pay the penalty for all that was wrong about me. A perfect man was punished so that a guilty one could go free: me.

And best of all—it was a gift! With my orientation in financial transactions, this was hard for me to believe. There was no dickering or bargaining here. All I had to offer was my flawed and broken heart, worthless to anyone but the One who created it; what I had to gain was deep joy, indescribable peace, and full forgiveness now—and eternal life later. What wise investor would reject such a deal?

I prayed and asked Jesus to come into my life, trusting only in him and nothing else to make me right with him. And I meant it.

My first action was to find a bookstore and make two purchases: a modern translation of the Bible, and Halley’s Bible Handbook, which helped to give me some idea of where to find what I needed in the pages of Scripture. I learned what it meant to pray daily, to share my faith, to enjoy Christian fellowship. I couldn’t get enough of God’s Word and I couldn’t hear enough good teaching. I began to grow and to see the world through new eyes.

 New Purpose

As I moved deeper into a life of following Christ, I knew I had a real desperation to truly know God and to please him in all that I did. I thought about who I was and what God had given me to work with. Finances, of course, had been at the center of my life. I realized that I needed to begin seeing money in terms of God’s kingdom. God hasn’t given us time, talent, and treasure just so we can hoard it or spend it on ourselves. All of our resources can be used to glorify him.
So where to start? I kept coming back to that powerful command from Jesus, given in the Sermon on the Mount: No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. (Matthew 6:24)
That verse became a new foundation for me. At first, the words seemed very cut and dried—as if one must choose to love or hate money, with no middle ground. It was a very difficult verse to understand, so I began to study it carefully. I learned what I could from sermons and Bible studies, and the truth began to come into focus for me.
When Jesus made this statement—and several others on the subject—he used the word Mammon for what we translate here as money. This word means “all that one possesses apart from his body and his life.” In other words, things—stuff, whether it’s money or what it buys. The word Mammon also comes from a root word that means entrust. That’s a serious, heightened version of trust. Similar to today, people of that time would give their money to a banker, and they had to place all their faith in that banker to take care of their worldly wealth. Jesus is saying that we can’t fully entrust ourselves to both God and possessions. We can’t divide it all up and invest 50/50.
But Jesus did a little more with this word Mammon. He spoke of “serving” Mammon, making Mammon the name of a master who can lord it over his slave. In his day there was genuine slavery, and the word he used in this verse for serve was associated with that kind of servitude. So this is serious trust and serious service.
Ultimately, here is what Jesus meant: As a human being, you can’t help but serve something or someone. You will serve God, or you will serve things and stuff. You’d better make that decision carefully, because one of these will win, and it will win all of you. You’re entrusting no less than your heart and soul—your eternal destiny. Jesus says I must choose one master, and everything else must be in submission to that decision.
When Jesus talked about Mammon, he was making the point that whether you realize it or not, you are in service. You may live under the illusion of total freedom, that you think what you want and do what you want, beholden to no one. But true freedom is indeed an illusion. You are always pursuing, or you wouldn’t be a human being. Pursuing what? It could be money or comfort. It could be power or pleasure or acclaim. But something drives you, it drives you down its own road, and Jesus says that it’s impossible to travel on two roads at the same time.
I came to understand I had clearly been driving down a certain road, and it was the endless road of pursuing more. But it ultimately had no real destination other than chasing a mirage ending in heartbreak. I wasn’t enjoying the journey. It’s a crossroads moment when we realize this. I only found true rest when I went back to that banker called Mammon, withdrew everything, and deposited it within the Bank of Heaven.

- See more at: http://kingdomnomics.com/the-phil/phils-story/#.U4X_fCe9KSM