How do you know when you have become a slave to your money? And how do you stop yourself from becoming a slave to anyone.
Principle: When you borrow ANYTHING from another person, you become their slave. Do NOT borrow!
The borrower is slave to the lender. Proverbs 22:7
What do I mean?
Let’s say that one day, you and your sister are at the store. You see a toy you REALLY want to buy for $5. But… you don’t have $5. Your sister does! So, you turn to your sister and say, “May I BORROW $5 to buy this toy, and I’ll pay you back?” Your sister says yes, BUT, she says the only way she’ll let you borrow the money is if you do her chores for her this month AND you can pay her the $5 from next month’s chore money. You think and think. ‘Man! That’s a LOT of work, just to buy this toy. I’ll have to feed the dogs, sweep the house, take out the trash. I have to pay her back AND do all of her chores?’ After thinking for a while, you say, “Okay!” You shake hands in agreement, she hands you the $5 and you buy the toy.
It’s official, you are now your sisters slave for the month! All for a $5 toy that two weeks later, you don’t even care about.
A slave is not what most of us think. We think slave and we typically think about people who were owned by other people and forced to do really hard work and if they didn’t, they’d get in trouble and probably beaten or hurt. But slaves are people who NEED to work to pay someone back. The work you are doing is either the payment or it is the work that you get paid for and then you have to hand over the money for all of the work you did. It’s money you earned yet you’ve already promised it to someone else. If you don’t pay them back, often you could get in trouble with the law or perhaps they can come and take back the thing you bought with the money they let you borrow.
What God wants…
…for us to be people who DO NOT borrow. In the bible God is trying to free us from different types of slavery. The most important, the slavery of and to sin. The bible says in Romans 6:16:
…you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness.
Money also can make us slaves. We can be slaves TO money as it says in Matthew 6:24:
No one can serve two masters, for he will either hate the one and love the other. You cannot serve God and money.
God does not want us to be a slave to anything in this world, especially to money or to others.
Most people grow up and they become slaves. They borrow money from a bank to buy a REALLY nice car they can’t afford. They use credit cards to borrow money to pay for furniture they can’t afford, vacations they can’t afford. They borrow money from family. They borrow money to buy a boat, jet skis, and a four-wheeler. Perhaps they buy a really nice computer or television. And they make a promise, a contract, to pay all of these people back – the bank, the family member, the credit card company. They promise that they will earn money, work, however long it takes to pay all of these things back. So everyday when they go to work, they are going to work as a slave to all of these people. The money they are working hard to earn isn’t theirs. It already belongs to the people who they borrowed the money from. They just haven’t earned it all or given it to them yet.
Imagine having to go to work everyday and work REALLY hard everyday, just to have to give ALL of that money you worked for, to someone else.
Imagine instead, you go to work, you work really hard, you earn a lot of money, and at the end of the month…it is ALL yours!
It is your money to buy things with, to give some to your church or an organization who cares for something you really care about, like an organization who helps dogs that are in trouble. Imagine if you could save some of YOUR money each month so you can retire someday, stop working, and you don’t have to depend on the government or your own kids to help pay for your retirement. This, and much more is possible when you do not borrow money but instead you get to keep your own money.
Two principles or suggestions I recommend to help you do this and be this type of person, one who doesn’t sell themselves as a slave to others.
Have a plan!
- Have a plan for everything you buy. It’s called Self-control, also known as one of the Fruits of the Spirit. There is a toy you want to buy? Save up for it and when you have enough money, go buy it then! It’ll still be there, I promise! In fact, by the time you have enough money, you probably won’t even want it any more. Are you going to be driving in a few years? Save up for that first car. Go work and save money. You’d be surprised. You may find that after you’ve saved that money, you may decide not to spend quite as much as you thought you would because you now know the pain and sweat and time invested in saving for it
Pray
- Pray to have the spirit of self-control as I mentioned above.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and…SELF-CONTROL. Galatians 22.
God wants us to have and be all of these things for he is all of these things. One of them is self-control, or controlling ourselves, our actions, our emotions. And the way we do this is with the help of the holy spirit. Often we turn to ourselves to fix things like this, but without the holy Spirit, we just can’t for very long.
Go be a person who is free! Pray to the Holy Spirit to help you be a person who is free! Free from the chains and slavery of borrowing from others. Have a plan, save, and be outrageously generous! And remember:
The borrower is slave to the lender. Proverbs 22:7
Image credit: Ian Stuffer, Unsplash.com
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Featured Photo Credit: by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Kopans is here to share ideas for helping 1 million people reach a million dollar net worth by using money principles he’s learned over the years. Let’s talk money, budgets, becoming debt free, financial wisdom, financial principles that work.
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