07 Feb 2025: Our Year of Financial Discipleship
INTRODUCTION
The entire Christian life is one of discipleship—disciple being and disciple-making. This formation is a spiritual hub that extends its gospel reformation and transformation to every aspect of human life and society. The word “disciple”—one who is a learner, a student, an apprentice, a pupil or a follower—appears some 260 times in the gospels and in the book of Acts.
Consequently, the placing of adjectives before the word ‘discipleship’—like ‘missional’ (as in missional discipleship), ‘emotionally healthy’ (remember emotionally healthy discipleship?), ‘lead’ (as in LEADiscipleship) or ‘financial’ (as in financial discipleship)–are all attempts to emphasise a particular spoke or strand of this lifelong, lifestyle of following God and His ways, being intimate with Jesus and being empowered by the Spirit of God to influence others for him. Discipleship really is all-of-life and for all-life-long.
LOOKING BACK TO GO FORWARD
After having as annual themes Forming Flourishing Missional Communities/Organizations (2021), Emotionally Healthy Discipleship (2022), LEADiscipleship (2023), Deepening LEADiscipleship (2024), in 2025 our focus is back to foundational knowledge of what God (the Bible) has to say about managing money and possessions: FINANCIAL DISCIPLESHIP. For brevity, we will define a financial disciple as “one who studies, applies and multiplies what God says about finances (money and possessions).”
About a decade ago, I was travelling in the great state of Alberta in western Canada and remember coming across a striking quote attributed to the Reformation catalyst of the sixteenth century, Martin Luther, that said something along the lines that for most Christians the last thing to be discipled about them is their pockets. Indeed, money is such an important matter that there are over 2,500 scriptures about it in the Holy Bible—the good, the bad, the ugly. Money has strings attached to our emotions, mindsets, skill sets, dreams and goals etc. In fact, like disciplining the tongue (James 4:1-12), if we can be financially discipled, most of the other areas of our lives would be covered too.
In scripture, Jesus makes a daring, categorical statement: “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). In this Scripture, God calls out two masters we choose to serve–God or Money. When God is our Master we use money to serve Him but when money is our Master we (dare) use God to serve it!
A WORTHY PARTNER
Rather than picking up our own HuD-published Financial Whizzdom series of two decades ago and merely parroting what some of us may have already become familiar with, we have chosen to partner Compass Financial Ministries instead. Compass possesses some foundational studies in digital and hardcopy form that focus on five main pillars. I like the ‘five’ for two main reasons; first, you can count them all on one hand; and secondly, five in Biblical numerology is the number of grace. May God’s financial grace abound in the year Twenty25 (5x), a year of ultimate, extreme, exceedingly abundant grace! Here are the five foci:: Ownership, Surrender, Choice, Multiplication and Eternal Focus.
–Ownership: The Bible is clear that God is the sole owner of everything (eg. Psalm 24:1).
–Surrender: Once we recognise God’s ownership of “our” money and possessions, we must surrender them to Him through our affect, attitude and actions (see Luke 14:33).
–Choice: Daily as we have the opportunity to make many decisions as it relates to money and possessions, the biggest and most important of them all is the choice to serve God over money (go to Matthew 6:24). A key Financial Whizzdom law we’ve lived out at The HuD Group has been the Proto Principle: in all your getting, get God first.
–Multiplication: God’s first instruction to humankind in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible was to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). This hasn’t changed. In the first book of the New Testament Jesus shows us how God still expects us to multiply what He puts in our hand through the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14–30). Financial Discipleship is not only learning and applying but also multiplying what we have learned (in knowledge) and earned (in money) to grow God’s Kingdom.
–Eternal Focus: As Financial Disciples, we must always stay focused on the eternal outcomes of our choices and not the temporary ones. Satan, the flesh and the secular world try to detract, distract and destroy us with (Matthew 6:19-21).
CONCLUSION
The last verse of the above Matthew 6 passage is actually our memory verse for the year: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” I hope you look forward to this year of financial discipleship as much as I do with an emphasis on God’s grace for ownership, surrender, choice, multiplication and eternal focus. May we bring pleasure and glory to God, bless people and planet, vanquish evil and experience deep joy and good success as we study, apply and multiply what God says about money and possessions in 2025. Thankfully like biblical leader Nehemiah, The God of heaven will prosper us and help us succeed (Nehemiah 2:20a).
Global CEO of The HuD Group
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