The Spiritual Practice of Cash Flow Analysis
/Hello All,
This week, I have for you a post adapted from a message that I was lucky enough to share with the 55+ crowd of MacGregor two years back. It is a message that I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about over the years, as it is one that was largely formed by my years spent working in accounting before I came to the pastorate.
Money is a peculiar thing. It can be used to bring a lot of happiness to the world, but at the same time, it can also completely destroy our lives if we let it take over who we are. So, in today’s post, I hope to address this problem, as well as provide a test for how to check if this is happening to us. And so to tackle this problem, I am quite certain there is one place in the Bible that is better than any other for us to turn to first, and that is the Sermon on the Mount, specifically where Jesus talks about what it means to have two masters.
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also... 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.”
I find that when it comes to understanding what Jesus is teaching us in this passage, that its helpful to know about one of the big differences between the everyday life of people from first century Judea where the Sermon on the Mount took place and those of us in Canada today: the difference in how our valuables are stored.
Today, if you are lucky enough to have a large-ish amount of money, likely you are going to take it to the bank and they will keep it safe for you. But this was not how the people of Jesus’ time would have dealt with their valuables, at all. It simply couldn’t have been as banks of the kind that we have weren’t really a thing until about 500 years ago, and even then weren’t really for anyone except the super rich for another three hundred years after that.
While there were examples of ancient institutions that performed many of the same functions as a modern bank, there were treasure store houses, and money lending has existed for likely just as long a money has, these types of services would have been largely outside of the reach of the average Joe that almost certainly Jesus would have been talking to in this passage, being that wealth inequality was rampant in the time when Jesus preached.
No, for the people Jesus was talking to, wealth storage likely would have worked a bit differently than it does for us, a bit more simplistically. From sources we have from the time, such as the ancient historian, Josephus, we can guess safely that if an average first century Judean were to all of a sudden find themselves in possession of something valuable, then there was really only one thing they could do to make sure it was safe; hide it in their homes, likely in clay pots buried in the floor.
I find this to be a useful fact to keep in mind when reading this passage on having two masters, because I ask you. How long do you think it would take, looking at those precious things in the corner of your house, before they would become more important to you than they really ought to have been? Judging by the amount of time Jesus dedicates in the gospels to calling out the negative impact that wealth can have on living Godly lives, I think it would be fair to say that this would have been a problem he saw quite often.
Then, just as now, money has a way of doing just this; becoming more important to us than it really should be. Whether you have none at all, or Scrooge McDuck sized bank vaults full of coins, our relationship with money, if left unchecked, has a way of rewriting our priorities in life and in doing so, taking over our lives.
And so, Jesus preaches to this problem, “you cannot serve two masters.” You cannot serve both God and money. If you serve money, if you spend too much time caring for it, what you are letting it do is become your master. In other words, what you are letting it do is set your priorities for you. This is a problem because just as any master assigning priorities for those under them, these choices money is making in your life will not be for the benefit of you and those around you, but will instead be for the benefit of itself first and foremost.
If you make money your master, you can expect that you will hoard your money to yourself. If you make money your master, you can expect it will seem a lot more appealing to short change people who have done work for you. If you make money your master, you can expect it to only make good sense to try and pay the bare minimum of what you can get away with instead of an amount others actually deserve, to say nothing about what they need to live on. You will ignore those who are obviously in need and you will let your relationships slip, spending less time with those you care about because that can be costly. Time is worth a lot, after all.
But Jesus reminds us, just as money can be a master to us, so too can the God that we see in Christ. And while money may seek to hijack our priorities in order to serve itself, the priorities that God looks to set into our lives are much more beneficial and in line with what is truly good. God, we know, cares for our well being, after all. God, we know, loves us. God cares for our communities and building the world always nearer to perfection as well. So you have a choice, serve a master who only cares for themselves and will destroy everything just to get more, or serve God. It’s your choice.
Now, by saying all this, I am not trying to say that money is in and of itself an evil thing to be avoided at all costs. Actually, far from it. I understand scripture to teach that money, understood rightly, is just a tool like a hammer. Just as a hammer drives in nails, money can be used to buy things, to pay people, and to show the world what we value. These functions of money can be used for wonderful ends: building our community, helping those in need, spreading the love of God to the corners of the Earth. But just like a hammer can also be used to break things that shouldn’t be broken, money can also be used to tear down our lives, and the lives of others if used poorly. And so, I say that it is in how money is used that we can most clearly see if it is our master, or not.
And so, we arrive at the namesake for today’s post: The Spiritual Practice of Cash Flow Analysis. For many of you reading, that title likely has bored you to tears before you made it even halfway through the seven words that make it up. To you I want to apologize before you go any further, because things are about to get so much more boring for you. But I encourage you to keep with it, because I guarantee you that you will find what I am about to propose to be deeply beneficial to your walk with God.
Now for those of you who don’t know what a cash flow analysis is, first off, I just want to say congratulations on living a far more interesting life than I have led, but to sum it up, a cash flow analysis is kind of what it sounds like. A cash flow analysis seeks to answer where, over a given period of time, did you spent your cash. For an example, say a year ago you had $100 in your bank account, in that time you took in another $100 because you sold a quilt you had lying around, and then you spent $80 later on materials and thread so you could make another, ending you with $120 in the bank. Put all that information on a single piece of paper and that is a cash flow analysis. Line one, you started with $100. Line two, sold a quilt, + $100. Line three, bought materials to make another quilt, -$80. Line four, finishing balance, $120. If there are all of a sudden more things on your analysis, group them together in a way that makes it easy to see what was spent on what and why, but in a nutshell, that’s all there is to it.
And while that may sound like the most boring waste of time that you have ever heard of in your life, here is why I think it very well may be as close to a spiritual practice as an accounting tool can possibly get. If you do this, to say your personal bank account, over a long enough period of time, what you will have created when you are done is a single document where at a glance you will be able to see everything you have spent your money on and every place you have received money from over a whole swath of time. If you want to quickly be able to tell if you serve your money, or if your money is just a tool, I doubt there would be a single simpler way to be able to tell than from a document like that.
Do you spend a lot of money giving to others? That information is right there. Do you hoard your money. No hiding that either! This may seem like a weird solution for how to tell if you have a problem focusing on your finances over other things, but the simple truth is that you can’t hide from the numbers.
So, give it a try. I began using this practice when I was still in seminary wondering perpetually why I was always so strapped for cash. After a few months at it, I began to realize that maybe what I thought were my priories, weren’t my true priorities at all (or so was my takeaway from the fact that the amount I was spending on visiting friends and family was far less than my Hamburger Helper budget from the same period). Do you want to know where your true priorities lie? Where your money flows may very well tell you that in a clearer way than most anything else you could possibly do.
So I encourage you, when you get a bit of time to yourself (likely something many people reading this don’t have a problem doing right now) open a spreadsheet, and find your bank statements for just the last three months. First jot down the opening balance, and then simply go through every entry you find. Group like entries together to make it easy to follow, and make notes of what the purchases were for when you think its worth explaining. Did you get money in? From where? Did you spend something? Where did it go? Most of the entries are not going to be anything special, likely mostly groceries and things like that, but when you are done and you have the totals and your closing balance for that period of time at the bottom and you know what you all spent on what, ask yourself, what do the numbers say about your priorities? What do they say about who you follow?
Are you using your money as a tool to serve our God; building relationships and community, helping those in need? Or are you serving the second master instead? Do the Spiritual Practice of Cash Flow Analysis and you will likely have a strong idea which it is. Again, the numbers just don’t lie.
