God vs Money (eBook)

Why Passive Income Is Essential to Serving God

Edwin Lee (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2019 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
10-10-10 Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-77277-290-6 (ISBN)

Infos

FIND YOUR PATH TO SERVING GOD BY CREATING PASSIVE INCOME! For years, the Christian faith seemed to call for living a simple life, one where you learn to accept your limited finances. In God vs Money: Why Passive Income is Essential to Serving God, Dr Edwin Lee explores the Scriptural basis behind many Christians' relationships with money. Along the way, Edwin shares his financial journey and how he came to understand the importance of building passive income and its impact on his relationship with God. If you are questioning living a life where you struggle to pay the bills, feeling that pursuing more money would contribute to a love of money, then you need to read God vs Money. Edwin looks at the Scriptures and offers a deeper understanding of what the love of money is and how a lack of money can negatively impact that relationship with God. Edwin shares how passive income can give you the freedom to create a deeper relationship with God and to explore opportunities that you might have missed because of a focus on providing for your loved ones. If you are ready to enjoy a deeper, more meaningful connection with God by changing your relationship with money, then God vs Money is a must read!

Textauszug

I am about to relate how I was taught to view work and money. As I describe what I call the Usual Life Cycle, see if you can relate to the various points of this cycle.

First, there is our birthday, which is often a day of great joy for our parents and extended family. That day will follow you for the rest of your life. It is a day where parents fall in love with their child and begin to imagine their future. They have great aspirations for that child, and hope that this child will one day grow up to be someone great, with wealth, happiness, and health.

Parents are constantly setting goals for their children, tweaking them as their children express interest in different areas of the world. While they want the best for their child, it can also be said that parents are pushing an agenda of their own, one that includes traditions and culture norms. It can be hard to accept that your children might turn to a different path and a unique set of dreams all their own, but it happens often, because children are designed to dream big.

As a child grows up, he or she will begin to understand the world around them, in a carefree nature. The greatest dream of a human being starts in the mind of a little child. We begin to dream as little children with no inhibitions. Sometimes the sky is not even the limit as we dream of exploring space as an astronaut, and to land on Mars. There is a faith and wonder that children have, which adults often lose. Still, it is that faith that is so critical to achieving those dreams.

The Bible also talks about the faith needed to have a good relationship with God and enjoy the blessings he offers. It talks of a child-like faith, which is a critical component for every one of his believers. Unless you be as a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of God. (Matthew 18:3)

Dreams Shape Reality

In a similar way, our dreams are most believable when we are children. As children, our dreams seem realistic. We are not inhibited by our thoughts or self-doubts, and we are not discouraged by reality checks, simply because they don’t yet exist in our world. We are free to dream, and whatever it is that we dream of, our parents typically feed those dreams, until we start asking for something more substantial to bring those dreams into reality.

Usually, this shift happens just as we enter kindergarten or first grade. The same parents that encouraged us to dream big dreams are going to be the same people who now start to educate us on what the real world is like, bursting the bubble of our dreams to scale down our expectations for the future.

Those same parents, who had the high aspirations and hopes for their new little baby, suddenly begin to accept defeat and concede that their hopes were just that: hopes and dreams. Everybody knows that hopes and dreams keep us moving forward, but often those hopes and dreams remain unfulfilled. It becomes a source of frustration and regret as we focus on doing what society expects, instead of fulfilling the purpose that calls to us.

As we grow up, even from that early elementary education, we are taught to obey our parents and to be a good student, as we complete a prescribed number of years of education (anywhere from 12–15 years) to prepare us to enter the workforce and get a good job. Somewhere along the line, our aspirations start getting downsized as well, because we look at the enormous task of achieving our original dreams. It becomes a daunting task, and our excitement drains away.

Think of a dream that you had as a child. Did you end up downsizing it to fit into the reality that you were being groomed for by your parents and society? Too many of us have, and it impacts the type of life that we believe is possible.

One of you may have started out dreaming of being an astronaut. Over time, that dream is usually downsized, and you might settle for the dream of becoming a fighter pilot instead. It might get downsized even further, and you settle for an even more realistic dream of just becoming a pilot, regardless of the plane. As the years go on, that dream continues to get whittled down even further. Now you might be settling for a dream that involves just working at the airport. Eventually, the child in you just goes to the nearest game shop and takes advantage of a flight simulator game to play on the computer, thus keeping your dreams alive, even if they are in a deflated format.

Let’s consider another dream that someone might have had as a child: dreaming of driving a super car, such as a Ferrari or Lamborghini. As a child, he may collect stickers and fill books with these super cars, even having posters of super cars on his bedroom wall. The dream of owning one might be the last thing he thinks of every night. As this child grows into his teenage years, this dream gets downsized as he finds out the costs of a Ferrari. Suddenly, it appears that there is no conceivable way to achieve or afford that dream car. So, he settles for any car, just as long as he can get one. That dream gets downsized to a Hyundai Getz or an entry level Mercedes A class.

Just like the child who dreamed of becoming an astronaut, this child gets himself a copy of Need for Speed, and a racing simulator set up to live his dream.

Another example is the child that read of Andrew Muller, a missionary who started orphanages in a foreign land. This child starts dreaming of the day when he will be able to build children’s homes in underserved countries. As the child grows, this dream also starts to get downsized. This child may then shrink the dream to work with a local organization or foundation that serves children. As the child realizes that those jobs do not pay much, or enough to enjoy a comfortable enough life, they downsize that dream even further to just making donations to worthy children’s programs, such as WorldVentures Foundation, or World Vision International.

Do you see the pattern here? Do any of these examples sound familiar? I think that most readers can relate to at least one of these scenarios. Dreams get deflated as reality and the naysayers start to get a hold of us.

What do we do when faced with these realities? For almost all of us, we begin to slowly settle instead for this watered-down version of reality, instead of continuing the quest to chase our dreams and turn them into our amazing reality.

It is easy to settle into that common route of life that most people take. We strive to get good grades, with the idea that we will have success because we can get into the right university or the right college. Getting into that prestigious university is usually a dream come true for most people by this time.

Ironically, when you think of your childhood dreams, rarely do they include getting into a prestigious university. As you can see, our dreams are being altered along the way. It is not a sudden thing; but a gradual altering takes place, from the grand original dreams of a little child, to eventually becoming hopeful dreams of a weary soul.

Now that you have managed to secure a space in a university, you then begin the long process of working hard and striving to achieve good grades, ideally achieving honors or making it to the Dean’s list. It is about achieving the goals that are meant to give us the comfortable life. When we graduate, we throw our caps and tassels into the air. For most people, this signifies freedom from the school system, and that we can now finally make some money!

These 12–15 years of education are meant to prepare and equip us for the world. At the moment of our graduation, we feel as if we have been set free from a prison called school! Depending on where you went to school, you might be faced with a mountain of debt, but you are feeling confident that you will get a job that will soon help you to clear that debt and start your journey to fulfill your dreams.

After graduation, you start the process of applying for jobs. For most graduates, the ideal job will be the one that pays the highest salary. Usually, the hours required are not that important, because we are more interested in the money that we are earning, and the life that we can create based on those earnings.

Building Social Mobility Becomes the Driver

For most, that first paycheck is their first taste of serious money. However, they also quickly fall into a major trap. When their incomes increase, so does their spending. Lifestyles improve, but the costs to support those newer lifestyles also start to go up. Maybe you couldn’t afford a car in the past, but now you can. You might justify the expense with the thought that you have earned it with all your hard work, or that having a car will allow you to spend more time with your loved ones because you can get home sooner, instead of using public transportation.

It becomes a game revolving around social mobility, where every salary increase or promotion means that you move up the social ladder, adding material things along the way. It could be another car, a luxury apartment, a new house, a swimming pool, and the list could go on and on. The point is that you are creating a new lifestyle with every increase, and that becomes your new normal and minimum standard of living. It keeps getting better as we earn more money, but we are also creating a greater level of upkeep.

The reason is that with every increase in our lifestyle, more money is needed to maintain that lifestyle. If we are lucky, our financial situation will continue to move in an upward trajectory, but that does not always happen. As a result, people can find themselves reaching...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.5.2019
• Vorwort: Raymond Aaron
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Beruf / Finanzen / Recht / Wirtschaft
• ISBN-10: 1-77277-290-9 / 1772772909
• ISBN-13: 978-1-77277-290-6 / 9781772772906