E243: Does Faith Affect Your Finances?

LIVING WEALTH PODCAST

DOLLARS AND NONSENSE: EPISODE 243 TRANSCRIPTION

The Role of Faith in Life and Finances

[00:00] Nate Scott: 

Whether you’re a believer or not, life is all about faith. That it is a truth that’s woven into this world. Of course, of course, I would believe that that’s what it’s all about and trusting in him. But what I’m saying is even if you’re not a believer at the end of the day, you have to have, everything is about faith.

I believe you will never be able to fully unleash your financial potential until you make room for God to show up in your life, both in your finances, life in general, business, until you make room for him to show up, you will always short yourself on what you could become and what your money could become for you.

And this really became just front and center for me back actually on Mother’s Day. I go to a church, my dad’s the pastor of the church, and he was preaching a message on Mary, the mother of Jesus and Jesus Christ himself. And it was teaching about the time if you’ve never read the Bible or not a believer, I think you can get a ton out of this message, but if you have, some of this will be familiar.

The First Miracle: Lessons from the Wedding at Cana

[01:05] Nate Scott: 

There’s a story in the Bible of Jesus’s life where it’s kind of described as his first ever coming on the scene event, his first ever miracle event. That’s at a wedding actually, where he turns water into wine, spoiler alert, and in this sequence, it’s a very interesting sequence, to jump into yourself. The idea is, Mary, his mom, has been, knowing that there’s a call on Jesus life, she’s received from the Lord all of this revelation of who Jesus is going to be, the Savior of the world, God’s own son, and she’s been waiting 30 years for this event to happen.

I mean, Jesus doesn’t actually show up on the scene until he turns 30 years old, really, with any sort of actual ministry event. And so she knows that there’s something coming and she’s just been waiting, waiting. When is God going to do this thing? And it comes to a head at this weird sequence of events at this wedding in Cana.

[01:53] Nate Scott: 

And so they’re at the wedding. We don’t know a ton about the wedding and I’m not totally sure why she cared so much. But they’re at this wedding, Jesus and his mother and probably their family, and Mary comes up to Jesus when the wedding has run out of wine, which is apparently a travesty back in the day, for sure, I guess.

So, the house has run out of wine, it’s an emergency situation, and she, for whatever reason, must have felt like now is the time for Jesus, the Son of God, to show up and prove himself. I don’t know how that happened. But she comes up to Jesus and says, Jesus, you have to do something, you have to save this situation and Jesus responds to her it is not my time.

Trusting God’s Timing

[02:35] Nate Scott: 

This is not my time to do it. She almost is like, she ignores him and she turns to the servants that were there and she says “Whatever he says for you to do, do it.” And this is what I find interesting. 

And some of the messages that we can take away is that the honest truth is that doing whatever Jesus tells you to do is the safest place to be. Following God’s advice is the safest place to be. When you obey, when you hear the voice of God and you choose to obey, even when it’s scary or risky, it’s actually the safest place to be because you open the possibility for miracles.

It’s very hard to see God’s hand and miracles are God’s hand in your life in a supernatural way. You receiving some something or something occurring in your life that is obviously not your work at hand, but God’s work at hand.

So it’s hard to see miracles when you don’t have any faith and you’re not living in obedience. Faith is really your response to God’s word. So if you can’t, if you don’t obey when you hear, you’re probably gonna see less of God’s hand in your life. You’re gonna get whatever you conjured up yourself, you’re not going to receive anything from the Lord. That’s the idea.

Opening Doors Through Faith

[03:53] Nate Scott: 

Living a life without faith means you get whatever you get, and God is not involved. When you start to mix your life with faith, you start to see God’s hand in things and Him providing for you in ways that you never would have been able to discover without opening the door for God.

So faith is what opens the door for the Lord. And what I found in this story, which we’re going to dive into in a second, kind of how the story pans out really, is that people often don’t want the process, they want the key and the same thing is going to be true in money. So let’s go back to the story of the wedding.

So Mary tells the servants to do whatever he says. And Jesus must just be like, what the heck am I supposed to do? He probably didn’t use the word “what the heck”, but that’s Nate’s paraphrase. And he apparently decides to step into the situation and resolve it and really start to show himself as who he really is in a new way.

[04:50] Nate Scott: 

He’s about to come on the scene as the son of God, truly. And so he tells the servants that were there, go fill these water basins. These big water jugs, fill them up with water. And then, once you have filled all six of them with water, I think the number was six. I want you to take some of it in, you know, this ladle thing, scoop some out and bring it to the master and have him taste it.

And so if you can put yourself in the story, first off, he never once tells any of these servants that the water is going to be turned into wine and in fact in the story, we never even, we don’t even know when it was turned into wine. You know what I mean? 

It doesn’t discuss that somewhere in the process of the servants choosing to obey the Lord, the water turned into wine. A miracle occurred somewhere in the process that we’re not allowed to know.

This is the big issue is that faith obeys without knowing what the outcome will be. And I mean that there’s such a truth that we can take from that in life. So the servants do what Jesus says for them to do. They fill up the basins with water and they scoop it out. They bring it to the master.

The Impact of Obedience

[06:04] Nate Scott: 

The master takes a drink of this, what the servants believe is water. And he is astounded that the master of the house quiets everybody down. Because most people, when they host a feast, they serve the best wine early and the wine gets worse or worse as the day goes on. But you guys have saved the best wine for last.

And I mean, we can learn so much from this story, but what I wanted to point into this was that somewhere in the process of obeying the words that the Lord has spoken, a miracle takes place. And there’s a huge blessing for everybody involved. And I believe the same thing can occur with money. I believe that for you to unlock your full potential with money, you need to discover ways to step out of your comfort zone and start to trust God for things that you’re not normally trusting God.

Challenging Conventional Financial Planning

[07:02] Nate Scott: 

Most of the time, as I mentioned, people are seeking not the process of becoming somebody new, they’re not seeking the process to involve God in their life. They’re really just seeking the key. They just say, Oh, I hear real estate’s a good investment, let me throw a whole bunch of money into real estate.

Oh, the stock market’s great, let me throw a bunch of money in the stock market. Oh, infinite banking is great, let me throw a bunch of money here. And they’re just saying that there’s some sort of product or some sort of tool out there that’s going to solve their problems where they don’t have to go through any sort of real process of becoming somebody new.

This is what’s so interesting about faith. Faith is a transformative thing in our lives. The more you have faith, the more you will transform into something new. You have to want to, you have to be willing, at least I should say to be transformed by trusting the Lord. 

So as you can kind of tell in this discussion, one of my biggest issues that I find with conventional financial planning as a whole is that it’s really trying to rob us of any avenue to have very much significant faith in our lives.

Faith as a Foundation for Financial Decisions

[08:08] Nate Scott: 

And the idea is really, if all you do is stuff money into retirement programs and bank accounts, let them sit, you never really get your hands on your money. There’s very little for you to latch on to that requires any sort of trust in the Lord. Now, I know there’s the basic things that you can trust, just for God to provide, for God to be the one who provides opportunities for you at your job or in business.

There’s these various ways that you can, of course, have trust in the Lord overall. But when it comes to your savings and your investments, most of the time, if we’re honest, God is not involved in any way with any of those things. God bless. It’s all about us and the opportunities that we find. And here’s kind of the moral of the story.

If I can make it a little bit of a joke to some degree, here’s what I believe. I don’t think that God is going to support the economy of the United States, causing GDP to grow and causing the S&P 500 index to increase just because you put money into your IRA and you’re gonna trust God that the S&P is going to do well.

[09:08] Nate Scott: 

I don’t think that’s a legitimate avenue for faith to take place. Like, I really, I know you may have as much faith as you possibly can have in that situation. But I do believe that there’s some other forces at work that are not, that God is not going to step in and cause the entire nation’s economy to grow and the S&P 500 to increase just because every time you make a deposit into your IRA, you’re sitting here thinking, Lord, I trust you that it’s going to, the market’s going to do well. I’m going to make a great rate of return.

Transformative Faith in Financial Strategies

[10:13] Nate Scott: 

This is why I’m such a strong believer in people becoming something new in the financial world where they can actually start to take a transformative amount of faith with them, with their money. And so this in my own life has really panned out to be whenever I was, you know, asking the Lord truly, what do you want me to do with money?

I mean, I can invest it, I can save it, I can put it in policies, of course I can do all these things. And it was really Him. It was the Lord that I felt start to speak to me that what he wanted me to use my money to do was to partner with other believers and build businesses.

In a way that of course I can generate profit, but in a way that it would help other believers. And so I was just seeking out opportunities in my circle to get people that I knew involved, that maybe we’re already in business and just seeing, is there a way that I can help them achieve something?

[11:14] Nate Scott: 

Is there a way I can use my mind, my skills, my money to partner up with them and achieve something together in a collaboration because I felt like that was what the lord called me to do and because I sought after him and was willing to do it I really do believe that his hand has been in it.

Whereas if all I was doing was stuffing money and letting it sit passively, I don’t know if I would have ever seen this. I’m also not naive enough to say that this is God’s plan for everybody. I believe that God does, I’m sure, calls some people to be passive financially. Where they’re really, you know, his ultimate plan is just to be a good steward of the money they have, live on less than they make, store it up, and there’s not some sort of big, overarching, faith filled plan for their finances.

Maybe they’re more focused on some other form of faith in their life. Maybe it’s, I don’t want to go into details of that. I’m just saying, I know that I am not everybody. But what I am trying to bring up is that I have looked back on my life. And I have found that anytime I exercise some element of faith, anytime that I mixed faith in with my actions to achieve something and to trust God for the end result for the process to take place, and I tried to hear his voice all of those times, something beautiful has occurred as it has gone on.

[12:37] Nate Scott: 

Whether it’s been investing with partners, whether it’s been in business in general, whether it’s been leaving college to join Living Wealth full-time and dropping out. Anytime I chose to listen to the Lord and have faith in an unknown future, but trusting that I heard God’s voice and seeking after Him.

Every time I’ve done that, every time I’ve sacrificed something I felt like I had the right to, but I laid it aside because I wanted to prove to the world that I truly trusted God to produce an outcome. Anytime I did that, God showed up and it started to transform me. So I’ve been transformed, transformed, transformed.

Anytime I was not doing that, my life stalls. I get stressed. I get anxious. I get unfulfilled. And so this is my biggest thing to you is to stop seeking the key that will unlock some sort of financial return. You are not just one real estate deal away from being a brand new person with a better life.

[13:37] Nate Scott: 

Real estate doesn’t give you a better life. Stock market doesn’t give you a better life. Infinite banking won’t necessarily give you a better life if you don’t do anything with it. But, instead of seeking the tool or the product or something, or the process that will just unlock your life, seek to become something new.

Oftentimes, I remember thinking about my family along these lines, oftentimes we don’t spend time laboring in prayer for our family, for our kids, for our life, we just want the life of someone who did, and the same thing is true with your money and your business. 

Oftentimes, all of us want the end result of what it looks like to labor with the Lord and with our finances, our business, with our work. We want the end result of someone who’s really trusted God, followed the Lord, took risks whenever God called them to, had faith through it all. Who we trust that they prayed for their investments, they sought the Lord in their business.

Seeking Transformation Over Transactions

[14:48] Nate Scott: 

We will, and then they have this beautiful tapestry woven of their life and we get to look at it and we say, I want that. We want the life of someone who has spent time laboring with the Lord. Oftentimes we just don’t allow ourselves to do it. We want to receive the CliffsNotes version.

We want the shortcut of becoming something new. And just like in the story that we talked about in the wedding in Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine, essentially Jesus did not tell them what the end result was going to be. And he never really does. He does not tell you what your end result is going to be, what the outcome is.

[15:28] Nate Scott: 

But he does tell you what steps you should take today. And you trust him for the end result. So essentially it’s like him saying, you don’t understand now, just do it. And so I ask you, whoever’s listening to this show, what is God telling you to do that you are afraid to do because you don’t understand everything about it, but you know, you’ve been avoiding it and that you hear the calling of the Lord saying, Hey, you don’t understand now, just do it.

I feel like, of course, with money, that there’s this process that occurs that I didn’t understand fully whenever I started doing infinite banking 12 years ago and building up capital, I did not know the outcome. I just knew that I was called by God to do it. 

Of course, I believe that infinite banking is a good idea and that has a bunch of value, of course, but what I, what I knew is seeded, not seeded, like a seed was planted that there was going to be an outcome.

[16:27] Nate Scott: 

That I could trust God for that was going to be bigger and better than what I could imagine. And so it was interesting. You don’t understand now. You just go down the path to do it. And that’s the same thing. I welcome you to see as you start your process with infinite banking, if you’re a new client, or even if you’re an existing client is, hey, you might not fully understand what you’re going to end up doing with your policies financially.

Over the next 5, 10, 20, 30 years. But what you can know is that as you build capital there, and especially if you start to intertwine it with faith saying, Lord, show me what I’m supposed to be doing, what you can know is that there is going to be a beautiful tapestry built, if you will seek after it, find joy in the process, you can find joy in the process of building capital and infinite banking and becoming something like infinite banking can be the launch pad for you to become something.

Living a Faith-Filled Financial Life

[17:24] Nate Scott: 

In the business world and in the financial world that you never were before. And so find joy in the process, find joy in serving the Lord, seeking after his will. Don’t be so outcome oriented, but be process oriented about who you need to become to take the next step? Oftentimes that’s going to require faith.

And by the way, whether you’re a believer or not, life is all about faith. That it is a truth that’s woven into this world, not just like faith in God, of course I, of course I would believe that that’s what it’s all about, and trusting in Him, but what I’m saying is even if you’re not a believer, thanks for staying so long on this call, I mean on this podcast, but at the end of the day, you have to have, everything is about faith.

As soon as you have no hope, as soon as you have no faith, life becomes extremely deteriorating, and it happens rapidly, and you become stale, unfulfilled, stressed, and you start to seek out ways to calm your inner spirit down and ways that can’t ever fully complete it. So this idea is to find joy in living life by faith, taking risks, taking steps that require a trust in the Lord.

[18:32] Nate Scott: 

I believe that while we’re doing that with our family, while we’re doing that in business, while we’re doing that at work, while we’re doing that when we give money to our church, when we tithe, all these different steps of faith that occur, the one that often gets left out is having faith in what we’re doing with our money and how can we incorporate that into our lives.

So seek the Lord on that. I hope this has been helpful to you. Guys, this has been a fun show. As always, we hope to see you next week as well. This is Dollars and Nonsense. If you follow the herd, you will be slaughtered. 

You can go to https://livingwealth.com/ and fill out the free consultation form to meet with one of us to see if infinite banking would be a great fit for your life.

We hope to see you there. Good luck, my friends. Thank you so much.