When we turn over our finances to the Lord, he may ask us to do some things that do not make sense to us and prove challenging, if we still tightly control the purse strings. Yet we still must acknowledge that God wants us to be wise stewards, too; so, how do we maintain financial prudence while seeking to be led by God’s spirit into generous giving? How do we do both?

Anyone who seeks to gain control over his or her spending usually tries to follow a budget of some sort, but how do we live by faith when using a budget? Budgets should be realistic, or they will be useless. They are designed to help us stay on track with what we decide are our spending priorities. Usually people who are self-disciplined do better with budgeting. Some of us can be very strict in setting spending boundaries and staying within them. Others may have more of a challenge with sticking to a budget and become frustrated. If we are not careful, we can fall into one of two traps. We can become so captive to our own self-imposed spending constraints that it hinders our having faith to be generous when appropriate. The other trap is to fail to bring our spending under some form of discipline, which can result in wasting money for things that don’t truly matter so that we do not have to ability to give to what does matter.

It is important for us to be disciplined with our finances while staying open to God’s leading to be generous beyond our budget. This means we have to learn to live in a dynamic tension between self-control and faith.

We must decide whether we will operate by faith or by human reasoning.

If we can deny ourselves while being generous to others, we probably have become true disciples in the area of money.

Those who believe that tithing (giving 10% to the church where they are committed) is a priority, build that into the budget. Most who successfully tithe make that their first priority and use the remaining 90% for their personal budget. As we covered in a previous installment of this series, the remaining 90% still belongs to the Lord, even though it is still in our hands. 

We are “stewards” or managers of God’s money and are to use it as he sees fit.

If we are going to learn to give generously, it is important to constantly remind ourselves of this fact. Otherwise, we start seeing our money as our own.

If the tithe belongs to the Lord (Lev. 27:30) and is a non-negotiable, offerings are made out of the generosity of our hearts on a free will basis.

There are no “rules” for being generous.

It is based upon our being free in our hearts to respond generously to to genuine needs as the Holy Spirit’s nudges us.

Spirit-directed giving is where love, faith, and good stewardship intersect.

Love and faith take us on a journey beyond the confines of what might be considered prudent budgeting into the seemingly risky realm of obedience to the Lord our Provider.

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