On God: Faith or Not
I find it interesting that people seem to use “faith” as a convenient way to get away with not addressing those things in their life they simply don’t want to deal with. They will use budget planning to assure they can pay the mortgage, but they use faith as an excuse not to plan for retirement. They will plan and save for years to for a special family vacation but use faith to avoid planning for car repairs and medical expenses. They will quote the Bible to say that one should not worry about tomorrow for it will take care of itself when addressing one situation, but then turn around use the Boy Scout motto of “Be Prepared” for those other things. Does faith apply or not?
While I do believe in having faith, and the power of faith, I do not believe it is reasonable to use the concept of faith to replace one’s responsibility to plan and be prepared for a family’s financial security. There is one exception I would absolutely concede on this point and that would be if you are devoting 100% of your effort and life to ministry.
So how does all that balance out. How do you balance Biblical instruction to ‘not worry about tomorrow’ with being a responsible person? The answer I think lies in how we try to maintain dual lives — that of a secular participant on one hand and that of a Biblical Christian. I believe it is clear from the bible that things of this world are temporary and unimportant and we are called to have our eyes on more important things. When we participate in the secular world we use secular methods to protect the secular assets and situations that are important to us. Whether they should be important to us is a very good question question — but they are.
Posted by Paul Gernhardt on Sunday, January 18, 2009