Real Faith and Real Money: Finding the True Riches of Life

By Ron Allen

Jesus said, "So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches?" (Luke 16:11)

Ron Allen, a CPA, has combined God's Word with years of practical experience to give you a guidebook to finding the true riches of life:

• Learn Jesus' secrets to prosper as you live by faith.

• Fol

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Jul 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637693391

Book preview

Preface

God knows where you live.

That is why there are more scriptures about money than any other subject.

God wants you to prosper, and He has given us a roadmap to prosperity. But the road to prosperity is a spiritual battleground, pitting faith against fear, pride against humility, obedience against presumption, and faithfulness against selfishness.

Arrayed against you are the world system, the spirit of money, and Satan himself. Both rich and poor can find themselves enslaved by money, serving Satan instead of God.

Ultimately the war over provision is a war over your very soul. For if the Lord is not Lord of your pocketbook, He is not your Lord at all.

But if you choose to follow Him, He will show you the way to prosperity and set you free to achieve your destiny and find true riches in life.

Part I

Faith

The righteous will live by faith. (Romans 1:17)

Chapter 1

The Secret of Faith

If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.

(Matthew 17:20-21)

It was 1984, and I was going broke. The local economy was based on oil, and it had cratered in 1982. I was deep in debt, and my investments were worthless. So, having nothing to lose, I thought I would see if God had anything to offer. It took me three years, from 1982 to 1984, to finally surrender to God.

Even so, I felt a heavy load of condemnation and hopelessness. Some members of my family even feared for my life, but then one of my clients, a mature Christian, took me aside and began to talk to me about faith. Not the fairy dust kind of faith, but real faith that controlled real money. He showed me that faith is the most powerful force in the world, and my life was changed forever.

The world of money seems far removed from the world of faith.

Over a forty-year working life, we will spend about 80,000 hours on the job and thousands of more hours spending, saving, and planning our financial lives. By contrast, over a forty-year period, most people will spend only a couple of hours a week in their church, about 4000 hours, or 5 percent of the time spent working. The world of money consumes our thoughts as well as our time. We worry about making ends meet, advancing in our careers, paying for our kids’ education, and providing for our old age. The sound and fury of everyday life seem to drown out the serenity and hope of the world of faith.

But those who have mastered the world of money know differently. The granddaddy of the self-help authors, Napoleon Hill, learned about the power of faith by studying the lives of over 500 successful people in the early 20th century. He explains faith as The Eternal Elixir which gives life, power, and action to the impulse of thought. To him, faith was the starting point of all accumulation of wealth.¹ Real faith is the secret to controlling the world of real money.

Faith is one of the most powerful spiritual forces in the world, but many Christians miss out on the power because they confuse faith with belief. The actual word in Greek for faith is pistis, which means conviction and reliance. Belief is part of faith, but without action in reliance on belief, there is no faith, and nothing happens. That is why the Scripture in James 2:14-26 says faith without works is dead.

Faith is not a mysterious otherworldly force but is something we use every day. We evidence our belief in an unseen power every time we turn on a light switch. No one has ever seen electricity, and most have no idea of how it works, but we nevertheless believe it works. However, light will not come on without the faith act of turning on the switch. God’s promises work the same way. You have never seen God, and you may not understand why, but if you believe and act in faith on God’s promises, you will get results.

Faith is also an action that can bring rest and peace. You exercise this type of faith every time you sit in a chair. You believe the chair will hold your weight and the act of sitting allows you to rest in the chair. Imagine how hard it would be to sit in a chair while trying to hold your weight up in case the chair collapses. This is why many people are so anxious and fearful because they have not exercised their faith to find rest in God.

Faith requires you to act before you can see the results (2 Corinthians 5:7). This is also an everyday activity. Young people attend school in faith that their education will produce a future income. Employees work in faith that their employer will pay them at the end of the week. People save and invest in faith that their money will grow over many years. In the same way, God requires us to act in faith, expecting to receive what we have believed for (Matthew 24:21-22).

But by far, the most important element about faith is where you have placed your belief. Electricity may fail, chairs sometimes break, employers can go broke, students may find no work, and investors can lose money through bad investments. The faith described by self-help gurus like Napoleon Hill is a dangerous mixture of faith in self and faith in God. But our faith and hope must be in God alone (1 Peter 1:21). He never fails.

Exercising faith was how you were saved. You first had to believe in your heart, but that was not enough. Even the demons believe (James 2:19). Saving faith requires the belief in your heart but also requires the action of making Christ your Lord by confession with your mouth (Romans 10:10). Like Abraham, your belief is credited to you as righteousness, and you are justified by faith (Galatians 3:6-9). That is why the righteous live by faith (Galatians 3:11).

Your faith is placed in a God who has good plans to prosper you and give you hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11). From the very beginning, God created a world of abundance to meet the needs of mankind (Genesis 1:28-30). God gave our first parents, Adam and Eve, a whole world to conquer. They were the richest people who ever lived.

But He kept for Himself one tree, The tree of the knowledge of good and evil.² They were presented with a choice. Should they accept God’s provision and accept what He said was good, or should they provide for themselves and decide for themselves what was good?

We all know what happened next. Adam and Eve decided to have faith in themselves, not God, and took the fruit of the forbidden tree. By rejecting God’s provision and deciding to provide for themselves, they lost everything. And the author of their fall, Satan, has been trying to tempt people to throw away their faith ever since.

There is a war between Satan and