Balanced: Week 4 "Developing A Plan"
This week I am concluding the sermon series that I've been working on for the past four weeks: "Balanced: Gaining and Maintaining Financial Stability." I have always had a hunch that whenever I have preached on money there are some folks who make the conscious decision to stay away from church. That got confirmed this week after I heard one of my parishoners told her friends that she wasn't going to attend church during this sermon series. This was personally kind of icky for me, but honestly I am not surprised. I am sure that there are lots of ways that people might want to parse it, but in my mind there's pretty much only one reason why Christians don't want to hear sermons on money and how it affects our relationship with God: Guilt. Those of us who call ourselves Christians don't want to hear what the Bible has to say about money because we prefer our relationship with God to be separate from our relationship with our cash. The truth of the...