Men and Money Part 2

Welcome to Man Talk brought to you by TAWCMN, talking and walking Christian men's ministry where they're devoted to breaking down the walls of race and denomination and challenging men to take their God-assigned role. Here's our hosts Will Hardy and Roy Jones Jr., a black guy and a white man.

Welcome. Welcome to Man Talk and radio. And this is Will Hardy.

I'm flying solo again. But we have been talking about on last time, men and money. And we know this is a very touchy subject.

We know it's a subject that really hits the senses of both man and woman. But money is, it's a necessity. We need it in order to operate in this world. But we can't let money control us. And we complain about money when we don't have it. But I never heard anybody complain about having too much money.

I just have so much money that I just want to complain about all this money that I have. So money we know is a necessity. But again, we can't let it control us. Money have divided kingdoms. It has divided households.

It has broken friendships, divided local houses of worship. Money, it just has a way of coming and creeping in there and doing things that we let it do instead of turning to the God who is able to keep money at bay and keeps our thoughts about money at bay. So men, how do you manage your money?

Are you doing that at all? That's the first question. If you don't know where your money is going on a weekly basis or daily basis or monthly basis, then you have no control of your finances. It's a necessity for you to understand, as we talked about last time, that you will be held accountable for all of the finances and resources in which God has given you because he is the source of all resources. So if you're not managing your money at all, then you already have allowed yourself to fall into the pit of defeatedness because you got to get out that valley. You got to understand where the money is going. Second question I have for you men is what do you typically do with your money?

So when you get paid, what's the first thing you do? Do you run out and I know I'm going to hit a nerve now. Are you running out buying that lotto ticket? Come on now.

Come on men. See, if that's the first thing you do when you get paid, again, you've allowed yourself to fall into the pit because God, he has given you everything that you need. So what you have to do as a responsible God fearing man is to give God what belongs to him. And when you be faithful in that way, God will again open up the windows of heaven and start pulling you out blessings that you will not have room enough to receive it.

That's a promise God made and God cannot go back on his promises. So what are you doing with the money? Do your wife know what you're doing with your money? And if you're not managing it, then you don't know what you're doing with your money, where it's going on a weekly basis. And my next question to you man is how important is budgeting to you? Do you budget? Managing is one thing budgeting is another and we're going to talk about that in some future broadcasts on exactly what you need to do to budget your money. I'm not an expert at money, but I do counsel as a pastor, I've counseled several couples, men and women individually concerning money, and it's not difficult to do.

You just have to come together as a couple, communicate and say, as a husband, I'm going to take charge of the finances in my home because I'm responsible. That's not to say you're going to be dominant and you're going to be a dictator and you're going to come and say, wife, we're going to do this, this and this. No, that's not the point here. The point is to make you a responsible steward of what God has given you. And on last time we gave you First Timothy six and seven, we said that you brought nothing into this world and you can certainly take nothing out. And we also gave you First Timothy six and ten for the love of money is the root of all evil and money causes us because it makes promises to do things for us that we should not do. But if we have money, we listen to the voice of money and we say, hey, you know, I got money I can do X, Y, Z. And then the final question I want to ask to you men is what effect has money had in your marriage relationship when you mismanage it? So and I know I'm talking to someone out there right now who is in a money crisis situation because you don't manage, because you don't budget, because you don't know where your money is going. And now all of a sudden you've got yourself into the hole and you say, Lord, get me out of this hole.

I'm too deep in it. But it's caused division in your household. And you may not be the best money manager when it comes to numbers and accounting.

Your wife may be better than you when it comes to this. So you should, as the head of that household, solicit her help, sit down, talk about these things, because the time that you should not talk about money is when you're angry. And if you do that, then you allow yourself again to go into areas that you simply don't want to go. And then we're going to talk a little bit about what the scripture says about money. We've been talking about that on last time, what the scripture says about money. But we don't want to forget that.

We want to come back to that point. Because when you address money, you have to ask, what does money, what does it represent to me? When I ask myself, what does money represent to me? And if I find that I'm spending too much time thinking about money, dreaming about money, finding ways to get money, then I'm really not allowing myself to open up and to listen to the Spirit of God speak to me in reference to those things that he wants me to know so that I can advance the kingdom.

Because it's all about Christ. It's all about making sure that we use our resources in the right way. So if money, if you're thinking about money all the time, dreaming about money, then money has a negative effect and hold on you.

You should look at money simply as a tool to accomplish the life goals that are set before you. That's all. It's a tool.

It's just like anything else. Like you use a wrench or saw. It's simply a means to get you to an end, whatever that end may be. An individual goal that you set up for yourself to pay your house off or whatever the case may be. And God, God had blessed me because when I was in the military, I didn't manage money. I was I was a lonely only, as they say, I was only in charge, so to speak, of myself. And so I did things because I had the freedom to do them. And once I got into the army and I started getting paid, it's like, wow, this is like real money for me now.

So, you know, I would go out and I do certain things and I didn't think about money because, again, I was the only one that I had. But since then and as God blessed me to mature, he's blessed me to see that money is not as important as people make it to be. And if you put money in its perspective and you see it for what it is and not all of what it can do for you. But what it'll end up doing is it'll be doing things to you and you'll find yourself in a situation to where you'll be crying out to God.

Lord, how did I get myself in this situation? Well, you don't know how to manage money or you've mismanaged money or you not budgeting money. So look at it as a life goals attempt. You know, I want to pay off this or I want to pay off that.

Sit down. Write these things out with your wife. Speak about how the money is to be spent, how you're going to give, what you're going to save. And let the spirit of God dictate to you by putting certain things that you need to take care of in priority. And when you do this, then you will understand that you and not money is controlling things. So when you do anything new, when it comes to money, budgeting or talking money out, you want to write it down. Because, see, when when something is new to you, when you talk about money or the things you haven't done before with money, they become foreign to you because it's like I've never done this before.

I may not know how to do it. But God blesses and gives wisdom to you in reference to these things that you need to understand. And he opens up your understanding if you simply get into his word. So and if you need help, there's all kinds of budgeting tools out there. So when we come back, we're going to continue talking about this conversation when it comes to money and what you need to do, how you feel about it, because money can make you depressed. So we thank God for the opportunity of all the listeners who are listening in reference to money. And we will be back with you after the break.

Don't forget, if you need any assistance or you need any other information in reference to the TAWCMM ministry, visit the Web site and leave a note. Call us up. You know our numbers, Roy Jones Jr. and myself, we're available. Let God bless you. We'll see you after the break.

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Join your host, Will Hardy and Roy Jones Jr., a black guy and a white guy. Welcome back to Man Talk Radio. When we were on the other side of the break, we were talking about writing down things that you need to do when you make changes in reference to money. So you can't remember everything that you might change. When it comes to how you deal with money, how you handle money, how you budget money. So what you should do is simply write these things out and then talk about them, because when you grew up. You and I, all of us, we were conditioned as to how money would mold us or how we saw others using money, namely our parents.

That that's the best and the good place to start. When we looked at them and we saw how money was managed in the household when we grew up. You may not have had enough money coming into that household to do some of the things you wanted to do as a child.

I certainly didn't. You know, there was I mean, to get an ice cream or a popsicle was I was like going to Disney World for me. So, you know, but I thank God that everything that I went through, I had to go through it in order to see how our household managed money. And my dad was a very good manager of money.

He made sure that you ate that last sweet pea on your plate because he would always remind us that some folks are going to bed hungry. So money and conditioning. When it comes to money, we have to find out how we were conditioned.

So you shouldn't have things that we talked about last time. You shouldn't be conditioned to have a separate bank account. You should not be conditioned to have all of these personal and private stashes or credit cards.

That's an element for disaster when it comes to money. But you also want to be able to live a lifestyle that's comfortable for you with not and not exceed your income on a monthly or weekly basis, depending on how you get paid. And so you have to understand the lifestyle of your spouse and she have to understand your lifestyle.

So there are some things that you want to do or she want to do. And you have to sit down and you have to count the cost of these things. And again, this is just practical advice that I'm giving you because having been a pastor for 32 years and God had blessed me to have paid off not one, but two houses since he had blessed me to be in this world. And I'm very thankful. Smart money management and being able to go to God and speak to him freely about what I should do with my money. But I do want to take a pause right here to tell you that when after I got the military and God blessed me to get married, that there was a lot of resources that was available to me as far as printed resources.

And I'm not pushing any one product, but I just want to tell you that. And he's gone on to be with the Lord. But there was a man by the name of Larry Burkett.

B-U-R-K-E-T-T. God bless Larry. He was the one who inspired me to budget, to save, to invest how I spend. And he had so many resources out there. And of course, nowadays you could find easy budgeting tools in Internet or software to budget if you need to do that.

Frankly, I just like the pen and a book, but you know, you might not want to go old school. So learn how to find out where these resources are if you're struggling. Just don't sit there and say, OK, we're going to here we go again. We're going to do X, Y, Z. And again, we end up in the same situation that we you were before. And you don't want to go there. Each one of you have personality differences. Wife have a personality difference. You have a personality difference. And if you don't understand these differences, then you'll have conflict when it comes to how money is used and trust.

That's another one. If if you can't trust your wife or your wife can't trust you, then surely God can't trust you. Because what we as men and leaders of our household or supposed to be leaders of our household. We should look to God and giving us direction. And I think we understand that if you've been in the Lord for a while.

God will give you those desires of your heart, especially when it comes to sustaining your resources. Now. Men and women, when you don't trust each other, what begins to happen is if she's making more money than you, then she's going to feel like, you know, I'm the one who needs to be saying what's happening to the money. If you're making more money and she's spending more money, then you might want to have a conversation with her in reference to. I'm making this money.

I'm I'm going out. I'm bringing my money home. But yet I can't account for where the money is going.

So these are all conflicts. And again, money is the second leading cause for divorce right behind infidelity. So money will divide you quickly. And you have to understand, do what do I expect? From my spouse, when it comes to money, you have to set an expectation. If you don't know what to expect, if you don't know what things that she would spend the money on or things that you enjoy. To spend the money on, then you have to sit down, have a conversation with her on that.

This is what I would like to do this month. If the budget allows, if the budget doesn't allow it, then you can't do it. Maybe you have to do something that's less expensive. But this is all it all comes down to managing your money and having an expectation of the personality differences between each other and the lifestyle that each one wants to live. Because, I mean, you might be making minimum wage.

And there's nothing wrong with minimum wage jobs. But your wife might have the taste of Hollywood Boulevard or somewhere in Hollywood that you have all these expensive stores. Well, this is when you need to have a conversation.

You actually need to do it before you get married and pre-counseling. But these are the sort of things that when you come together, you bring continuity in the conversation. One should not dominate the conversation over the other because when we have a wrong view of money, then we have to go back and look at what God blessed through Solomon to say. And Ecclesiastes chapter number three and verse 10. He who loves money will not be satisfied with money. Nor he who loves wealth with his income.

This is also valid. In other words, money, when you get it, you want to make more of it. So money never satisfied. It can never bring you peace and happiness.

You can only find peace and happiness in Jesus Christ. And when you have a wrong view of money, Ecclesiastes 10 and verse 19 says, bread is made for laughter and wine gladdens life and money answers everything. So see, if that's your view of money, that money is the answer. Then again, you've allowed yourself to come to a dis understanding of what the word of God is speaking to you about.

So money has its ups and money has its down, but it's how you manage it because God placed that resource in your hands and he wants you to use that resource for his glory. Now, do the kids really need that video game? Do they need that video console? Do they need that computer laptop or some new iPad or or iPhone? Do they really need that now? And that's because sometimes kids begin to dominate where your money is spent.

Oh, you know, you could your wife can come and say, oh, John, you know, they have this and they have that at school. But do Johnny really need it this month? So think about that, man. Think about as you go through the day. Don't keep your mind on money, but let God bless you to take the money you have and use that money wisely, because when you do that, God will truly open up the windows of heaven. He will begin to pour you out a blessing that you will not have room enough to receive.

God is able, man. So we thank you for listening again to Man Talk Radio and join us again next time, because we're going to continue this conversation when it comes to men and money. As we wrap up today's show, be assured that TAWCMM, Talking and Walking Christian Men's Ministry, is building a community of men that are Christ followers with the desire to be servant leaders in their homes, communities, churches and work environment. Check out our website for upcoming events and regularly scheduled meetings. Drop us a note for topics that you would like to have us visit in the future. Thank you for joining us on Man Talk today. Visit us at www.tawcmm.com. Men walking the talk.