…if we could open the eyes of our people in Africa and other developing countries to know the laws of money, then we can indeed help our continent. I am convinced that giving out food or money will not last for long, but if we will change the approach to money in our people, we will have empowered them to be forever free. Ignorance indeed is the only killer around.
Here I wish to begin to give you some appetiser on the laws of money. Let’s start the journey:
1. The First Law of Money that I wish to expound on today is – MONEY IS NOT MEANT TO BE SPENT. The first instinct of uninformed men when it comes to money is to spend it, and that is the proof that they are uninformed. It is also a proof why they will never really become wealthy. Some people even ask, “what is money meant for, if not to be spent?”
People who understand money and its laws will tell you that when you are given a hundred dollars, you are only permitted to spend a hundred dollars when the original hundred dollars has made at least three times its original value. So if you are given a hundred US dollars and you have not found a way to multiply it or put it to work, such that it will produce for you three hundred dollars, you are not entitled to spend the original hundred dollars. If you do that and indiscriminately spend the money that comes to your hand, it shows that you will never really become wealthy.
Many people tell me, how then do I pay my bills and meet my needs? To the informed that is easy; out of the hundred dollars that came to your hand, put thirty dollars to work such that in the next few months, maybe a year or more, that thirty percent keeps on working for you. Because that hundred dollars keeps on working for you, it is returning the original hundred dollars and more to your pocket. I am talking about increase and multiplication.
The mistake poor people make is that they see rich people buy and use flashy stuff, then they want to copy them. The poor man only sees the luxury of the rich, not the laws that brought him there. Since the poor does not know the mechanism working for the rich, he is not aware that the rich man is only spending after many returns have come back on his dollar. Rich people don’t spend the original capital they have, they only spend the overflow.
On the other hand, the poor man sees the luxury of the rich, wants to become like him and throws away the initial meager amount of money in his hands. Some people even do worse, they don’t just spend the little money in their hands, they go ahead and borrow or spend, in instalments, what they have not yet made. That way, these people not only become poor perpetually, but slaves to the rich since they have to keep on working for them, so as to pay for their debt. Meanwhile, those rich men that the poor are copying have already built companies, factories, and stores, where the poor man eventually goes to spend the little money he has. So as soon as the rich pay their poor workers their salaries, they have already built outlets where the poor immediately rush to, to spend this money, thereby returning the money to the pocket of the rich.
A good help in the service of the rich is the advertisement industry. This becomes an effective manipulator of the poor to part with his hard earned money, leading this back to the pocket of the rich. Thereby, leaving the poor poorer and the rich richer. (More on this in my book, Money Won’t Make You Rich.)
2. The Second Law of Money I wish to Share today is that MONEY MUST BE RETAINED. The ability to retain money that comes to your hand is one of the greatest qualities of a future millionaire. What does that mean? What I mean is that whenever you are given a hundred dollars, money acts like God. Money dictates to you its wishes. Once the hundred dollars comes to your pocket, it begins to dish out instructions to you on how you must obey its command by going to spend it. This is what made Jesus to call money a god – Mammon. Because money acts like God.
God gives out commandments. God commands. God orders. Money does the same things. Money desires to be obeyed just like God desires to be obeyed. So when money comes to your hand, immediately the spirit of mammon begins to exact and claim its authority over you. By retaining the money in your hand, however, you are declaring your liberty and freedom over the God of mammon. You are thereby proclaiming your own independence over the spirit of greed, anxiety and lust.
If you could take a hold of the money and put it down, not looking at it and not obeying its dictates by running out to spend it, you have just turned the table on the god of mammon. You are telling money that it is no more your Lord. You’re asserting your authority over the power of money by telling it, I can have you here and not spend you because I am the one in charge. I tell you money what I want to do with you, you don’t dictate to me. I only obey the dictates of my Lord and Master Jesus Christ. That is how you break through from the power of money. Remember that money is a good servant, but a bad master.
You must be able to prove to mammon that you have the will power to ignore it, bypass it and disregard its dictates. Only the person who has been able to do this can dominate and subdue money. Once you stop taking its order, it now begins to take your orders. When you stop being at its service, money now begins to come to your service.
The ability to retain money enables you to become the master of money and mammon. You stop being its slave and you assume the rulership over it. Let me tell you why this is important. It is only the man who has mastered the act of retaining money who can calmly dispense that money to judicious use. When you already have victory over money, only after that you could begin to hear the voice of God, the leading of the Spirit, because when the voices and dictates of money stop coming to your ear, another voice comes, the voice of the Holy Spirit that begins to lead you to where you can judiciously spend that money, because God only speaks in stillness and calmness.
You must stop listening to the voices and dictates of mammon before you can begin to distinctly differentiate and hear the voice and the leading of the Holy Spirit. He will lead you to where to invest. He will lead you to where to save. He will lead you to the right people. He will give you the understanding of the right area of business to invest in, etc.
You must be able to prove to mammon that you have the will power to ignore it, bypass it and disregard its dictates. Only the person who has been able to do this can dominate and subdue money. Once you stop taking its order, it now begins to take your orders. When you stop being at its service, money now begins to come to your service.
3. The third law of money that I will like to share with you today out of about 25 that I have is, ANY AMOUNT OF MONEY THAT COMES TO YOUR HAND MUST NOT BE SPENT UNTIL A SIGNIFICANT PART OF IT IS INVESTED.
The lesson of the parable of the talents as told by Jesus in Matthew 25:13-30, is that any person who spends all that comes to his hands, either on bills or pleasure, is both wicked and lazy. The servant that Jesus condemned in that story was condemned because, he did not invest the primary capital that was entrusted into his hand. I think I will not be exaggerating if I say most of the people reading this article fall into the same category as this servant. Most of us don’t even consider investing the money that is entrusted into our hands. The reason is because we are mostly not aware of the first two laws of money I have stated above.
Before my own personal encounter with the Lord in this regard, I lived like everyone else. At that point, our church was making 20,000 US dollars a month, yet before the end of the month we were already in the red. It was catastrophic, until the lord pointed out to me to read this parable again. While reading the story, I kept on comforting myself that I was a good servant, because I had a big church at that time and people were grateful to me for the changes and differences God was using me to make in their lives.
What a shock it was when God told me that in this story I wasn’t the good servant, I was not even the second servant that got two talents. What totally devastated me was when the Lord told me that I was worse than the last servant whom He condemned in that parable. My sense of pride and self-worth was so much offended that I was angry with God momentarily. I felt it was by all means unfair to have compared me to a wicked and lazy servant. But to now say I was worse than him totally shattered and ruined my day. I needed a proof and an explanation. Then God began to take me to school.
He said, at least in the case of the wicked and lazy servant, he was smart enough not to spend everything that his master trusted into his hand. In my case, however, I was spending over 20,000 thousand US dollars on needs and bills, thinking I had excuses. I could not get myself to save, talk less of multiplying. The Lord also reminded me that there was a time I was making only 2,000 US dollars in a month.
At that time I had prayed to God that He should increase me. My belief was that if God could only help me make 5,000 US dollars in a month, I was going to be grateful and that would be more than enough for me. Guess what? God answered that prayer, but once we started making 5,000 US dollars, the needs became overwhelming, so much that that amount was again not enough. This was because I was not following the laws of money. When you don’t abide by the laws of money and, like in my case, you don’t even know them, this means that caterpillars and cankerworms are always standing by to consume the little that you make.
If we could teach our people not just to know these laws, but to religiously observe them, we would have dealt a heavy blow to the dragon of poverty in our world.
Here I was again rushing to God in prayers to increase our income to 10,000 US dollars. I was sure that if we could earn 10,000 US dollars, we would never be in need again. Well, you can guess what happened. My rude awakening happened when we were already making 20,000 US dollars and yet not meeting our needs. God’s conviction was so strong that I had no option but to break down in sorrow and repentance. The stroke that broke the camel’s back came when I asked the Lord, I know I am not lazy by any standard, but you spoke of that man as being lazy.
At that point I was working 18 hours a day. How can I be working for 18 hours and still be called lazy? Again the Lord came to my rescue: He said by being lazy, He was talking about my refusal to think; laziness of the mind in relations to money. He said that the laws and principles of managing money are out there, I should not have been lazy to go in search of them; and my failure to develop myself in the question of finances was a form of laziness.
The fact that I did not bother to study financial matters or even go for financial consultations all pointed in the direction of this laziness – mental laziness. I thought I had an excuse; my argument was I am a pastor, and I want to face my business, besides I had never heard any pastor preach or teach about this. To which the Lord told me, that is not an excuse and I am answerable to only Him. He has all forms of knowledge out there for anyone who is diligent enough to ask, seek and knock.
This revelation changed my life for good. Right from there, I called the board of our church and I declared to them that we are going to cut a lot of our expenses, with a significant part of our income going to savings and eventually into investments. That was another huddle I needed to surmount, because my board said; we are a church, and we don’t do investment, we only spend, we don’t invest or multiply.
To cut the long story short, I was able to get the church to start by putting aside the first ten percent of all that came in for savings and investments. We gradually moved from there to thirty percent of all that came in for savings and investments. As a result, I was able to make our church a millionaire church that was in surplus within a year. After attaining this with the church, I dared to challenge myself to make my first million US dollars in the next two years. I studied all I could on the subject. With my experience from helping the church make money, I was surprised when after nine months I was able to make my first million US dollars instead of two years.
Next in my target, I decided to prove the efficacy of these principles by helping my church members become millionaires. I started with ordinary people and by the grace of God in the next three years, I was able to raise 200 millionaires in US dollars from within our congregation. Yes, the die has been cast. The Lord was right after all. I had learnt my lessons. No more going back!
Ladies and gentlemen, what am I trying to tell you; why am I taking my time to go into all these details? I simply want to help you to understand that if we could open the eyes of our people in Africa and other developing countries to know the laws of money, then we can indeed help our continent. I am convinced that giving out food or money will not last for long, but if we will change the approach to money in our people, we will have empowered them to be forever free. Ignorance indeed is the only killer around. “My people perish for lack of knowledge” – Hosea 4:6.
It is what we don’t know that is killing us. Because of ignorance, most people waste money, others spend money, while only a few invest money. Looking back, I can actually see now that even in my 40-hut village of Idomila, with the abject poverty around, I could have had enough, if only I had known these laws of money. Nobody could have been living in the type of poverty that I grew up in if only we had been educated in the rudiments of the laws of money. It is therefore my belief that the true key to financial liberty for our continent and the world at large is to bring the knowledge of the laws of money to become a common subject in schools, governments, institutions, community centres, cultural centres, churches, mosques, etc.
If we could teach our people not just to know these laws, but to religiously observe them, we would have dealt a heavy blow to the dragon of poverty in our world.
Sunday Adelaja is a Nigeria born leader, transformation strategist, pastor and innovator. He is based in Kiev, Ukraine. He can be contacted at sundayadelajablog@gmail.com.
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