A Hundred Percent of Nothing Is Nothing

On the last day of March one year, the Lord said something to me that made me laugh out loud.

In April, I want you to give away everything over twenty thousand dollars.

Now, to understand why that was funny, you need to know about breakup.

In the Canadian oilpatch, breakup is when winter finally lets go. The snow melts, the roads soften, and the province throws on road bans to keep heavy equipment from destroying the highways. It can last a couple of months. For us that meant April and May were dead. No rigs moving. No light towers rented. No money coming in. Every year we hunkered down and bled for two months, living off whatever we'd made over the winter.

Twenty thousand was our break-even number. If we hit it, we'd get through the spring without a loss. Making more than that during breakup had never happened. Not once.

So I laughed and said, "Sure, Lord. You can have everything over twenty thousand. A hundred percent of nothing is nothing!"

I told Cara. She had the same reaction. Easiest yes we ever gave, because there was no earthly way it would cost us a dime.

Hold that thought. I have to back up a few months.

Not long before that, God had gotten hold of me with a verse I'd read a hundred times and never actually seen.

From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked. — Luke 12:48 (NIV)

It didn't sit quietly on the page that day. It grabbed me by the cuff and stared me down like I had a decision to make.

Two words came up off that page at me. Given. And entrusted.

And I realized I was looking at two different roads. Not a wrong one and a right one — a lower one and a higher one. Did I want to be a man God blessed regularly? Or a man God trusted outrageously?

Here's the difference, and forgive the picture, but it's the one that finally made it land for me.

Given much is a pizza. God gives you a pizza. You hand Him back a slice. You eat the rest. You're the owner, He's the recipient, and if you're faithful with that slice He'll generally keep the wolves off the other seven. Most Christians live here. It works. It'll get you by.

Entrusted with much is also a pizza. Except it isn't yours. He hands it to you to manage, and you do whatever He tells you with every single slice — and hope you get to eat a couple.

Up until then my financial philosophy had been perfectly standard: give God His ten, keep my ninety, try not to mess it up.I wasn't in rebellion. But I wasn't in surrender either.

And I saw that God wasn't after a bigger percentage. He was after a bigger perspective. He didn't want me following a holy system. He wanted me following a Holy Spirit.

Before anybody panics — I'm not starting a rebellion against tithing, and I'm not handing stingy Christians a loophole.

Ten percent is a beautiful place to begin. It trains a heart to honor God first. But stewardship is the higher road, not a cheaper one. Jesus said unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees you won't enter the Kingdom, and the Pharisees tithed down to the penny. He expected more, not less.

So when somebody asks me, "What if God tells me to give less than ten percent?" — I'll say it plainly. Then they're not hearing God. Stewards don't go lower. They go higher. They outgive tithers every time, because they're not following a law. They're following the Holy Spirit.

I told Cara what I was seeing. We sat down at the kitchen table with a napkin and a pen and wrote out a covenant with God.

Nothing fancy. Deadly serious. We put it in writing that from that day forward everything we had — the business, the possessions, the bank accounts, the properties, even the debts — belonged completely to Jesus Christ, and that He had permission to do anything He wanted with any of it.

We signed our names like two kids writing a contract in blood, folded it up, and tucked it away.

From that moment I wasn't giving anymore. I had nothing to give. I was managing.

And almost immediately, He started testing us.

Which brings us back to April.

On April 1st, the phone rang. An unusual job, out of nowhere. Then another call. Also unusual. Then another. Work we hadn't chased and hadn't thought of, dropping into our laps in the deadest month of our year.

By the end of April we hadn't just broken even. We'd done thirty thousand dollars.

Ten thousand in profit during breakup.

So we gave the ten away, and I want to tell you something about how that felt. It was fun. Genuinely fun, in a way that writing a cheque had never been before — because it felt like we were giving away somebody else's money.

We were. It had never been ours.

That was the first real test of a napkin, and it set the tone for everything after it. There have been many more since. He's tested us on an inheritance from an aunt whose cat I had wronged. On a Swiss watch I very much wanted. On a pair of earbuds, of all things, with the clerk's hand already on my credit card. Those are stories for another day.

Now let me answer the objection you're already forming, because I'd be forming it too.

That's fine for you, Steve, but I don't hear God's voice. He doesn't talk to me. I need a calculator to work out what to give.

Here's what I've found. When you sign on the dotted line of stewardship, He starts talking louder. Once He knows He owns it all, He makes His opinions known.

And I'm not talking about audible voices. I don't hear those. I stumble through this every day and some days I miss it completely. When I say "God said," it almost always felt more like a tug on my heart than a voice in my ear — a burden, or a red light, or a green one.

One more thing, and this one matters more than anything else in this post.

If there's pressure attached, or hype, or guilt, or flattery, or somebody dangling a prosperity carrot in front of me to get me to give — the Holy Spirit almost always gives me a red light.

Stewards don't respond to manipulation. They give because He spoke. And they sow where they're told to sow, which I've found is far harder than deciding how much.

So here's the question that verse put to me at that kitchen table, and I'll leave it with you the same way it was left with me.

Are you a man who's been given much? Or one who's been entrusted with much?

You can live either way. One of them is easier, and God will still bless it.

But only one of them gets you the phone calls in April.

This is the turning point of my book Dependently Wealthy — the story of how a broke, insecure preacher who knew nothing about business learned to manage God's money instead of his own. Available in paperback and audio on Amazon.